American Genre: Contemporary Painting

On view from July 20, 2017 – September 15, 2017, Wednesday - Sunday, 11am-5pm, Thursday 11am-7pm, First Friday, 11am-8pm

Exhibition Reception: Thursday, July 20, 2017, 5:00–8:00pm

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art is pleased to announce American Genre: Contemporary Painting curated by artist, writer, and curator Michelle Grabner. Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

American Genre: Contemporary Painting is an exhibition built on a triad of traditional painting genres: still life, landscape, and portraiture. Fifty paintings by fifty American artists offers a critical balance to the conditions of atemporality, affected responses, and the material turn shaping much of contemporary painting discourse. Alternatively, this exhibition employs historically recognized groupings of subject and forms. Genres incorporate and invoke structures of knowledge by performing classification. Deeply embedded in everyday life, genre is conspicuous and powerful in its ability to chart historical continuity and differences through its organizing forces.

Artists include: Gina Beavers, Wendy Edwards, Dana DeGiulio, Francesca Fuchs, Hope Gangloff, Evan Gruzis, Magalie Guerin, Jessica Halonen, Jonn Herschend, Tucker Nichols, Aliza Nisenbaum, Roger White, Griff Williams, Kelly Williams, Emi Winter, Herman Aguirre, Lucas Ajemian, Deborah Brown, Kristin Calabrese, Susanna Coffey, Angela Dufresne, Andreas Fischer, Howard Fonda, Richard Hull, Jose Lerma, Keith Mayerson, Henry Taylor, Storm Tharp, Dan Attoe, Peter Barrickman, Amy Bennett, Ann Craven, Cynthia Daignault, Rackstraw Downes, Mari Eastman, Brad Killam, Eva Lundsager, Tyson Reeder, John Riepenhoff, Claire Sherman, Gail Spaien, Spencer Sweeney and Emily Sundblad.

This exhibition will include an exhibition catalog that also functions as a genre reader. The exhibition will close with a one-day symposium hosted by Maine College of Art on September 15, 2017.

For more information or to request an interview, please contact Erin Hutton, Director of Exhibitions and Special Projects, Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art (ICA), 207.699.5025 or ehutton@meca.edu.

Images: Dana DeGiulio, Citizens, 2015, Oil on canvas, 25×19″