In the spirit of our combined venture, our opening exhibition-the sixth in a series organized by the noted curator and writer Sarah Gavlak-explores and celebrates connections between American art of the present and that of the past. Each of the contemporary artists included in Flaming June (VI) has created an image inspired by a particular painting produced by an American artist of an earlier era or has rendered a work in direct response to the one they have chosen.

The title of the show is taken from the famous painting Flaming June (1895) by the English Pre-Raphaelite artist Frederic Leighton, portraying a sleeping woman in a brilliant orange gown. By evoking images of similar classically rendered subjects by Renaissance painters Giorgione and Titian, Leighton explored the redolent suggestiveness and sensuality within a tradition usually perceived through its ideality to be antithetical to it.

The contemporary artists in Flaming June (VI) reflect Leighton’s legacy in their interest in issues of classical beauty, sensuality, and seduction and in the way that they derive their inspiration for addressing these themes from the art of the past so as to reinterpret, explore innuendoes, and find points of reference that are reflective of life today. Each artist’s work will be shown along with the object from past from which they derived inspiration.

Elif Uras’s painting will be exhibited next to one by the early twentieth-century painter Florine Stettheimer, reflecting the artists’ similar use of brilliant colors and interest in exploring the pastimes of the leisure class. The Los Angeles-based artist Matty Byloos has selected a work by Edward Hopper that resonates with his own interest in exploring themes of isolation and psychological distance. A work by painter and photographer Marilyn Minter will be paired with one by Willem De Kooning. The show will provide further juxtapositions between work by Lisa Anne Auerbach and William Merritt Chase, Ellen Harvey and Lilian Westcott Hale, Anthony James and Albert Herter, Melora Kuhn and Chase, Alexis Marguerite Teplin and John Singer Sargent, Michael Wetzel and Hercules Brabazon, Lesley Vance and Georgia O’Keeffe, and T. J. Wilcox and Karl Buehr.