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Carl Morris: Figure, Word and Light
Leonard Ruder: Evidence of a Life's Work
For Release: December 04, 2007Two new exhibitions, Carl Morris: Figure, Word and Light and Leonard Ruder: Evidence of a Life's Work, will open with a reception on Sunday, January 13 from 3 to 5 p.m. Admission is free. The exhibition continues through February 14.
Guest curators Prudence Roberts and Silas Cook will give a gallery talk in The Art Gym, at noon, Tuesday, January 29.
These projects are supported in part by the Oregon Arts Commission and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Carl Morris
Figure, Word and Light
The Art Gym exhibition Carl Morris: Figure, Word and Light, includes more than fifty of the renowned Northwest painter's work from the 1940s, 50s and early 60s. Carl Morris (1911–1993) had a long and illustrious career and his work has been the subject of several museum exhibitions. Prudence Roberts, guest curator of the Marylhurst exhibition, has a deep interest in the history of the art of the Pacific Northwest. In this exhibition Roberts examines the work painter Morris made partly in response to the Second World War. She writes, "This exhibition, and its accompanying essay explores Morris’s responses to his times by focusing on his use of the figure, either fully rendered or merely suggested; his references to word—as calligraphic sgraffito, as tablet, or as text—and his frequent images of light as a source of creation or salvation." Prudence Roberts is an art historian and curator, and a member of the faculty of Portland Community College, Rock Creek Campus.
Leonard Ruder
Evidence of a Life's Work
Two years ago, Leonard Ruder's art came to the attention of Silas Cook, Assistant Director of The D.F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College. In Leonard Ruder: Evidence of a Life's Work Cook has curated an overview of Ruder's paintings and drawings for The Art Gym. The show includes Ruder's early focus on abstracted architectural and landscape motifs, tracks the work as the artist quickly moved to non-objective abstraction and demonstrates the artist’s formal prowess and constant experimentation.
Leonard Ruder has made art for more than 50 years. After he graduated from the Cranbrook Academy in 1950, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston included his work in a national traveling exhibition. Ruder moved to Portland in 1950 and the Portland Art Museum presented his art alongside works by Louis Bunce and Carl Morris in several Oregon Annuals in the 1950s. Over the ensuing decades, Bunce and Morris gained public renown, while Ruder worked quietly in the studio and supported his family as a Portland Public Schools custodian. He regularly sold work through the museum's Rental Sales Gallery, but rarely exhibited elsewhere.
THE ART GYM
Founded in the fall of 1980, The Art Gym at Marylhurst University has a 26-year history of presenting work by hundreds of artists based in the Northwest. The Art Gym has published more than 50 exhibition catalogues and sponsored more than 100 conversations about art, in the region. In 2004-2005, The Art Gym was a recipient of the Governor's Arts Award.