Current Exhibits

Paul Harris: Bronzes and Drawings
Constructed Wood Sculpture

When: Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Jacquelin Pilar Contemporary Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., June 13, 4:15 pm

Paul Harris is a sculptor of vision – he is able to transform his life experience into provocative works of art arising from a sense of concentrated yearning. His language is that of form born of the unconscious reservoir of personal experience but it is a language that shares with music the magical moment of silence. In his writing, Harris says, “…forms must unite in a sculpture which has something to say. Sculpture is a form of mime; it must speak without words. Sculpture must engage, arouse, disturb, and irritate some tiny particle within us that nothing else touches. An intellectual response is grey and cold and unacceptable. But when was the last time a sculpture caused us to weep as we might in a theater? A collection of beautiful forms is not enough. Forms must cry out about our loneliness, our desperations, our delights. Sculpture must be slow and fast, moody and spirited. Sculpture must speak and be mute.”

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Kathryn Metz: Land and Light
Paintings and Woodcut Prints

When: Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Fig Garden Village Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., June 13, 2:45 pm

Kathryn Metz, Professor Emerita of Art at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is an accomplished artist whose work has been collected by such prestigious institutions as the New York Public Library, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chamaliers, France, and the Grunwald Graphic Arts Foundation in Los Angeles. The Museum’s current exhibition, Kathryn Metz: Land and Light, explores the poetic relationship between painting and the natural landscape permeated with light. Her work explores fleeting impressions of color and light much as the Impressionist French painters of the 19th century did as they used the research of Eugène Chevreul to achieve a more exact representation of color and tone.

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Bruce Haley: Environmental Apocalypse
Photographs from the Field

When: Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Duncan Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., June 13, 3:30 pm

Each of the Bruce Haley images included in the current exhibition was photographed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the last days of 1991. The majority of these post-communist photographs were taken in Romania, not only of the devastated landscape, but also of the Roma people who wander upon the land as they have done for centuries. In their totality, the photographs comprise a gritty, impressionistic visual diary of an impoverished region. Sometimes shot from the window of a train or bus, or while wandering from place to place, Haley has given us a sense of the aftermath of war and the wreckage of a crumbled empire.

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Patrick Percy: Listening to a Thread
Paintings and Drawings

When: Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Hallowell Gallery

There is a quiet elegance and stark beauty in Patrick Percy’s exhibition of incongruent images of a mythic and endangered landscape. As disquieting as the silent spring Rachel Carson wrote of in 1962, Percy’s canvas panels present a world of dramatic ambiguity alluding to our endangered planet. The work can be seen as a cautionary ecological drama drawn from the kind of illogic found in man’s fragmented and fleeting dream life. These are enigmatic paintings of vast arid landscapes with vestiges of societal disasters – where dazed figures emerge from some kind of cataclysm, leaving man to wander on a destroyed and barren land. Percy has chosen imagery that is intentionally ambiguous and therefore provocative. Seemingly offering evidence, stories are suggested that pose questions about our selves, our society, our species and our world – these paintings challenge one to question what kind of survival we may hope for in the very civilization we have created upon the earth.

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Six by Six: Tuesday by Tuesday
Watercolors from the Central Valley

When: Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Lobby and Concourse Gallery
Panel Discussion: Fri., June 13, 2:00 pm, Bonner Auditorium

Fresno artist Carol Tikijian was struck by the passion of Hiler's book and was particularly interested in Saroyan's introduction to "Why Abstract?" Challenged by the advent of the 100th year of Saroyan's birth, paired with an invitation from the Fresno Art Museum to create an installation honoring Saroyan's life work, Tikijian's response was to follow her ongoing examination of the black and white dotted line that she has used repeatedly in her art over the last ten years. The artist has used these dots to represent the pathway of a life or an idea - here was an opportunity to use her dots to follow Saroyan's pathway.

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The Landscapes of Henri Rivière
Selections from the Elisabeth Dean Collection of French Prints

When: Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Moradian Gallery of French Art
Conversation with the Collector: Thurs., June 19, 12:00 noon

Elisabeth Dean has selected twenty-two woodcuts, lithographs and etchings of the French landscape drawn from her impressive collection of Henri Rivière prints. It is an enchanting exhibition of work completed during a transitional period of political, social and scientific movements, a time when artistic and intellectual ideas ushered in a new era of modernism in which art began to explore the subtleties of individual perception. It was a time when many artists of the nineteenth century experimented with new ideas and techniques, when the world opened to ideas of democracy and equality casting aside ethnocentric points of view. Artists, particularly the Impressionists, were struck by the way in which space and form was treated in Japanese art, and they began to apply this new inspiration to their own work. Printmaking, which once had been viewed as a means for reproduction or as a way to make social and political commentary, began to be seen as a distinct and separate art form – serious artists began to view etchings and lithographs as equal alternatives to painting.

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Exhibits Underwriters

We appreciate the generosity of the following organizations and individuals for sponsoring the Winter Exhibitions at FAM:

  • James and Coke Hallowell
  • Dumont Printing
  • Electric Motor Shop
  • Bonner Family Foundation
  • Women's League
  • Harriett R. Stratton Trust
  • Mrs. Jane Cleave