Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Tuesday, January 13, 2015 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC.

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery celebrates the opening of American Abstract Artists: AAA 75th Anniversary Print Portfolio with a reception on Thursday, January 15, from 5 to 7 pm in Cohen Memorial Hall on the Peabody campus. The exhibit, on view through February 27, highlights the American Abstract Artists group (AAA) that was founded in New York City in 1936 at a time when abstract art was not met with great acclaim.

The exhibition features original works created for this project, all digital prints, and marks a willingness to endorse progressive technologies and to advance an artistic tradition. The resulting portfolio and exhibit reflect an awareness of changing artistic sensibilities in a contemporary and evolving digital era.

The AAA group has produced more than 120 exhibitions in museums and galleries and has print portfolios in major collections worldwide, including the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery. Previous AAA print portfolios (1937, 1987, and 1997) were created using more traditional forms of printmaking such as lithography and other plate-based printing methods. The current president of AAA, Daniel G. Hill, explains that “the digital process enabled a wide variety of approaches that include abstract and documentary photography, scanning of flat-work made expressly for the project, digital compositing, and image manipulation, as well as the use of vector-based software and hand-coded algorithms.” Each print is original and has been individually signed, numbered, and dated by the artist.

Organized by the Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, the exhibit is accompanied by a catalogue that includes an introduction by Robert Storr, a member of AAA, painter, curator, critic and dean of the Yale School of Art. The Vanderbilt presentation is made possible, in part, by the Ewers Gift for Fine Art.

Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11 am to 4 pm, and Saturday and Sunday, 1 to 5 pm. Please note that the gallery will be closed on Monday, January 19, for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Free and open to the public, the Fine Arts Gallery is housed in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.

For more information, call the gallery (615.322.0605) or the curator’s office (615.343.1702); or visit vanderbilt.edu/gallery.