The Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, NY, (718) 638-5000
Brooklyn Misc.
November 3 - December 28, 2006
Reception: Friday, November 3, 6 - 8 PM
Web Site
New York-born artist Walton Ford, a 1982 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, draws inspiration from the work of such nineteenth-century artists as the naturalist John James Audubon and the French caricaturist J.J. Grandville, whose part-human, part-animal subjects satirize man’s shortcomings. This exhibition presents more than fifty of Ford’s large-scale, meticulously executed watercolors from the 1990s to the present, which depict birds and animals in a style resembling Audubon’s prodigious Birds of America—but with a significant twist. While beautiful, Ford’s paintings often portray scenes of violence and offer a wry critique of colonialism, the naturalist tradition, and the relationship between man and animal.