Happy International Women’s Day!
We are celebrating this important day by highlighting work by women artists from our permanent collection, as well as work on view in our upcoming exhibitions, Revelations: Recent Photography Acquisitions and Entwined: Ritual Wrapping and Binding in Contemporary Southern Art, both opening this month.
FLORENCE MCCLUNG
Florence McClung, Cypress Swamp, Caddo Lake, 1939, Oil on canvas
Florence McClung’s Cypress Swamp, Caddo Lake, from the Ogden Museum’s permanent collection, is currently on view.
McClung was a painter, printmaker and art teacher. From a young age, she studied to become a pianist, but in the early 1920s she began to study art in the Dallas studios of Texas artists C. F. (Frank) Reaugh, Frank E. Klepper, Olin H. Travis, Alexandre Hogue and Thomas M. Stell. She painted for periods in Taos, New Mexico, circa 1928-32, joining a circle that included Hogue, Mabel Dodge and Tony Luhan. Her art studies continued during this period in New York with Texas artist Martha Simkins and at Cincinnati Art Institute with Charles McCann.
Throughout her career, McClung exhibited nationally at prestigious juried shows in Texas and was awarded the Stewart Prize for Landscape for her oil painting, Angus Mine. She also served as the director of the Texas Fine Arts Association (TFAA) in 1945, and of the Southern States Art League (SSAL) in 1946 and 1947. In the 1940s and 1950s, she was an active member of Printmakers Guild, Dallas (renamed Texas Printmakers in 1952), a small group of Texas women artists and art educators who exhibited and sold their prints nationally. This unique women’s print guild was organized in reaction to the exclusion of women from Lone Star Printmakers, Dallas, a short-lived group whose existence only spanned four years from 1938 – 1942. McClung’s print, Home Front, was among the 100 prints selected by the Metropolitan Museum for a f50 gallery exhibition titled America in War. My Son, another print by McClung, was chose from a Library of Congress exhibition for the cover of a Red Cross magazine in 1944.
Florence McClung had a long, impressive career and was alert and active with gardening until she was 97 years old.
CHERYL MEDOW
Cheryl Medow, Tri-Colored Heron And a Skimmer, 2017, Courtesy of the artist and PDNB Gallery in Dallas, Texas
Cheryl Medow’s Tri-Colored Heron and a Skimmer will be on view in our upcoming exhibition, Revelations: Recent Photography Acquisitions, opening at the Museum on March 14, 2020.
In Cheryl Medow’s photographs, you’ll find both imaginary and real environments that incorporate wild birds and invite the viewer to enter the natural world. Medow creates these visual narratives through layering, using both classical and contemporary tools. With a background that combines classical training and twenty-first century tools, she uses her natural curiosity about birds to bring her photography to life. Tri-Colored Heron and a Skimmer exemplifies Medow’s combination of photographic practices.
Medow studied ceramics at the famed Chouinard Institute and received a B.A. in Art from UCLA, concentrating on life drawing with charcoal and pastels. Continuing her art education, she studied printmaking at Hand Graphics in Santa Fe, New Mexico and digital printmaking with Mac Holbert and John Paul Caponigro in Santa Barbara. She has been the recipient of several awards, the subject of numerous articles and her work in held in many private collections.
It is Medow’s hope that by embracing her hyper-real bird images, her audience will also create more space for birds living on our planet and be mindful of the fragility and beauty of life itself.
SHARON KOPRIVA
Sharon Kopriva, Earth Mother, 2015, Rope and mixed media, Collection of the artist
Sharon Kopriva’s Earth Mother will be on view in our upcoming exhibition, Entwined: Ritual Wrapping and Binding in Contemporary Southern Art, opening at the Museum on March 28, 2020.
Sharon Kopriva, a Texas native, currently works in Houston, Texas and Hope, Idaho. Her career has taken her through investigations of pre-Colombian cultures in Peru, examinations of her Catholic faith and inspirations from the spiritual forests of the beautiful Pacific Northwest.
Since her inauguration with the Fresh Paint exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in 1985, Kopriva has exhibited nationally and internationally including at The Menil Collection, Houston; in previous exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans; and The National Museum of Peru in Lima. For more than thirty years, Kopriva has combined two and three dimensional media, often with fusions of papier-mâché and found objects.
Happy International Women’s Day from the O!
References:
Foltz Fine Art Gallery, Florence McClung