Regional Art
•
Jay Bolotin
• Sam Gilliam
The University of Kentucky Art Museum has a long-standing commitment to collecting
and exhibiting works by regional artists. Our survey of art made prior to
1980 contains works by painters passing through the state, such as Edward
Troye and George Healy, as well as native-born artists who achieved both regional
and national prominence, from Hattie Hutchcraft Hill and Marvin and Morgan
Smith to Norris Embry and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. The museum’s collection
embraces a diversity of styles and approaches, ranging in work by the self-taught
Edgar Tolson to the academic master Frank Duveneck. The collection also includes
landmark examples by contemporary artists of the region, including current
and former University of Kentucky faculty members Robert Tharsing, Arturo
Alonzo Sandoval, Deborah Frederick, Marilyn Hamann, and John Tuska, as well
as other nationally acclaimed artists with Kentucky ties, including Jane Burch
Cochran, Jay Bolotin, Daniel Ludwig, Sheldon Tapley, Linda Butler, and Sam
Gilliam.
JAY BOLOTIN American, born 1949
Hopper and Bernice, 1982
Cast resin with acrylic, 57¾ x 50 11/16 x 8¼"
University of Kentucky Art Museum. Gift of Judy Humble. 1994.12
Known for his work as both a visual and performing artist, Kentucky native
Jay Bolotin has combined his twin pursuits in art and music in highly original
theatrical productions, such as The Hidden Boy, whose American premiere
was in New York City’s City Center Theater, and the forthcoming Limbus:
A Mechanical Opera, which will incorporate human actors and the artist’s
giant mechanical sculptures. In his print portfolios, Bolotin draws inspiration
from literary sources, such as William Blake’s work which has a close
affinity to Bolotin’s own complex and ambiguous narratives. Bernice
and Hopper are two of Bolotin’s stock characters who, in sculptures
and reliefs, act out various roles and personal dramas. According to the artist,
Hopper’s name means ‘to hop,’ as in to move or to change,
and that the masks worn by his figures are indicative of the mutability of
‘truth.’
The University of Kentucky
Art Museum also has an earlier version of Bolotin’s Hopper and Bernice
(1996.9) and his woodcut series A Mortal Pilgramage (1983.17)
SAM GILLIAM American, born 1933
Glisten, 1972
Acrylic on canvas, 27 x 73 15/16 x 3"
University of Kentucky Art Museum. Gift of Hugh C. Evans. 1995.3
One of the country’s best known African-American artists,
Gilliam has become internationally recognized for works that explore new forms
of expression and new materials. Born in Tupelo, Mississippi, he moved with
his family to Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942. After completing his undergraduate
and graduate studies at the University of Louisville, he started his career
as a participant in the Washington Color Field movement of the mid-to-late
1960s. He became known for three-dimensional paintings -- painted canvases
that were draped and suspended off the wall and shaped canvases with thick
layers of paint. Gilliam’s large-scale paintings are intended to activate
the viewers’ visual and physical space by existing both on and off the
wall. Glisten, an early work that helped establish Gilliam’s reputation,
charts the artist’s commitment to explore the creative process. Reflecting
the influence of Jackson Pollock’s poured paintings and Helen Frankenthaler’s
stained canvases, Gilliam’s own work is a fusion of all-over surface
texture and broad expanses of luminous color.
