CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – On Oct. 29, Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion will debut “The Strange Life of Objects: The Art of Annette Lemieux,” a mid-career retrospective of work by the conceptual mixed media artist. A public reception to celebrate the exhibition opening – which will begin with a gallery conversation with Lemieux – will take place from 6-8 p.m. on Oct. 28.
Solvent-based ink on synthetic material, light fixture
In recent years, Krannert Art Museum organized monographic exhibitions of the work of Louise Bourgeois, Bill Traylor and William Edmondson, Hedda Sterne, and Howard Finster. The Lemieux retrospective extends this commitment to present the work of visionaries whose artistic practices challenge formulaic readings of art history, said Kathleen Harleman, the director of the art museum.
The exhibition provides the first critical overview of the artist’s dynamic and varied career. Lemieux first attracted attention on the emerging global art scene in the 1980s. Since then she has continued to produce work that grows in depth and resonance, proving herself to be an artist of lasting significance. Her commitment to content over material motivates her to work with an ever-expanding range of media. From bronze to cotton to found objects and images, Lemieux masters and invents techniques and processes that correlate with states of mind, resulting in an artistic landscape that probes the personal, the conceptual, the political, the feminist, the literary, the critical, and the historical.
For the exhibition, work from the past 25 years was selected according to chronological and thematic developments in Lemieux’s practice, tracing themes such as the relationship between personal memory and cultural history, content and medium, and text as image.
“The Strange Life of Objects” illuminates Lemieux’s substantial role in the trajectory of American and global art, giving to her pivotal body of work the full recognition it deserves, Harleman said.
The exhibition was organized by independent curators Lelia Amalfitano and Judith Hoos Fox, who conceived and contributed to the exhibition’s catalog, a 231-page, illustrated book that includes essays by critic Rosetta Brooks, a faculty member of the Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Calif.; cultural theorist and author Peggy Phelan, a professor of drama and of English at Stanford University; and critic and scholar Robert Pincus-Witten.
Brooks, Phelan and Pincus-Witten have watched and reflected on Lemieux and her development as an artist for more than three decades, and in the catalog they provide expansive analyses of the artist’s work and its cultural significance.
Lemieux, a professor of the practice in studio arts at Harvard University, was an active and engaged partner in each aspect of the exhibition and the accompanying catalog, according to Diane Schumacher, the director of marketing and publications at KAM.
The exhibition will be on view at KAM through Jan. 2, 2011.
After it closes at KAM, “The Strange Life of Objects” will travel to the Worcester Art Museum in Worcester, Mass., where it will be on view April 9 through Oct. 9, 2011.
KAM and Kinkead Pavilion is a unit of the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The museum is located at the corner of Sixth Street and Peabody Drive in Champaign, one block east of Memorial Stadium. The museum is open to the public from 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Thursday, and 2-5 p.m. Sunday. The museum closes on Thursdays at 5 p.m. on university holidays. Admission is free; suggested donation is $3.
