Current exhibitions: 
|
This exhibit encompasses 60 years of painting and drawings by American artist John Heliker. Heliker developed a unique and expressive artistic style during the Works Progress Administration years and continued to be a central figure in New York’s art world for over six decades. Brenau Galleries invites you to an evening celebrating the opening of this unique exhibition that charts the career of notable American artist John Heliker. Patricia Bailey, the Executive Director of the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, will give a special talk on the life and legacy of John Heliker at 6:00 p.m. in Sellars Gallery. Free and open to the public. For info call 770.534.6263. Click Here for a preview of the installation at Brenau University Galleries. |
|
 |
||
Recent exhibitions: 
|
John Heliker: The Order of Things charts the development of work by a significant American artist and surveys nearly 60 years of his artistic production. From the 1940’s until his death at the age of 91, Heliker played a vital role in the artistic and cultural life of New York City. A contemporary individualist who was never associated with any particular school, Heliker was an influential teacher. His work was regularly exhibited, widely collected, won many prizes, and he was honored with a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1968. This exhibition, curated by Asheville Art Museum’s Cole Hendrix with the cooperation of the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, offers an insight into the creative process of an artist whose career spanned seven decades of the “American Century.” Click Here for a preview of the installation at the Ashville Art Museum. |
|
|
||
|
John Heliker spent many summers at his tudio on Great Cranberry Island. He took great pleasure in island life, and felt more alive and at home on Cranberry, believing he did his best work on the island. In an essay for the exhibition catalog, Martica Sawin said about Heliker’s island work: Figures, engrossed in routine activities—shucking clams, picking berries, sitting in a sunlit field overlooking the sea—became integral to his compositions. Yet his paintings are less about figures in specific settings than they are recreations of the total sensation of a time and place. |
|
|
||
|
John Heliker’s paintings and drawings seem to me to have a natural place in our University Gallery, first of course because they open a beautifully imagined world to us the viewers; but also because their author was a beloved and generous teacher and mentor, at Columbia University for many years, at the New York Studio School, and later in the Parsons MFA program. Like the painter, the paintings are persuasive in the most unassuming and gracious way. With their streams of brushstrokes, their thin but luminous washes of color, and their gently shifting and almost interlocking vertical and horizontal planes, the paintings dance on the bedrock of Heliker’s fine drawing. The combined effects of his drawing and his color convey great lessons about the art of composing; his long life of dedication to his art, a great lesson to young artists starting out on that life. Deborah Rosenthal Professor of Fine Arts, Curator of the exhibition. |
|
|
||
|
This exhibition—the first devoted to Heliker's paintings since his death in 2000— includes 28 paintings from the 1960s through 1990s. The relatively small canvases represent many aspects of Heliker's life: views of the Maine coast with clam diggers and male bathers; still lifes of flowers and kitchen motifs; Spanish landscapes; a portrait of his friend, the painter Edwin Dickinson; self-portraits and depictions of other young artists at work in the studio. New York Times review, 6/7/2012 Click Here for a preview of the installation. |
|
|
||
 John Heliker |
This selection of over forty of the artist's early drawings includes many works never before exhibited. Curated by David A. Lewis, the exhibition originated at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas before traveling to Western Carolina University Fine Art Museum in Cullowhee, North Carolina. The exhibition is available to venues in the United States. For more information, please download the prospectus in low-resolution (.3 MB) or high-resolution (5.0 MB) format. |
|
|
||
Robert LaHotan: The Early Years |
A selection of works drawn from the artist's early years, reflecting the vitality and love of color which would mark his long career in New York, as well as the impact of the Maine landscape on the young abstract painter. |
News About Recent Fellows: |
|
