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RFH 2010, Arts

Exhibit Focus is Post-Katrina

Sat, Aug 21, 2010

Exhibit Focus is Post-Katrina

Colgate hosts Francis Cape's Behind the Levees, an exhibition that brings together for the first time several bodies of work that center around the artist's ongoing engagement with post-Katrina New Orleans. It will be on display from Aug. 29 to Oct. 10 at the Clifford Gallery.

The artist presents a lecture Sept. 15 at 4:30 p.m. in the Golden Auditorium.

Spanning five years, the exhibition begins with "Waterline" an installation of framed photographs taken on a 2 1/2 hour walk through the city on November 6, 2005, just two months after the hurricane, and concludes with two new gulf oil spill pieces created specially for the Clifford Gallery.

This project and exhibition as a whole, is a proposition: how can we re-imagine forms and models of production in response both to historical precedent and current disaster. Cape onsiders a host of difficult issues relating not just to New Orleans but to a general cycle of American production and consumption, and to the legacy of modernist debates surrounding utility and ornamentation, social idealism and mass consumerism.

Cape apprenticed with master carver Dick Reid before receiving his MFA in 1991 from Goldsmiths College, London. In 1993 he moved to the U.S. and now lives and works in Narrowsburg.

He has exhibited at the U.S. Biennial, Propsect 1, New Orleans; the St. Louis Art Museum; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; the Public Art Fund, NY; and Murray Guy, New York.

He was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2001, and of a Henry and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship in 2003. Cape was appointed critic in sculpture at Yale in 2009.

In addition, on Oct. 6 Dan Cameron will present a lecture at 430 pm, Golden Auditorium in Little Hall.

Cameron is founder and artistic director of U.S. Biennial, Inc, which produces Prospect New Orleans, a new international biennial whose first edition opened in November 2008 at multiple sites around the city. Since 2007 Cameron has also served as director of visual arts for the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans.

For further information contact: DeWitt Godfrey, dgodfrey@mail.colgate.edu

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