The Places We Return To…

Eric Barth | Rod Bouc | Elsie Sanchez

In The Places We Return To, three Columbus-based painters explore evocative personal landscapes that reside deeply within. Colored by nostalgia, melancholy, and longing for something perhaps just out of reach, each artist wrestles with the complexity and intimacy of memory.

Though different in style and approach, each of the artists’ works hint at a tension just beneath the surface, a dark side, an unshakable feeling. By applying heavy pigments and then scraping them off the surface— obscuring and revealing—each artist uses methods that recall the intangible qualities of place-based memories.

 

About the Artists

Eric Barth grew up near Lake Erie, in the suburbs of Cleveland, where his early involvement in the arts began in the underground music scene. He holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and founded The Barth Galleries in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio.

Rod Bouc was raised on a farm in Nebraska. He earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska and an MFA from The Ohio State University. For over thirty years, he served as a registrar and as an administrator of the Columbus Museum of Art.

Elsie Sanchez was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States as a young child with her family. She earned her BFA and MFA from The Ohio State University. She received the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Greater Columbus Arts Council Arts Partnership Award, and was selected to participate in the XIII Havana Biennial.

Line | Drawing Meaning from the Mark

Curated from the museum’s permanent collection, this is the first of a new series of exhibitions exploring the big ideas of visual art.

Line is language. Line is expressive. It can whisper, shout, proclaim.
Line can be bold, certain, searching, delicate.
Line can be quick, clipped, staccato.
Line can be sinuous, curving, undulating.

Line can build stability through structure and scaffolding.
Line can convey movement and energy by changing direction.
Line can be an edge, a contour, a border.
Line can mark a boundary between what is and what isn’t.

Line can be an index of where the artist’s mind–or the artist–has traveled, a record of moving, searching, observing, measuring.
Line is a point traveling through space.
Line is a path.

ZZ (detail image), Jack Moulthrop, ceramic, 2009

Color Fields: Andrea Myers

Andrea Myers
August 10th-December 29, 2024

I take up space as a female artist, reclaiming ‘women’s work’

 while pushing the boundaries of painting. –Andrea Myers

In Color Fields, Andrea Myers uses discarded, donated, and domestic clothing in ways that both reference and resist the rigid notions of work traditionally assigned to women. She approaches textiles differently. She uses the visual language of Color Field painting, including vibrantly saturated color over large swaths of a surface. She combines this with a gestural—and a bit rebellious—approach to quilt making to create large-scale panoramas, organic formations, and shifting shapes.

For the artist, colorful fabric functions like tubes of paint. Her sewing machine’s stitches are her drawings—dense, wild, and frenetic with energy and movement. Her color palette is not quiet; but instead, riotous neons and technicolor. Simple shapes suggest landscapes, sun, moon, mountains, rivers, erosions, contours, and topographies. These soft geometries push against the boundaries of the rectangular frame, spilling onto the walls and floors and over obstacles in her path.

Andrea Myers is an interdisciplinary artist who creates work at the intersection of contemporary color field painting, sculpture, and fiber arts. Having grown up in the flat farmlands of the Midwest, Myers’ artwork represents a joyous rebellion against the tight tedium of cross-stitches and the precision of traditional quilt making. Instead, hers is one of clashing colors, scribbling stitches, and joyously coloring way outside the lines.

Myers earned her BFA in Printmedia (2002) and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies (2006) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Myers’ work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She lives and makes art in Columbus, Ohio.

Tigris

Amanda Love
Dec 9, 2023 – Fall 2024

Former bookbinder Amanda Love responds to book banning and the dismantlement of knowledge with Tigris, a new art installation of deconstructed books.

Celebrating Women: Female Artists from the Permanent Collection

Jul 15, 2020 – Current

Historically, female artists have been underrepresented in museum collections and are shown at significantly lower rates than their male counterparts. During the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Museum is highlighting female artists whose works are in the permanent collection. These works of art showcase the wide range of media, subject, and technique with which female artists have traditionally worked and demonstrate how women continue to conceptually advance the art world today. Featuring work by well-known and lesser known artists alike, this show explores artistic contributions of female artists, not only regionally, but nationally and internationally as well. Artists in the show include Davira Fisher, Frances Hynes, Helen Bosart Morgan, Aminah Robinson, Alice Schille, Kara Walker, and Stella Waitzkin, to name a few.

In addition to new art on display, the Museum has been awarded a grant from Smithsonian Affiliations. Funding for this project allows us to host a Smithsonian speaker in support of their American Women’s History Initiative taking place this year.

Girl with Cigarette (The Model’s Break) (detail), n.d., Harriet Woodfin Titlow, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. John Westcott