Clough-Hanson Gallery at Rhodes College is very excited to announce its first show of the spring season: Susan Maakestad: Urban Abstraction.
The show will run from January 20th through February 15th, 2006. There will be an artist’s lecture in Blount Auditorium in Buckman Hall at 7:00 p.m., Thursday, January 19th. The reception for the show will be held in the gallery from 6 - 8 p.m., Friday January 20th.
Maakestad paints ordinary places: parking lots, streets, glimpses of the Mississippi River. Her paintings are from urban landscape, the concrete and asphalt backdrop of television's Cops. Merely imitating the natural world does not interest her. She is moved by the internal logic of paintings themselves, a world where things make sense somehow. Or almost don't. Where everything lives and breathes in tension held together by beauty and paint. The exhibition will have an accompanying brochure with an essay written by Nashville Scene writer, David Maddox. In the essay he writes:
“Susan Maakestad’s scraps of space start as pure use, space that we do not see or comprehend. For the purposes of sight, thought, and feeling, this space has been abandoned, available to a painter to depict and endow with sense. It leaves room for her to occupy it as a squatter. Why not make use of the space unclaimed by others? These paintings have multi-dimensional life in spite of the marginal and unremarkable qualities of their sources, and they constitute a significant act of creative reuse within the bleakest precincts of the contemporary landscape.”
Susan Maakestad earned her M.F.A. in painting from The University of Iowa in 1987 and a B.A. and M.A. from Central Washington University in Ellensburg, WA. She is Associate Professor of Art at Memphis College of Art, where she has taught since 1997. She was awarded a regional National Endowment for the Arts fellowship from Arts Midwest in 1988. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work was included in the national publication "New American Paintings," Midwest Edition, in 1995. Her watercolors are included in The Drawing Center's slide registry in New York. Her oil paintings are part of The Painting Center in New York's online Art File. Her work has been exhibited nationally. She is represented by Groveland Gallery in Minneapolis and Perry Nicole Fine Art in Memphis.