Past Exhibition

Portraiture Beyond Likeness

March 12 – April 10, 2010

Wayne Art Center is pleased to present Portraiture Beyond Likeness, on exhibition March 12 –April 10, 2010 in the Davenport Gallery. The exhibition will take place at Wayne Art Center, 413 Maplewood Avenue, Wayne, PA, 19087. An Opening Reception will be held on March 12, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. A second reception will be held on April 1, from 5:00 – 8:00 PM, at which time Guest Curator Jo Lauria will present a gallery talk.  The public is cordially invited to attend.

Portraiture Beyond Likeness is one of 95 exhibitions that are part of INDEPENDENCE: The 44th Annual National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) conference taking place in Philadelphia from March 31 – April 3, 2010.   The Clay Studio, Philadelphia, the on-site liaison and organizing body of the exhibitions program for the 2010 NCECA conference, has commissioned this exhibition.  

Challenging conventional notions of portraiture, Portraiture Beyond Likeness presents a select group of artists who use this genre to reveal the human condition and explore the multiple personality traits that comprise identity.  The exhibition will be populated with portrait heads and full-scale figures that animate attributes, emotions, attitudes, and altar egos through methods of representation as diverse as hyperrealism and symbolic abstraction.  Ranging from the heroic to the grotesque, from the actual to the mythological, the artists demonstrate how portraits can go beneath the skin exposing the raw nerves and emotional texture of personal psychologies, inner fantasies, and private fears. Using visage borrowed from human, mineral, or animal, these portraits trade classical neutrality for spectacle and portray both individual identities and universal archetypes.

Nationally and internationally recognized for her work, independent curator Jo Lauria holds a degree in art history from Yale University and in studio art from Otis College of Art and Design. She was decorative arts curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), specializing in modern and contemporary decorative arts, craft, and design.  She has published extensively, organized numerous exhibitions, and produced and directed multimedia presentations and documentary films.  Ms Lauria will discuss works in this exhibition at a gallery talk scheduled during the NCECA reception, Thursday, April 1, at 6:00 PM.

Participating Artist include Tanya Batura, Rebekah Bogard, Andrea Keys Connell, Magda Gluszek, Phyllis Green, Curt LaCross, Esther Shimazu, Kim Simonsson, Dirk Staschke, Beth Cavener Stichter, Liz Zacher.

Portraiture Beyond Likeness is among the Concurrent Independent Exhibitions (CIE’s) scheduled as a part of the conference.  CIE’s are professionally juried exhibitions selected from a vast array of proposals submitted by NCECA’s membership. Jurors for the 2010 CIE Exhibition Program were Linda Ganstrom, NCECA Exhibitions Director, Jeff Guido, Artistic Director of The Clay Studio, and Conference On-site Liaison, and Amy Sarner Williams, President and CEO of The Clay Studio, and Conference On-site Liaison.

 Support for development and planning of these exhibitions, has been provided by the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, a program of the Philadelphia Center for Arts and Heritage, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts and administered by the University of the Arts.  The William Penn Foundation, Philadelphia, PA, provided funding to produce these exhibitions.

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