Tang to open major shows Feb. 18

Among the new exhibitions at the Tang Museum are three one-person shows featuring the provocative work of Nancy Grossman, Donald Moffett, and Pam Lins. The Tang will launch the shows with an opening reception on Saturday, Feb. 18, 6-7:30 p.m. A Dunkerley Dialogue with Grossman and choreographer/dancer Elizabeth Streb will take place immediately prior to the reception, at 5 p.m.

See below for a profile of each artist and a list of public events related to the exhibitions.

Nancy Grossman

For over five decades, Nancy Grossman has created a powerful body of work that combines exquisite craftsmanship with a long-standing exploration of the nature of violence and power. Wide-ranging in style and genre, and often challenging in nature, Grossman's work defies categorization and resists easy interpretation. Nearly half a century after her emergence on the New York art scene, she remains an important yet largely under-appreciated artist.

Tough Life Diaryis the title of one of Grossman's collages but also an apt descriptor of her life and art. "Her work can be about the many ways we might define tough," says Berry. "Her work is formally gorgeous, but its materiality and content often expose harder parts of our lives." And, he adds, Grossman lets us see how tough the pieces are to make: "You see all the stitches, the nails. Nancy reveals all the handwork, all the hours."

The Tang exhibition gathers works from the early 1960s through the 1990s in multiple media.

Undoubtedly her most famous works are the life-sized leather-covered heads Grossman began exhibiting in the late 1960s and continued to craft well into the early 1990s. Fifteen of these works are in the Tang exhibition. Carefully carved out of wood, tautly covered with leather (often recycled from old leather jackets), and fitted out variously with dentures, zippers, straps, and horns, Grossman's sculptural heads?some of which took a year to complete?bear the trappings of constraint evident in so much of her work.

The heads are what most museums have, but they are not often on display. "They are confronting objects," says Berry. "People are uncomfortable with them because they seem to be in distress?they're covered, bound, and gagged; they can't see or speak. But another way to decipher them is to see how their leather skin protects them and keeps them safe from us."

"The Nancy Grossman show will make a needed and meaningful contribution to the art history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, providing access to the full history of Grossman's groundbreaking work for the first time," says John Weber, the Tang Museum's Dayton Director. "This show is overdue, and we are delighted to present it at the Tang Museum."

Donald Moffett

Vibrant abstract paintings and ethereal landscapes are among the works on view at the Tang in Donald Moffett: The Extravagant Vein, the first comprehensive survey of Moffett's work.

Moffett creates paintings that extend the traditional two-dimensional frame, making highly textured relief works, paintings that are opened inside out, and intricate illuminations through the use of video projections on the canvas. While addressing social and political issues, Moffett's paintings frequently reveal a sense of humor that both acknowledges the complexity of life and "pushes the boundaries of what we understand a painting to be," says Tang Associate Curator Rachel Seligman, noting that the artist has said, 'I complicate painting.'"

For his Gutted (2007-08) series, Moffett cuts open his canvases and paints inside them, playing with our understanding of the two-dimensional surface. In his Paintings from a Hole (2004) Moffett again breaks through the two-dimensional plane, with an arm that emerges from a hole to paint and repaint the canvas in a continuous video loop. In the Comfort Hole (2009-10)works, he loads the canvas with thick layers of paint that are extruded into shapes and textures reminiscent of porcupine quills or loops in a weaving. Series such as What Barbara Jordan Wore (2001-02) and The Extravagant Vein (2003) feature oil paintings layered over with video projection.

Moffett has been a major player in the causes of his time and is widely respected in the national and international arts community. "His work deals with tough subject matter?what it means to be a full citizen of this country, gay rights, humanrights," says Seligman. And, she adds, "there are so many layers of meaning" that there is a wonderful balance between the serious, the poetic, and the provocative.

Moffett arrived in New York City in the late 1970s, and when the AIDS crisis hit a few years later, he became a member of ACT UP and the AIDS activist collective Gran Fury.

Pam Lins

The Opener Series introduces new artists to the Tang Museum's audience. For Lins, whose work has been shown in galleries and group museum shows since the late 1990s, this is the first solo museum show with the first catalogue documenting her work.

For her Tang exhibition, Lins has transformed the museum's mezzanine into a single environment combining previous and re-made works with new pieces on view for the first time. "It's an eccentric combination of old and new," says Tang Malloy Curator Ian Berry, who notes the artist's particular strength in "creating installations and situations for her objects that play with architecture and space in interesting ways, like filling up a room so you are pushed to walk in and around her work." Unlike many solo exhibitions that proceed chronologically through an artist's work, the Tang installation will mix the old and new together in a dense "forest" that viewers explore from within.

The oldest piece in the show is Corner piece reconstructed painting background (2005/2012), a large installation of plywood, paintings, and paint that Lins has remade for the show and is literally built into the corner of the room.Her recent sculptures blur seeming opposites?craft and fine art, abstract and representative, slapdash and minimalist, colorful and unadorned, hollow and full.

Public Events Related to the Shows

• Saturday, February 18, 5 p.m.:Dunkerley Dialogue with Nancy Grossman and Elizabeth Streb,choreographer and dancer
• Saturday, February 18, 6-7:30 p.m.: Opening Reception for all new shows
• February 29, March 27, April 25, 12 noon: Curator's Tour with Rachel Seligman, associate curator, Tang Museum
• Thursday, March 1, 7 p.m.:Artist Talk with Pam Lins
• March 6 and April 11, noon: Tourwith Malloy Curator Ian Berry
• Thursday, March 22, 7 p.m.: Dunkerley Dialogue with Donald Moffett and Mason Stokes, associate professor of English at Skidmore College
• Tuesday, April 10, noon: Gallery Tour with Douglas Crimp, author and Fanny Knapp Allen Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester
• Tuesday, April 10, 8 p.m.: Douglas Crimp Reading: Crimp will read from his new book, "Our Kind of Movie": The Films of Andy Warhol