Judy Moonelis to kick off ?Art-A-Rama? Week on campus
Judy Moonelis, an award-winning artist whose most recent art works have linked science theory and artistic practice in creative explorations of subjects as diverse as the heavens and the human body, will lecture at 6 p.m. Friday, July 10.
Free and open to the public, the lecture will be in Davis Auditorium of Palamountain
Hall. The talk is part of a series of events dubbed ?Art-A-rama Week? by Katie deGroot,
director of Skidmore?s Summer Studio Art Program. During the second and third week
of July, there will be a series of special events by visiting artists who will work
with Skidmore?s summer art studios during the day, and provide public lectures at
other times during the week.
Moonelis, a New York City-based artist, has exhibited widely throughout the U.S.
and abroad. Earlier this year she was featured in the group show ?Conversations in
Clay? at the Katonah Museum of Art, a celebration of the medium that has played an
essential role in the development of nearly every culture on earth, across the millennia.
Moonelis, like the other nine participating artists, created several dynamic pieces
that activated the gallery space in an effort to engage the viewer. Her Mirror Neuron Strands (2007-2008) and Evolutionary Wall II (2005-08) suggested individual biological entities and as members of wider social
and physical communities.
The ?Conversations with Clay? pieces continued a recent theme of work by Moonelis.
In the August 2004 issue of World Sculpture News, critic Glen Wood explained, ?Moonelis has over the course of her career employed
her art as a means of engaging diverse scientific theories on material, aesthetic
and conceptual levels.?
He continued, ?She is, in other words, most interested in that region where empirical
observation must yield to the imagination: the point at which the hypothesis replaces
the concrete evidence.?
In 2007 Moonelis had a solo exhibition at the Kehila Kedosha Janina. Moonelis?s
site-specific installation Jania Project: Celestial Structures featured cone-shaped wire and mixed-media sculptures suspended from two large skylights.
The works drew upon multiple references to the ?heavens,? including ancient celestial
maps, contemporary models of the universe, Gothic vault structures, and the geometric/numeric
symbolism often featured in sacred spaces. The synagogue is the sole remaining Romaniote
Greek Jewish congregation in the western hemisphere and one of just seven original
synagogues on Manhattan?s lower East side.
Moonelis is represented by John Elder Gallery in Chelsea, New York City, and Rena
Bransten, San Francisco, where she has had several solo exhibitions. A graduate of
the Tyler School of Art and the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University,
Moonelis has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two New York
Foundation for the Arts Fellowships and the Virginia A. Groot Grant. She is currently
associate professor in fine arts at Fairleigh Dickinson University, College at Florham,
Madison, N.J.
