Up-Close Look
By Melinda L. Lucas
Members of the Old Jail Art Center will get an up-close look at three new exhibits during a dinner reception on Saturday, Sept. 17, with the galleries open to the public during regular museum hours.
The staff at Old Jail Art Center has been busy preparing for the weekend’s opening.
The opening will start with refreshments, viewing, and conversation on Saturday evening from 7:00 to 7:45 p.m. for OJAC members, with introductions and then dinner at 8:00 p.m.
Fall Features
Artists whose works are being exhibited starting Sept. 17 are Francesca Fuchs: Francesca Fuchs at The Suburban at the OJAC, Anselm Kiefer: Asche für Paul Celan, and Shelby David Meier: Almost Everything and More.
The exhibits by Fuchs and Meier will be display until Jan. 28, while Kiefer’s 13-foot sculpture will be in place until May 20, 2023.
Francesca Fuchs
at The Suburban
at the OJAC
For her exhibition at the Old Jail, Houston artist Francesca Fuchs focused on works in the OJAC’s permanent collection. Perusing some 2,300 digital images on the museum’s online database, Fuchs sought other artists’ works that inspired her.
The exhibition title is a reference to a past exhibition of Fuchs’ work at The Suburban in Illinois. The artist “re-creates” and references that particular exhibition creating conversations between a suburban space near Chicago and a rural space in west Texas. Simultaneously, relationships echo throughout the entire exhibition as a larger conversation occurs between her paintings of paintings and paintings of objects within the OJAC galleries.
Anselm Kiefer:
Asche für Paul Celan
In Asche für Paul Celan, Anselm Kiefer creates a dialogue with the work of Paul Celan, the Holocaust survivor and great German-language poet, who has influenced the artist’s output since adolescence. Celan experienced the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, having been forced to work at one and having lost his parents at another.
On loan from the TIA Collection in Santa Fe, NM, Kiefer’s subtext imbued sculpture features a 13-foot representation of a German U-boat constructed of lead as its central element. The large boat is pinned motionless to the floor by a stack of immense books, also of lead, surrounded by concrete rubble.
Shelby David Meier: Almost Everything and More
In the ongoing Cell Series of Exhibitions, artist Shelby David Meier’s project, spread over the two upstairs rooms of the original part of the Old Jail, is entitled “Almost Everything and More.”
While working as an art handler, Meier began to reconsider works of art as they were in storage and transit, not on display in any venue. For Meier, “the materiality and agency of objects took on a new meaning when the work became more about logistics and budgets.”
For his Cell Series installation, Meier extracts from the “storage” of his work, recontextualizing the objects within the jail cells of the 1877 structure.
For more information or to become an OJAC member, call 325-762-2269 or visit theojac.org.
