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An Interview with Allison Zuckerman Pt. 1

Allison Zuckerman: Pirate and Muse

October 27, 2018 – January 21, 2019

Go behind the scenes with Allison Zuckerman at the Akron Art Museum and learn about her creative process, how she chooses her subject matter and more.

Join us for two Allison Zuckerman inspired events in January 2019:

Viola Frey, The World and the Woman, 1992, glazed ceramic, 80 x 142 x 75 in., Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Gift of Irving and Harriett Sands

Girls to the Front: Women Artists in the Akron Art Museum and Beyond

Famed art historian Linda Nochlin once pondered, “Why have there been no great women artists?” That is simply no longer the case. From Alma Thomas’ colorful Pond – Spring Awakening to Viola Frey’s massive sculpture The World and the Woman, the Akron Art Museum collection is full of great women artists. Explore female identifying artists in the collection on this hour-long tour that will culminate in an exploration of Allison Zuckerman: Pirate and Muse.

Allison Zuckerman, All Is Well, 2018, acrylic and archival CMYK ink on canvas, 60 x 80 in., Collection of Nicole D. Liarakos

Get Zucked: An Allison Zuckerman Inspired Tour Experience

Explore feminism, art history and digital art in an interactive scavenger hunt inspired by Allison Zuckerman: Pirate and Muse. Make a Zuckerman-inspired selfie, answer trivia questions and create an artwork ripped from the pages of an art history textbook.

And take home a catalog of Pirate and Muse, available signed or unsigned from the Museum Shop. 

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Try This: Kintsukuroi

Repairs can be beautiful if you try this Japanese traditional craft.

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Try This: Lanterns

Decorative arts, unlike sculptures, are meant to be useful and beautiful. These lantern projects are a perfect way to keep your creative output close by.

What do you need? There are directions for three versions of lantern projects. Ideally, you’ll need a form, a translucent paper, and glue or tape.

Try this? Lanterns are easy to make. Start by creating your form. An oatmeal container works great or you can also hot glue popsicle sticks together. Even a few bent pipe cleaners can work. Adorn your form with translucent materials, like tissue paper or cellophane. A careful adult could place a tea light in the lantern, but a battery-operated light is best.

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Collection Feature: Richard Estes, Food City

Food City verges on abstraction, as colors, shapes and brushstrokes intermingle. Cars, taxis and vans flatten into the same space as the cashier’s pink uniform, the checkout counters and stacks of cigarette packs. The facades of multistory buildings merge with hand-lettered signs advertising chuck steaks at 39 cents a pound. Richard Estes crops his painting so the grocery store’s glass windows fill the entire composition. Exterior and interior elements dissolve into a single plane. This energetic visual potpourri mimics the vitality of the surrounding New York City.

Richard Estes, Food City, 1967, Oil, acrylic and graphite on fiberboard 48 in. x 68 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased, by exchange, with funds raised by the Masked Ball 1955-1963
Richard Estes, Food City, 1967, Oil, acrylic and graphite on fiberboard, 48 in. x 68 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased, by exchange, with funds raised by the Masked Ball 1955-1963

Richard Estes is known as one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated photorealist painters. In his case, however, that credit is a bit of misnomer. Estes’ paintings do not actually have the same level of veracity that viewers associate with photographic images. That’s not to say that the camera isn’t central to the artist’s process. He photographs his subjects, collaging multiple prints together to achieve his desired composition. Estes then subtly tweaks his imagery, removing some elements that appeared in the photographs and adding others. Nowadays, the 85-year-old artist accomplishes this with the help of Photoshop. Unlike other artists active in the photorealist movement, Estes never used a grid or a projector to transfer his photographs to canvas or board. Instead, the artist drew and painted freehand.

When Estes made Food City in 1967, the young artist primarily focused on his immediate urban surroundings as subject matter. This painting of a busy grocery store in New York City’s Upper West Side neighborhood provided him the opportunity to show off the lettering skills he picked up as a freelance illustrator. These gigs paid Estes’ bills until he was able to focus his attention on painting full time in 1966. The artist credits his commercial work, and not his earlier training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with forcing him to master his craft. That work required him to translate photographs into painted illustrations for reproduction.

View more photorealistic artworks in the Akron Art Museum collection.

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Collection Feature: Jackie Winsor, #2 Copper

Jackie Winsor (born 1941, St. John’s Island, Newfoundland, Canada) assembles sculptures out of unexpected components. She prefers organic materials such as rope, hemp, branches and logs or building supplies like concrete, nails and bricks.

Jackie Winsor, #2 Copper, 1976, Wood and copper, 34 1/2 x 51 x 51 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased, by exchange, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Raymond C. Firestone
Jackie Winsor, #2 Copper, 1976, Wood and copper, 34 1/2 x 51 x 51 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased, by exchange, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Raymond C. Firestone

Not one to shy away from difficult physical work, Winsor constructs her minimalist geometric forms through repetitive manual labor. For #2 Copper, the artist built a grid out of 36 narrow pieces of wood, arranged in three sections of concentric squares. She wrapped each intersection with #2 industrial copper wire, forming 72 balls. As a child, Winsor assisted her father as he built their family home. Both her youthful construction experience and her college education in painting informed this process. “As a painter I was very interested in drawing, so when I was working on sculptural shapes I was thinking of them as drawings, you know: a line goes around and around and around and around,” Winsor remarked. “Part of how I thought of these early pieces is you just make the form full and fatter and fatter and fatter until you’ve built a shape, much like we build a house: more bricks, more bricks, more bricks.”

Jackie Winsor, #2 Copper (detail), 1976, Wood and copper, 34 1/2 x 51 x 51 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased, by exchange, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Raymond C. Firestone
Jackie Winsor, #2 Copper (detail), 1976, Wood and copper, 34 1/2 x 51 x 51 in. Collection of the Akron Art Museum, Purchased, by exchange, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Raymond C. Firestone

Winsor introduced winding, a handiwork traditionally associated with soft, domestic materials such as yarn, to rough construction materials that are typically associated with masculinity. The result is a union of masculine and feminine sensibilities. Her slow and meticulous fabrication process is integral to the meaning of the finished works; labor imbues the sculpture with the memory of her physical actions. With her emphasis on the physical qualities and metaphorical associations of her materials, Winsor shares a kinship with many artists participating in Heavy Metal, on display in the Isroff Gallery.

Archival photo of #2 Copper installation in the Akron Art Museum gallery

Weighing approximately 2,000 pounds (or one ton), #2 Copper is a challenging artwork to install. First, a forklift or heavy-duty pallet jack is used to move the sculpture on a pallet to its desired location in the gallery. Exhibition technicians then slide three padded braces with a U-shaped key through the interior legs of the sculpture. Without the additional support, #2 Copper would collapse under its own weight. The sculpture is then lifted with a chain hoist and gantry. The pallet is removed from underneath and the artwork is lowered to the floor.

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Explore El Anatsui’s Dzesi II

Look closely at Dzesi II from 2006 by Emmanuel Kwami  Anatsui. (Purchased, by exchange, with funds from Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Reed II, 2006.25).

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Paint without a Brush

What do you need? Compile as many non-paintbrush tools as you can. Add paper, watercolors, and water. You can also compile as many non-paper surfaces to paint on. Add brushes, watercolors, and water.

Try this? Painting without a brush can help you explore abstract painting. You can get a better feel for pattern and texture.

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Try This: Abstract Sculptures

Challenge yourself to turn regular household materials into a sculpture. Make something you find beautiful.

What do you need? Pick just one media, like a plastic folder.

Try this? Use your imagination to manipulate it to create a 3-D form. Or, put together only two forms, like paper straws and pipe cleaners. As you work, think about how your sculpture looks from all angles. Pick up your sculpture so you look at the forms from a different angle.

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Try This: Animal Collages

Animals are a perennial source of inspiration. While drawing is one way to depict creatures, collage or sculpture can expand your creativity.

What do you need? Scissors, glue, paper, and/or cardboard.

Try this? Cut shapes from paper and/or cardboard. Challenge yourself to create an abstracted figure from these pieces. Glue your shapes onto a background. You can add a few details with a marker at the end.

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Try This: Alternative Books

Bookmaking can be easy. Handmade books are perfect for pocket sketchbooks.

Try This? This book is one of the easiest books to make. You need paper, scissors, and yarn. You can use a ruler to make you work neat and even.

As with most books, you trim the pages to size, prepare for binding, and then bind the pages together.

You can add panache to your books by using interesting colors for the yarn binding, for the cover, and for the paper.

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