Curated by Vittorio Colaizzi

works by: Donald Beal, Martin Bromirski, Pamela S. Cardwell, Hannah Cornish, Michael Davidson, Vaughn Whitney Garland, Lenore Golub, Anne Gray, Julie Karabenick, Russell L. Roberts, Yolanda Sanchez, Jeffrey Stark, Elizabeth Ternhune, Timothy M. Trelease, David Webb, Susan Zurbrigg

Building Picturing features the work of sixteen painters whose approaches range from geometric abstraction to keen observation, from lyrical inventions with mark and color to restrained distillations of the landscape. These diverse painters are linked by their emphasis on the painting as a made thing, the result of an encounter with both tactile and formal constituents; paint and canvas, as well as color, shape, and placement. Neither hermetic nor naïve, these artists do not ignore the last few decades’ challenges to painting’s languages and ideologies in order to practice a nostalgic revivalism. They are fully aware that their images speak within a broader field that includes “high art,” news media, and cartoons, but they do not accept equalization as a premise, nor do they approach painting as a collage of readymade styles. Instead, they invest their very craft with meaning. Never simplistically painting “about painting,” they use the terms endemic to their practice to achieve the human qualities of curiosity, experiment, desire, and commitment.

Curator Vittorio Colaizzi received both an MFA in Painting (2000) and a PhD (2005) Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University. His paintings have been exhibited in Richmond and Brooklyn. He has published in Art Papers, Smithsonian’s American Art, and Woman’s Art Journal (forthcoming) and presented papers at the College Art Association, Southeastern Conference of Art Colleges, and the Modernist Studies Association. His article “Two Kinds of Thickness in Abstract Painting” was recently published in The Painting Center blog.