Topic: Sculpture

At Custom House: Time Made Real with works by sculptor Tim Lewis

August 27, 2008 |

Time Made Real: the Carvings of Tim Lewis, is showing in the Bruner, Crouch and Orgain Galleries through October 31. The exhibit features the life and work of renowned carver Tim Lewis from Kentucky. Lewis is one of America’s premier living self-taught artists.

After this debut at Customs House, selections from the exhibit will travel to the Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus, Ohio) and Mennello Museum American Art (Orlando, Florida) before closing the tour at the Kentucky Folk Art Center at Morehead State University.

Sixty pieces of Lewis’s work have been gathered from twenty-two public and private collections from across the Southeast and Midwest by guest curators Bruce and Kathy Moses Shelton. Works exemplify the full range of Lewis’s ability to tell a story from his first Noah’s Ark to his most recent, Win, Place & Show, an homage to the Kentucky Derby. Mining the experience of family and home, as well as a trove of legends and beliefs accumulated over a lifetime, Lewis has created a body of work that emerges as a visual narrative rich in its ‘telling.’ «Read the rest of this article»

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Hope Cemetery: Life and death celebrated in a garden of granite

By Christine Anne Piesyk | August 22, 2008 |

While On the Road in America, I continually look for unique and interesting places and people. In Barre, Vermont, I found just such a special place, a landscape irrevocably linked in life and death to the people of this community whose work is art in its highest form.

The pensive Spence monument is intriguing as the only one not immaculately tended.

Ten years ago friends introduced me to Hope Cemetery, first in a quick drive-by on the way to somewhere else, and later, for a “quick” tour that became a lengthy monument-by-monument tour. For these monuments are like no others. They honor the dead, but are of themselves museum quality works of art and imagination that attract a flurry of annual visitors from all over the world. The granite monuments, carved from Barre’s own Rock of Ages Quarry, rank as the best granite craftsmanship in the world. Most people do not realize that many of the monuments across our country are crafted from Barre (and other Vermont) granite.

I walked the peaceful, quiet grounds, awestruck by the ingenuity of many of the stones, and by the willingness of the creators to step beyond the traditional “names and dates of life and death” inscription and create memorials that capture the essence of individual in the form of a hobby, a career, a love, a memory…

To say that the images unfolding here are breathtaking is an understatement. I was walking through an open air museum of the finest art. «Read the rest of this article»

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‘Anomaly’ showcased at Don Jenkins Gallery

By Austin Peay State University | April 2, 2008 |

Anomaly, an exibition by Sam Matthews, will be shown at Austin Peay State University Department of Art in the the Don Jenkins Gallery at the Morgan University Center.

Anomaly will premiere at 7 p.m., Monday, April 7 in the Don Jenkins Gallery, located on the third floor of the Morgan University Center with a reception on opening night. The exhibition will remain on display until Wednesday, April 10 and is is free and open to the public. Matthews is an art major on track to receive his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture in May.

A resident of Clarksville, Matthews’s exhibition will consist of several large wood sculptures, which he describes as, “large ambiguous forms meant to entertain the eyes and create visual significance by arousing curiosity in the viewer.” «Read the rest of this article»

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Customs House stages world-class exhibit with Olen Bryant retrospective

By Christine Anne Piesyk | September 16, 2007 |

Hundreds of friends and fans came to the Customs House Museum Saturday evening for the opening celebration of Olen Bryant: A Retrospective, a world class exhibit of ceramic, wood and stone sculpture, a sampling of Bryant’s work from the early 1950’s to the present.

A Tennessee native and Professor Emeritus of Art at Austin Peay State University, Bryant was introduced to Saturday’s crowd as “an educator, mentor and humanitarian of the first order,” one who has guided and prodded his students to “find their voices” even as he continued his quest to develop and expand his own.

Meandering through the crowds, one could hear the comments of friends, of art lovers, watch them inhaling in awe at the beauty and substance of this work. In an era where art is displayed but art lovers are kept at safe distances, the Customs House exhibit was presented in a manner that invited touch, that invited close inspection of the most minute detail of each piece, be it a small “sleeping stone” or a majestic chair with outstretched arms. The art itself invited it. «Read the rest of this article»

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Olen Bryant: A Retrospective showcased at Custom House Museum

By Debbie Boen | September 12, 2007 |

“…He has a magic touch that wakes up the wood he’s carving or pours life into the ceramics that he’s molding…”

Olen Bryant: A Retrospective opens at the Customs House Museum and Cultural Center on North Second Street on Saturday, September 15, featuring the best of Bryant’s work. The exhibit will run through December 31, with an opening reception scheduled for Saturday at 6 p.m.

Bryant received the Distinguished Artist Award from Governor Phil Bredesen during a special ceremony celebrating the Governor’s Awards in the Arts at the Schermerhorn Symphony Center in Nashville in March, 2007. He is a well-known sculptor and educator and has received national recognition for his work. «Read the rest of this article»

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