Dialoghi dell'Arte | 2014-15 International Tour USA | CHINA | ITALY
Martha Armstrong Pamela Bowers Cynthia Bridgman Caren Canier Tina Engels Alan Feltus Jessie Fisher Dan Gustin
Lani Irwin Geoffrey Miller Barry Nemett Laini Nemett Richard Piccolo Langdon Quin Scott Seebart David Voros
Dialoghi dell'Arte 2014-15 International Tour
Leedy-Voulkos Art Center, Kansas City, MO 2014
June 6th - July 6th
Guilin Museum of Art, Guilin, China 2015
Works on Paper | April 5th-10th, 2015
SACI Gallery | Palazzo dei Cartelloni, Florence, Italy 2015
May 22nd- June 25th | Opening Reception May 22nd
Galleria Bocca al Lupo, ICA. Montecstello di Vibio, Italy 2015
July 2015 | Reception July 4th
“To embrace and absorb, that is enlightenment.
We have inherited the entire history and
knowledge of art before us.
You belong to a tradition. Italy is the fountain. Come and drink.”
Milarepa, 11th century Buddhist poet and saint
As Edwin Dickenson wrote, “The more influenced I am, the more original I become.” This statement rests at the core of a group of American artists and educators whom are directly influenced by immersion into the artistic culture of central Italy. This collective, made up of fathers and daughters, long-term couples and dedicated perceptual painters, come together year after year in Italy to continue their research and to introduce students to the Italian light and landscape; to the amazing traditions of painting, sculpture and architectural masterworks that populate the cities and the countryside.
The 16-member collective, working under the name, Dialoghi dell’Arte, or A Discourse on Art, will exhibit recent work in an International tour that will travel from the United States, to China and onto two venues in central Italy. At the inaugural exhibition at the McMaster Galleries at the University of South Carolina, it became immediately clear that this diverse group retained a cohesiveness, not only in its clear references to the Italianate traditions of narrative, form and composition, but also through its clear devotion to tradition as subject. In the exhibition essay for the inaugural exhibition, Pamela Bowers and David Voros, Co-Directors of the International Center for the Arts in Montecastello di Vibio, wrote of the groups’ connection to a cultural and geographic location;
“Each year they return to Italy to immerse themselves in both local Umbrian culture and the rich history the region has to offer as well as to participate in this critical community of contemporary artists that is generated, in part, by their presence there. In this, Italy influences not only their own work but also their teaching. Through them, the rich legacy of Italian art continues to inspire generations of young painters.”
The cumulative accomplishments of this group, whose members range from leaders in Post-Abstract Figuration to recent MFA graduates, are as impressive and they are varied. The members of this group have exhibited and lectured throughout the world, received an impressive list of awards and honors and are revered by their students for their passion and devotion to the study of painting. The work from this group ranges from direct responses to the motif through abstract relationships of color and form, the appropriation of Italian metaphysical and Renaissance approaches to narrative and idealization, the reverence for the poesis of Morandi, architectural narrations of complex spatial relationships to a resurgence of the role of artist as perceptual scientist. This group of American painters, writers and educators, diverse in stylistic qualities, finds commonality in their belief in the plasticity of the medium and in the importance of looking back.