WCU welcomes its next visiting scholar next week. Martica Sawin, a woman of many vocations, including art historian, contemporary critic, curator, writer and lecturer, will be speaking on Wednesday, March 28, in room 104 of the Belk Building. Her presentation will begin at 7 p.m.
Sawin’s lecture will give her audience a preview of the upcoming exhibition “Art from a Land of Fire & Ice: Icelandic Landscape Painting.” The presentation will contain Sawin’s recent research into how Iceland’s unique physical and geological qualities have inspired artists from the 19th century to the present.
The paintings will be featured in an exhibition next fall at the Corcoran Museum in Washington, DC. Sawin will be curating the exhibit.
On Tuesday, March 27, Sawin will give two more presentations at 11:00 a.m. in Room 278 of the Belk Building, and at 5:00 p.m. in Room 104. Her morning discussion will be titled “Thinking Abstract, Painting from Life: Representational Painters of the New York School Second Generation.” The discussion for the afternoon group will cover the impact of surrealist artists upon the formative years of the New York school of abstract painting.
Sawin is famous for her work with these topics and much of her research is included in her recent book and in various exhibitions in Europe. Sawin is the former chair of the department of history and criticism of art and design at the Parsons School of Design in New York. She is the author of a number of books and publications. One of her most recent positions has been the co-curator of an exhibition based on her 1997 book, “Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School,” which was displayed in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg, France.
For more than a decade, Sawin has also worked as a contributing editor for Arts magazine and Art Digest, as well as the reviews editor for the Art Journal. She has also authored several monographs, including large-scale works on Louisa Matthiasdottir, Nell Blaine, Wolf Kahn, Robert DeNiro, and Yves Tanguy. Sawin is currently focusing her time and energy on a revisionist history entitled “From Ashcan to Soupcan, American art 1900-1960.”
WCU’s departments of art, geosciences, and English are jointly sponsoring this event as part of the Visiting Scholars Series. All presentations are open to the public free of charge. For more information, call (828) 227-7210.
