Tony Feher

April 12-August 17, 2014

Spanning 25 years, the exhibit Tony Feher reveals the richness, complexity and impact of the artist’s work. In work distinguished by poetic gestures that give meaning to mundane materials, Feher emphasizes the importance of seeing familiar objects in new ways. The artist collects many of his materials—bottles and jars, plastic bags and polystyrene blocks—after they have been emptied and discarded. He often lives with them for an extended period of time before singling out individual items for their formal qualities and potential. In laying out, stacking or adding colored water to these common components, he encourages us to value their beauty, or simply to see and appreciate things differently–and anew. Tony Feher is organized by Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston.

 

Language in Art

April 12-September 14, 2014

Language in Art looks at innovative ways in which contemporary artists use text as a key component in their work. Sophie Calle’s evocative narrative accompanies photographs of items she assembled when she gained access to hotel rooms while working as a chambermaid in Venice. Meanwhile, unsettling questions–such as What Was I Thinking? or How Can I Get a Do-Over?—adorn Kristen Cliffel’s outsized chocolate-frosted pink cupcakes in The Dirty Dozen. Other artists featured in this selection of sculptures, prints and photographs from the Akron Art Museum collection include Robert Arneson, Lesley Dill, Vernon Fisher, Ed Ruscha and Carrie Mae Weems.

 

The Talking Cure

May 15-July 6, 2014

Twelve sculptures are the focus of The Talking Cure, a project by Melissa Stern. Stern invited 12 writers to interpret her simplified human figures, and the resulting interior monologues for the sculptures were then reinterpreted and read aloud by recorded voice actors. Visitors can read or listen to these examples in the gallery, and are encouraged to create new narratives of their own. Also on view are drawings by Stern that address wider questions of psychology and its relationship to art and story-telling.

 

Along the Tracks: O. Winston Link

June 7-November 9, 2014

O. Winston Link, a successful advertising photographer, found his passion in photographing steam locomotives. Along the Tracks features photographs from the Akron Art Museum collection and loans from private collections. The exhibition examines Link’s technical accomplishments and innovations as a photographer as well as his in-depth document of a quickly fading mode of transportation, and way of rural life in rural 1950s America.

 

 

 

 

Tony Feher / April 12-August 17, 2014

Language in Art / April 12-September 14, 2014

The Talking Cure / May 15-July 6, 2014

Along the Tracks: O. Winston Link / June 7-November 9, 2014

 

Akron Art Museum

1 South High Street

Akron, OH 44308

akronartmuseum.org
330.376.9185

 

 

Image Credits for Akron Art Museum Article

 

Tony Feher, Untitled, 2009, Mylar blanket, binder clip, 19 x 17 x 12 in., La Colección Jumex, Mexico, Photograph by Robert Wedemeyer

 

Kristen Cliffel, The Dirty Dozen (detail), 2010, low fire clay, glaze, luster, wood and Lucite, 32 x 32 x 23 in., Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Gift of the artist in honor of Mitchell D. Kahan 2012.102 a-n

 

O. Winston Link, Hot Shot Eastbound, Iaeger, West Virginia, August 2, 1956 (printed 1983 or earlier), gelatin silver print, 15 1/2 x 19 1/2 in., Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Museum Acquisition Fund 1984.1