Art-A-Rama Week: Exploring nature as artists muse

Skidmore's Summer Studio Art Program will host "Art-A-Rama" Week, July 12-16, featuring a number of opportunities for students at various levels and the public to hear from a selection of esteemed artists. All activities are free and open to the public.

"Art-A-Rama" Week, now in its second year, will highlight the theme of nature and will feature painter Joan Nelson as the lead visiting artist. Special activities during the week will showcase artists who draw on nature - either literally or figuratively - as inspiration.

Nelson, a California native now living and working in upstate New York, paints intimately scaled, visually seductive landscapes. Her contemporary landscapes are a rich collection of image fragments from other artists' work. Inspired by obscure details found in the paintings of Church or Turner, or more recently from Herg 's "TinTin" series, Nelson creates lush and mysterious private worlds. She has exhibited widely throughout the U.S. and has work included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.

The "Art-A-Rama" celebration kicks off with an illustrated lecture by Nelson at 7 p.m. Monday, July 12, in Gannett Auditorium, Palamountain Hall. 

In addition, other events during the week include a slide lecture by ceramist Aysha Peltz at 5 p.m. Tuesday, July 13, in Davis Auditorium, Palamountain Hall.

Peltz, a graduate of the State University of New York College of Ceramics at Alfred University and of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth,makes wheel-thrown porcelain pottery. She explains, "I alter freshly thrown forms to achieve the look of an action that has just occurred, a moment frozen in time. I think of my pots as imagined space and through them I build landscape and terrain." Peltz's work has been featured in a number of exhibitions, including the annual Strictly Functional Pottery National, where she has received a number of awards.

An exhibition featuring work by the Summer Studio Art Faculty opens at Case Center Gallery on Wednesday, July 14. A public reception is scheduled from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

"Faux Natural" is the title of a panel discussion to take place at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, July 15, at the Payne Room of the Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore. Ian Berry, Malloy Curator at the Tang, will moderate the session, which will include Paula Hayes, Kim Keever, and Deborah Zlotsky. 

-Hayes, a 1987 Skidmore graduate whose work is featured in the Tang's "Opener 20" exhibition titled "Paula Hayes: Understory" which opens July 17, creates living art that intimately connects people with the natural environment.

-Keever's large-scale photographs are created by meticulously constructing miniature topographies in a 200-gallon tank, which is then filled with water. These dioramas of fictitious environments are brought to life with colored lights and the dispersal of pigment, producing ephemeral atmospheres that he must quickly capture with his large-format camera.

-Zlotsky, a faculty member at the College of St. Rose in Albany, has exhibited widely in the Northeast and had work included in Skidmore's Schick Art Gallery 2009 show titled "Illusions" and at the Tang Museum in the 2006 exhibition titled "Twice Drawn." Her series LifeLike involves manipulating powdered graphite on sheets of Mylar. The resulting forms, she says, "are disjointed and completely seamless, grotesque, and delicately beautiful: invariably, like life."

Under the direction of Katie DeGroot, a well-known painter and printmaker whose focus is the natural world, the Summer Studio Art Program at Skidmore meets the varied needs of creative artists - from beginners to professionals - who are interested in developing their skills and broadening their experiences.

Toward that end, the program offers two five-week sessions of classes that enroll high school, college, and graduate students; high school art teachers; and independent artists. In addition to the range of studio art courses, the program also offers lectures, informal discussions, and other activities by visiting artists.

"Art-A-Rama" Week events are free and open to the public.