Dinnerware part of NWA art exhibits

Fayetteville
University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center
Louise Bourgeois
Topiary: The Art of Improving Nature
Nov. 7-Dec. 13, 2012

Internationally renowned artist Louise Bourgeois will be showing at the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center throughout the month of November.

Bourgeois was born in Paris in 1911 and lived in New York from 1938 and until her death in 2010. Using the body as a primary form, Bourgeois explored the full range of the human condition. From poetic drawings to room size installations, she was able to give her fears a physical form in order to exorcise them.

Memories, sexuality, love and abandonment are the core of her complex body of work. Her work appears in collections worldwide, and in 2007 she was the subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Tate Modern in London and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.

Bourgeois’ work has formed the flashpoint for a renewed interest in the field of printmaking, a renewed interest which has pushed traditional conceptions and boundaries, inspiring a new generation of artists to create prints.

As Bourgeois (1911-2010) herself once said, “…my work is suggestive, it is not explicit.”

Fayetteville
Walton Arts Center: Joy Pratt Markham Gallery
20 years: A Kathy Thompson Project
Oct. 4, 2012 – Jan. 13, 2013

Kathy Thompson has become known for her H Boxes, mixed-media boxes that arrange treasured artifacts into dynamic and resonant compositions. These richly textured and inventive works explore the intersection of objects, history, memory and the formal language of assemblage.

The Walton Arts Center commissioned Thompson to create an original project inspired by archival study, memorabilia and responses from patrons, staff and the arts community. This exhibition honors the past and celebrates the 20-year impression of Walton Arts Center on the cultural landscape of Northwest Arkansas.

Thompson, an artist living and working in Fayetteville, had in the previous three decades worked collaboratively and individually on a variety of interdisciplinary and individually on a variety of interdisciplinary projects and a series of multimedia work. She has exhibited her work at the Decorative Art Museum and the Heights Gallery in Little Rock; Seibu Art Vivant in Tokyo, Japan; The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; and various gallery’s in Northwest Arkansas.

Joy Pratt Markham Gallery Hours:
Monday – Friday: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Saturday: Noon to 4 p.m.
(1 hour prior to most Walton Arts Center performances)

Fayetteville
University of Arkansas Anne Kittrell Gallery: sUgAR Projects
Solo Showing of Kelly Brenner Justice
Nov. 26, 2012 – Jan. 31, 2013

sUgAR Projects and University Programs will host Solo Show by artist Kelly Brenner Justice in the Anne Kittrell Art Gallery, located in the University of Arkansas Union. This event is free and open to the public.

Kelly Brenner Justice’s work utilizes generations of plastic dinnerware ranging from vintage melmac and melamine to 1950’s Tupperware to modern Solo products. In its own way each of these “found” objects addresses a romanticized or idealized snapshot of society, whether it is a lavish Tupperware party in the 1950s or memories of a college keg party. Each object possesses not only a sense of levity and leisure, but also nostalgia for simpler times, all of which she strives to emphasize through the process of slipcasting.

Justice received a bachelor’s degree in art in English and a minor in studio art from the University of Arkansas in 2010.