Krushenick exhibition to be focus of Tang special events

Skidmore’s Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery has announced special events in connection with the current exhibition titled Nicholas Krushenick: Electric Soup.

The public is welcome at a March 25 evening-long exploration of the work of "the father of Pop abstraction," American painter Nicholas Krushenick (1929–1999). Born in the Bronx, Krushenick became a prominent figure on the 1960s and 1970s New York Art scene. His bold, dynamic paintings straddle the lines between the prevailing art movements of that time, most notably Abstract Expressionism and Pop art. For Krushenick, this independent, unclassifiable status was ideal. He said: "They don’t really know where to place me. Like I’m out in Left field all by myself. And that’s just where I want to stay.”

Free and open to the public, events on March 25 include the following:

-5:30 pm – Curator's tour of Nicholas Krushenick: Electric Soup with Ian Berry, Dayton Director of the Tang.

-6:30 pm – Dunkerley Dialogue on painting, abstraction, and the legacy of artist Nicholas Krushenick with Fabian Lopez, assistant professor of art at Skidmore College, and guest artists Kathy Butterly and Liz Collins.

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Fabian Lopez earned a BFA in drawing and painting at California State University-Long Beach, and an MFA in painting at Tyler School of Art at Temple University. He has participated in both group and solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Rome. Before joining the faculty at Skidmore College, Lopez previously taught at Tyler School of Art and Rowan University. His work has been published in New American Painters No. 104, title-magazine.com, theartblog.org and newsworks.org.

Liz Collins is a New York City-based artist and designer best known for her installation and performance project KNITTING NATION, and she presented the project's Phase 9: Accumulation at the Tang Teaching Museum in fall 2012 as part of the Dance/Draw exhibition. She has had solo exhibitions at AMP Gallery, Provincetown, Mass.; Occidental College, Los Angeles; Textile Arts Center, New York; AS220, Providence, R.I.; and the Knoxville Museum of Art, Tennessee. She has also exhibited at the ICA Boston, the Museum of FIT, the Museum of Arts and Design, and Museum of Modern Art. Collins’s awards include a 2006 United States Artist Target Fellowship and a 2011 MacColl Johnson Fellowship. Collins received both BFA and MFA degees from Rhode Island School of Design, where she was an associate professor from 2003-2013.

Kathy Butterly is known for her colorful porcelain and earthenware objects, which are often pint-sized quirky forms, cartoonish actions and surprising textures. Her work was featured in the 2005 Tang Teaching Museum exhibition Opener 10: Kathy Butterly: Freaks and Beauties. She has had solo exhibitions at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York City and the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica, California. Her work has also been exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the ICA Boston, and the ICA Philadelphia. Awards include a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award and a 2012 Smithsonian American Art Museum Contemporary Artist Award. She earned a BFA from Moore College of Art in Philadelphia and an MFA from the University of California, Davis.

-8 pm – The Electric Soup Party with music, food, and make-your-own Nicholas Krushenick-inspired wearable art projects. Organized with Skidmore College's Element Fashion Group.

Electric Soup features Krushenick’s dynamic paintings that juxtapose bold forms with hard-edged abstraction, revealing a body of work that exists independent of and simultaneously connected to Op art, Pop, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting. The exhibition includes well-known works created in New York in the 1960s and 1970s as Krushenick rose to prominence, as well as works created in Baltimore during the 1980s and 1990s, when art market tastes shifted away from Krushenick’s unclassifiable style. The survey also includes rarely seen drawings and prints influenced by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman’s theory of “push-pull,” in which bright contrasting colors activate the space—a practice Krushenick continued to use throughout his career.

Krushenick’s boldly independent vocabulary and style helped him become a prominent figure on the New York art scene in the 1960s. His vibrant paintings hinge on a tension between figure and ground; flatness and spatiality; edge and interior; geometry and disorder; with influences as varied as Henri Matisse, Edward Hicks, and Henri Rousseau. While Krushenick’s graphic forms and bright colors are akin to Pop art, he remained interested in abstraction, distancing his work from the representational forms of Pop art. While not as widely recognized as other artists of the period, Krushenick’s work has been influential to many contemporary artists including Kathy Butterly, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, and Thomas Nozkowski.

“As a museum dedicated to interdisciplinary teaching and learning, it’s important to us that our exhibitions are valuable tools to inform study across a range of disciplines, and provide engaging experiences for all our visitors,” said Berry.“We are thrilled to bring together this impressive group of Nicholas Krushenick’s bold and inspiring paintings, and to introduce a new audience to his significant body of work.”