Artists Talk with LVA: December 5, 2024

John & Peter outside the WXOX Studios.

Lida Gordon: Process and Materials runs December 6 through February 25, 2025 at the Cressman Center for Visual Arts. There will be an opening reception Friday, December 6 from 5 - 7 pm.

Peter Bodnar III is an artist living in Louisville and Vinalhaven, Maine. He was an Assistant Professor at the Louisville School of Art from 1976 to 1983 and has taught at the University of Louisville. He was also a Visiting Lecturer in Drawing and Painting at Spalding University. 

John Begley is a Printmaker, Installation, and Video Artist. From 1975 to 2014 he was a Curator and Gallery Director, including 19 years as Executive Director of LVA and several years with the UofL’s Hite Art Institute.

Lida Gordon's drawings and installations deal with archetypical female imagery in a contemporary context. She won many fellowships and awards including the Al Smith Fellowship: Kentucky Arts Council- National Endowment for the Arts in 1993, the Southern Arts Federation - National Endowment for the Arts in 1992, the Kentucky Arts Council Professional Assistance Award Fellowship in 1992, and the Kentucky Foundation for Women Visual Arts Grant in 1988. She was an Assistant Professor at the Louisville School of Art and founded the Fiber Art department at the University of Louisville’s Hite Institute for Art + Design.

Artists Talk with LVA: March 2, 2023

Moon-he Baik was a Professor of Interior Design at the Hite Art Institute in 1991-2021. She received her BFA from Ewha University in Korea, and her MFA from the University of North Texas. Her research focuses on Textile Design, Multi-Cultural Interiors, and Sustainability & Environmental Design.

Since 2018 she has been working to develop the Korea Fiber Form Biennial, which took place in South Korea in 2022 and is unfolding now in Louisville at LVA, KMAC, Asia Institute-Crane House, 21c Hotel & Museum, and the University of Louisville. She has now been invited to bring the Fiber Forum to the 2024 Venice Biennale.

In April 2023 Baik will once again be a featured designer in the KMAC Couture event!

Korea FiberArt International consolidates leading artists in Korean fiber arts to organize symposiums and workshops in correlation to exhibitions. The objective of KFAF is to shed light on Korea's creative endeavors using a wide range of fiber-based materials. The scope is broad from artistic narrative expressions to practical approaches that encompass function.

Artebella On The Radio: May 20

Hite Institute just graduated some new MFA candidates and this week we talk with two of them, Karen Weeks & Megan Bickel. Tune in to WXOX 97.1, or stream on Artxfm.com Thursday at 10 am to her Keith Waits talk with artists.

Megan Bickel is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer who was a Community Educator at Art Academy of Cincinnati and who operates Houseguest, an independent artist-run project space located in Louisville. Her exhibit l is meditating on two words as they relate to one another in our current moment: illusion and allusion. Specifically, this manifests by inquiring as to how we consume visual data, the probability of factual 'truths,' and cultivating safe, imaginative spaces for the viewer to conceive of ethically superior realities.

Karen Weeks is also a multi-disciplinary artist who has worked with fiber and a lot with the letterpress print studio. Her exhibit, Love Labor: Literal Symbols and True Abstractions, is comprised of images sourced from common ephemera of the home meant to represent the everyday: notes, discarded letters, open envelopes, unfinished knitting, garments, drawings, math homework. The works in this show seek to reimage this detritus by (re)organizing it into constructed passages that bear witness to the commonalities to be found in homemaking and artmaking, aesthetics and the commonplace, economics, and whining. They are abstract representations of that which is contained within us, by way of what collects in our homes, representations of the aesthetics of and the profundities contained within the mundane.

Megan Bickel, Karen Weeks, Katherine Watts & Rachid Tagoulla

MFA Exhibition
May 7-July 9, 2021

Cressman Center for Visual Arts
100 E Main Street
Louisville, KY 40202

Vignette: Benjamin Duke

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“How much monster, Duke’s Paintings ask us, are we willing to feel in ourselves, to accept, to affirm? What are the limits to which our egos restrict us, and what attractions and sensations liberate us from the cage of self? What aspirations and endeavors, Ben Duke’s paintings keep asking, lead beyond all compromises and reveal to us, finally what a body can think and do and feel.”  — From Brian Kubarycz’s introductory essay to the catalogue entitled: Benjamin Duke 2001-2010: Ten years of Work with essays by Brian Kubarycz, and Su YuAnn, published by Garden City Publishing.

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"Persistent Remainders" by Benjamin Duke, 60x65in, oil (2016), $8500 | BUY NOW

Benjamin Duke returns to exhibit in Louisville 11 months after presenting his painting “Louisville 2015: Full of Life, Now” (2015), to Metro Hall. He was Louisville’s first participant in a visiting artist initiative, introduced in 2015 as part of the Mayor’s Music & Art Series. The painting is on display in the Mayor’s Conference Room at Metro Hall.

Duke’s work takes our recognizable existence and twists it with pretzel logic. It is immediately accessible yet touches upon deeper currents: “In my paintings I ask myself “Is this the way the world is?’ I reshape and retool my painting experience to answer that question.  But while the question begins with the world, it ends with the work itself: “Is this the way the world is in this work?”

The search is for the world in painting and painting in the world (painting worlds / painting’s world). Am I in the world or is the world in me? I allude to my life, to writers works, to imagery and it is my hope that this record of allusion conjures and creates the same. I am referring to text, theory, idea but I am also finding myself already there, looking out to see in.”

"Awakening as Self-Identity Matrix #2" by Benjamin Duke, 60x60in, oil, $8500 | BUY NOW

It wasn't a Dream, It was a Real Place, Duke’s new exhibit, will run December 16, 2016 through January 27, 2017 in University of Louisville’s Cressman Center for Visual Arts at 100 East Main Street. There will be an Artist’s Reception open to the public December 16 from 6 pm to 8 pm.

"Lingua Franca #2" by Benjamin Duke, 60x72in, oil (2016), $10,000 | BUY NOW

Duke is Associate Professor of painting at Michigan State University. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, he received his Master of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art Hoffberger School of Painting. His work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions from Chicago to Taiwan. Duke has also been awarded international residencies at Bamboo Curtain Studios, The Kuandu Museum of Fine Art at Taipei National University of the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center.

Hometown: Louisville, KY
Education: BFA, University of Utah, Painting and Drawing Emphasis, 2002; MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Hoffberger School of Painting, 2006.
Website: http://www.bendukeart.com/
Gallery Representative: Ann Nathan Gallery (Chicago), A Gallery (Salt Lake City)

"TXT" by Benjamin Duke, 65x87in, oil (2016), $10,000 | BUY NOW

"Awakening as Self-Identity Matrix #4" by Benjamin Duke, 65x72in, oil (2016), $8500  | BUY NOW   

"Lingua Franca" by Benjamin Duke, 44x54in, oil (2016), $8500 | BUY NOW

Written by Keith Waits. Entire contents copyright © 2016 Louisville Visual Art. All rights reserved.

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