Artist Marc Swanson to Explore His Work and Its Impact, Nov. 5 & 6
October 30, 2015
Ten years after DePauw University acquired and displayed Fits and Starts, a work by Mark Swanson, the artist will visit campus as the inaugural Ukrop Visiting Artist, November 5-6.
On Thursday, Nov. 5, at 4:15 p.m., Swanson will present a lecture about his work. At the same time on the following day, a student-made film, A Deer Diary, will be screened, followed by a question-and-answer session with the artist. Both free events will take place in the auditorium of DePauw's Richard E. Peeler Art Center.
Fits and Starts is a life-size sculpture of a deer in mid-leap that is entirely encrusted in rhinestone crystals, a visually dazzling medium that alludes to themes of artifice, seduction, desire, exoticism and fantasy. Currently located in the second floor alcove of Peeler Art Center, the sculpture was completed in 2004 and acquired by DePauw University as a gift from the Butler Family Foundation in 2005. Within weeks of being installed, the sculpture was vandalized and removed. The incident sparked responses from faculty, staff, and students and resulted in deep conversations across campus about identity, LGBT treatment on campus, the nature of public art and public space, and the rights and responsibilities of administrators and audiences of artworks.
"The artist grew up the son of an ex-Marine and avid hunter in small-town New England," notes a biography by the Richard Gray Gallery, who represents Swanson. "He then moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s and became involved in the city's gay counterculture and club scene. He did not feel totally at home in either place, and he began making his first mature work -- the crystal-covered deer head sculptures for which he is perhaps best known -- as a way to explore, both physically and spiritually, the duality of masculine identities he was experiencing. To this day, this investigation of personal history saturates his work in all media, as does a quiet nostalgia that accompanies such a mining of the artist's past."
Swanson received his M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School at Bard College and also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Swanson's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at New York's Cornell University and the Saint Louis Art Museum, and in 2011 he had a solo show at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. He was commissioned to make the 2009 Peter Norton Family Christmas Project, and in the fall of 2010 he completed a large-scale outdoor sculptural commission for the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City.
Marc Swanson's visit is made possible by the Ted and Katie Blair Ukrop Visiting Artist Fund and the Department of Art and Art History at DePauw.
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