News

Annual Student Exhibition
December 7-January 12, 2019
Reception: Friday December 7, 2018 6-8 PM
Cressman Center for Visual Arts
100 E Main St
Louisville, KY 40202

The Hite Art Institute is pleased to announce the opening of our Annual Student Exhibition. Work in this show highlights not only the tremendous accomplishments of our students, it also showcases their dramatic range. Artists from all studio areas, from glass to graphic design, painting to printmaking, will be on view through January 12th.  

The subjects under investigation in this work are as varied as the methods employed to produce them. Remington King’s silkscreen work appropriates pop culture references and juxtaposes them with fine art practice. Lillian Fouch’s meticulous relief offers an exploration of identity and the artist’s relationship to inherited culture forms and symbols. Melanie Osbone’s paintings similarly consider hybrid identity and the artist’s ability to construct and manipulate one’s sense of self. In every case, work in this exhibition demonstrates the talent, and intellect, of our diverse Hite Art Institute student body. 

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Title

Cressman Center for Visual Arts
On View: April 27 - July 28, 2018
Reception: April 27, 2018  6-8 pm

The Hite Art Institute presents an exhibition by Louisville artist Douglas Miller at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts April 27 – July 28. The show, which serves as Miller’s culminating thesis for his Master of Fine Arts degree, will feature approximately 100 drawings and a projected animation. Most of the images are not complete, however. They are fragments, wisps of ideas not fully realized, in keeping with the theme of the show.

Playfully called “Title,” the show considers the disorganization of the creative process — how a person fails to bring a large-scale project to fruition. Miller was inspired by the novel Dead Souls by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. Gogol always planned to write three volumes, but he deteriorated creatively and psychologically and never finished the series. “Most people have failed or not met goals they’re expected to meet,” Miller says. “It’s not a theme specific to this one author, it’s universal. Self-doubt and other feelings that come with completing a large project are familiar to everyone.”

Miller earned his BFA from Hite. His drawings are in galleries across the U.S. and numerous private collections.

The opening reception is from 6-8 p.m. April 27.

Caprices: Wit & Whimsy

Schneider Hall Galleries
On View: April 26 - August 3, 2018
Reception: April 26, 5-7p.m.

The Hite Art Institute is pleased to present an exhibition from the University of Louisville’s print collection. Curated by students in the Critical and Curatorial Studies II class, “Caprices: Wit & Whimsy” transforms the white cube gallery into a space that invites laughter. The humor framed within this show is meant to break that invisible barrier one crosses when entering the gallery; the prints welcome candid, reflexive responses. Since the impact of visual humor is instantaneous, and can be undermined by over-explanation or analysis, this exhibition aims to allow for both instant gratification and complex reading.

A “caprice” is a sudden, impulsive, unpredictable action or condition, a disposition to do things impulsively. Synonymous with “whimsy,” a caprice surprises with its irrational or unpredictable idea or fantastic turn of mind. Like a caprice, humor surprises. Artwork on view includes elements of the grotesque, the whimsical, the ironic, and the childish to comprise an exhibition that is strategically eclectic.

“Caprices: Wit & Whimsy” includes work by Édouard Manet, Francisco Goya, Tom Huck, Bob Lockhart, Honoré Daumier, Mel Ramos, Cima Katz, among others, and was curated by Diana Dillman, Alexis Doerr, Adelaide McComb, Jessica Schumacher, Layne Wegenast, and Stephanie Wise.

 Caprices: Wit & Whimsy is on view April 26-August 3, 2018

Schneider Hall Galleries
On View: April 5 - 20, 2018
Reception: April 5, 2018 5-7 pm

The Hite Art Institute is pleased to announce the opening of the Spring 2018 BFA Thesis Exhibitions at Schneider Hall Galleries. The exhibition will display artwork in a variety of mediums from those students graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Hite Art Institute.

The exhibition will feature the artwork of Sarah Bichir, Jackson Hawkins, Lucas Keown, Ellen Lattz, Nicholas Reader, Bailey Thomas, Jacob Thompson, and Elizabeth Wolf with an opening reception and remarks on Thursday, April 5 from 5:00 - 7:00 pm. 

Each BFA candidate will contribute their unique vision as represented by a concentrated body of work developed to demonstrate their readiness to enter the professional art world upon graduation.

Schneider Hall - Covi Gallery
On View: March 8 - March 30, 2018
Reception: TBD

Cressman Center for Visual Arts
On View: March 2 - April 7, 2018
Reception: March 2, 2018 6-8pm

This March, the University of Louisville’s Cressman Center for Visual Arts is hosting work by the artist collective For Freedoms. The group is the first artist-run Super PAC (“Political Action Committee”), an organization that raises money in support for or against a political cause, but cannot directly support a candidate.

As part of the Cressman Center’s “New Monuments” series, the exhibition will display For Freedoms’ Make America Great Again billboard, a large-scale work that superimposes the slogan from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over a well-known image from the Selma, Alabama “Bloody Sunday” civil rights protest. This was one of many billboards that For Freedoms installed all over the US during the last presidential election (including in nearby Lexington, KY) in order to provoke conversations about art and political action. The work is part of a larger national campaign that investigates the relationship between art and speech, aesthetics and politics, and design and propaganda.

“New Monuments” brings one monumental work of contemporary art to the Cressman space and provides contextual material to situate the work both in terms of its art historical origins and its current political context. For this iteration, the Cressman Center will be reimagined as a campaign headquarters—a space where participants organize before heading out into the field to campaign. This is, in many respects, the way that For Freedoms has operated in the last few years—as a base camp for instigating other artists into political conversations. The group has worked collaboratively with many artists and arts organizations. They have provided a Roy Stryker-esque prompt to photographers documenting America as part of the Postcards From America project, and provided the organizational conceit for a group exhibition at Jack Shainman gallery in 2017. For Freedoms has also held a residency at MoMA PS1 in 2017 and is currently working on a “50 States” project for the 2018 midterm elections. 

For Freedoms was founded by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman, and now also includes a core team of five — Elizabeth Baribeau, Michelle Woo, Taylor Brock, Emma Nuzzo and Evan Blaise Walsh — and a growing network of over 140 contributing artists and hundreds of institutions nationwide. It takes its name from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address, a speech in which the president advocated against isolationism in favor of spreading American values to a European continent under threat of tyranny. In the speech, Roosevelt articulated the “Four Freedoms” essential to American liberty: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. Two years later, the speech inspired Norman Rockwell’s iconic “Four Freedoms” paintings, which were reproduced for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post.  This oscillation between art and political speech provoked Thomas and Gottesman to think about the role of art making in our contemporary context—one in which “speech” is not limited to citizens and political actors but has been afforded to corporations and super PACs as well. 

Event Programming

March 8, 2018   
Panel Discussion
Political Art and Activism: Making America Great Again
Cressman Center for Visual Arts
6 - 7:30pm
Produced in partnership with the Cooperative Consortium for Transdisciplinary Social Justice

March 22, 2018
Artist Talk: Eric Gottesman
Cressman Center for Visual Arts
 6 - 7:30pm
Produced in partnership with the Commonwealth Center for the Humanities and Society

March 29, 2018 
Freedom and Speech: A conversation about the First Amendment, Citizens United, and Corporate Personhood
Cressman Center for Visual Arts
 6 - 7:30pm

image:  For Freedoms / Spider Martin, Make America Great Again - Pearl, Mississippi, 2016, vinyl billboard, 10.5ft x 36ft.  Courtesy of For Freedoms.

"New Recruits" features work by Kyoungmee Kate Byun, Tiffany Calvert, Meena Khalili, Margaret Leininger, and Rachel Singel. The exhibition highlights the newest additions to the studio art faculty at the University of Louisville, artists whose work spans the multidisciplinary range of the Department of Fine Arts. Byun's interior architecture and design work is aimed at increased interaction—both socially (between those using the spaces she designs) and spatially (between the design work and the architectural structures it occupies). Calvert's paintings draw on imagery from art historical and contemporary sources, not as an act of appropriation but rather of reproduction. The work investigates the informational capacity of these reproduced images, and the ways in which the artist might interrupt or otherwise compromise their reliability. Khalili's practice crosses the disciplinary boundaries between traditional design and studio art. Often drawing on typography and Persian calligraphy, her work is inspired by geography, impermanence, and her experiences as a first generation Iranian-American. Leininger, a fiber artist by training, is deeply committed to art's capacity for provoking or modeling social change. Her work often intervenes at the intersection between craft making and the social bonds that it facilities. Singel's work is invested in the natural rather than the social. Using lithographic techniques, her work imitates the generative and corrosive natural forces that create minerals and other geological formations. Absence is a recurring motif in her art, which investigates what may exist within the void—an irreducible feature of almost all natural surfaces (from pores to burrows).

"New Recruits" introduces the newest generation of Hite Art practitioners—a welcome addition to the boundary-defying work undertaken at the University of Louisville. The exhibition will remain open all summer, with a closing reception on September 8, 2017, to welcome students and faculty back from summer break.

View the press release

"In Between: Time and Transition," is drawn from the Hite Art Institute's substantial print collection, and is equal parts historical survey and thematic group show. The exhibition is organized around the concept of "liminality," a term used to describe moments of ritual, social, or personal transition or transformation—spaces out of time and out of place—that allow for personal, social, or cultural reflection. Throughout the long history of modernism, art has often served in this reflective role, particularly during moments of acute transition, like the peacetime between World Wars and the beginnings and ends of centuries. The ideological divisions revealed in this recent presidential election have convinced many of us that we are currently occupying such a liminal moment. "In Between" attempts to pinpoint the psychic, temporal, and physical boundaries across which change occurs and the strategies through which artists enact and reenact such transition. "In Between" is co-curated by Whitney Cox, Joel Darland, Stephanie Gerding, Liz Jordan, Hannah Melvin, Scott Rollins, Hillary Roser, and Paige Schat.

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The Hite Art Institute is pleased to announce the opening of Pursuing the Uncanny: Ralph Eugene Meatyard, an exhibition curated by Critical and Curatorial Studies master’s candidate, Hunter Kissel. Pursuing the Uncanny features figurative photographs by Ralph Eugene Meatyard that incorporate masks, blurring techniques, and prolonged exposures to present moments when the unconscious becomes most visible.

Pursuing the Uncanny identifies parallels among Meatyard photographs that collectively allude to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay entitled “The Uncanny.” Freud’s text contends that a specific type of fright is prompted in adults upon an encounter with repressed material from childhood, especially as it pertains to supernatural forces, the mergence of reality and fantasy, and childhood complexes. Meatyard’s photographs illustrate the components of the uncanny in multiple ways. Blurring allows Meatyard’s figures to enter ghostly realms, as bodies that are neither completely in our world nor gone from it. Their presence indicates the possibility for the self to be divided—Freud suggests that children project aspects of themselves onto shadows and inanimate objects. In Meatyard’s images these figments become manifest. Through the use of masks, identity becomes even more elusive; Meatyard believed that a masked figure is at once no one and everyone. In works that are devoid of figures, Meatyard uses surrogates, such as dolls, to imply the possibility for fragments of the mind to transcend the body and inhabit lifeless objects. The Uncanny thus serves to inform viewers the ways in which masks, children, and the spaces they occupy carry meaning across the breadth of Meatyard’s work.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972) was a photographer working in Lexington, KY during the mid-twentieth century. He identified no less than twelve bodies of work he made during his lifetime. This exhibition features photographs from what has been posthumously referred to as Romances in prominent scholarship. Since his death, Meatyard has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at venues such as the International Center for Photography and the Art Institute of Chicago. 

View the Press Release