Sculptor-painter Whiting Tennis launches Tang's fall season

The Tang Museum's fall opener brings artist Whiting Tennis from the Pacific Northwest for his first solo museum show, a diverse collection of sculptures and paintings from the past decade as well as new works created for this exhibition.

Opener 22: Whiting Tennis runs from Sept. 3 through Dec. 31 at Skidmore's Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery.

Tennis, who has long exhibited on the West Coast and in New York City, will be new to many in this region, and that presents "an exciting opportunity for people to discover an artist," says the Tang's Malloy Curator Ian Berry. "It's also exciting to look at new work by an artist who is at a great moment of activity in his studio, an artist who is devising new ways to explore and reveal unusual and often unseen things."

At a time when there is a confluence of technology-oriented exhibitions in New York museums, Tennis "is responding to the same world but presenting a very different kind of object," explains Berry, suggesting that where another artist walking down the street might focus on digital displays, Tennis's eyes would more likely be drawn to a crushed paper cup and a discarded piece of plywood. 

Tennis's sculptures, often figural and at the same time otherworldly, seem to be simultaneously relics of the past and helpful contraptions for the future. A ramshackle elegance in both his collaged paintings and physical constructions is expressed through the humble materials he favors - weathered plywood and cardboard, plaster and concrete, asphalt and tar - the more used and flawed, the better. "Anything that's been used is preloaded with a lot of experience," Tennis explains in a video for the Seattle Channel (online at tang.skidmore.edu). "Anything that's been around a long time - I embrace it."

Thus his works, while abstract, are at the same time realistic and somehow familiar, haunted with nostalgia and an empathy for inert things. Says Berry, "If you go up to a Whiting Tennis painting it looks like something you know?it looks like a landscape, or a house, or an animal." Or, in the case of one trompe-l'oeil painting in the show, like an old blue tarp.

In sculptures such as Crow (2010), Choir Girl (2008), and even the asphalt-covered Boogeyman (2007), Tennis so animates his strange abstract structures that, as Berry says, "a pile of plywood turns into sort of a creature that we want to care for." Likewise his paintings often depict plywood constructions - a makeshift shelter, a scavenged home, a hermit crab, a wolf. "The artist has an amazing ability to turn just a few simple lines into something we feel emotion for," Berry notes, adding that in many ways "he's a traditional artist, continuing ideas of perspective and shading and image-making that are grounded in art of centuries ago."

Born in 1959 in Hampton, Va., Tennis received a B.F.A. degree from University of Washington. He has exhibited widely, including several solo shows at Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, and Derek Eller Gallery in New York.  His work was included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Northwest Art, La Conner, Wash.; the Portland Art Museum, Portland, Ore.; and Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Conn., among others. Tennis has received numerous awards, including the Arlene Schnitzer Prize, the Neddy Artist Fellowship, and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant. He lives and works in Seattle, Washington.

Several public events are scheduled in conjunction with the exhibition:

Tuesday, Sept. 13, at noon; Wednesday, Oct. 12, at noon; and Wednesday, Nov. 2, at noon - Curator's Tours of Opener 22: Whiting Tennis with Ian Berry, Malloy Curator at the Tang;

Thursday, Oct. 13, 7 p.m. -  Dunkerley Dialogue with artist Whiting Tennis;

Saturday, Oct. 15, at 5:30 p.m. - Gallery walk-through of Opener 22: Whiting Tennis with the artist;

Saturday, October 15, 6?7:30 p.m. - Opening Reception celebrating the Tang's fall exhibitions, including Opener 22: Whiting Tennis and I Myself Have Seen It: Photography and Kiki Smith, which opens Sept. 17.

Opener 22: Whiting Tennis is organized by Ian Berry, Susan Rabinowitz Malloy '45 Curator of the Tang Museum, in collaboration with the artist. The Opener series is made possible with the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts, the Overbrook Foundation, and the Friends of the Tang. Now entering its 12th year, the Tang Museum hosts some 40,000 visitors annually, ranging from local students who visit through school programs to museum-goers from around the globe.

The Tang Museum is open 12 noon - 5 p.m., Tuesday-Sunday, and closed on Mondays and major holidays. For more information call 518-580-8080 or visit http://tang.skidmore.edu/tang