Date/Time
Date(s) - April 20, 2023
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm
Location
The Republic Building
Categories No Categories
The Indiana University J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program presents an exhibition of work investigating a compatible abstract language by Eskenazi School faculty members Martha MacLeish and Malcolm Mobutu Smith. The artists have for many years been struck by formal affinities between their work, despite its disparate origins. The exhibition will showcase dimensional drawings and paintings, ceramics, and other sculptural objects. MacLeish is Program Director and Associate Professor, Creative Core, and Smith is Associate Professor, Ceramics and Director of Graduate Studies.
This lecture will be in conjunction with their exhibition Malcolm Smith and Martha MacLeish: in conversation that will run from March 13 – April 21
Malcolm Mobutu Smith is associate professor of ceramic art and director of graduate studies in the Sidney and Lois Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. He earned his MFA degree from the New York College of ceramics at Alfred University in 1996. As an undergraduate, he studied at both the Kansas City Art Institute and Penn State University where he received his BFA in ceramics in 1994. Smith’s professional activities include workshops, lectures and residencies. His works are represented by the Wexler Gallery in Philadelphia and are also held in numerous private and public collections including, New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, and Indiana State Museum.
Smith’s works, ceramics and beyond, are guided by improvisations that merge volumetric form with graphic flatness. His vessels are inspired by the intersections graffiti art, comic books and organic abstraction. Generally, his ceramics forms rely on wheel-thrown and hand-built elements, most commonly presented as abstractions of cups, bottles, and vases. In this practice he is fueled by passions for Hip Hop and Jazz as locations for invention and the unexpected. Motivated by these concerns and his own multi- cultural background, Smith’s work form combined references mashing up cues from identity politics, drawing, printmaking and 3D printing to arrive at the strange and new. His decorative objects operate as signifiers of an acculturation to the aestheticized objects reflecting his desires and imaginations.
Martha MacLeish is an associate professor and Director of the Studio Arts Program in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University, in Bloomington. She received her BFA in painting and her BA in art history from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst in 1985, and her MFA in painting from the Yale School of Art in 1988.
MacLeish has exhibited at Grizzly Grizzly Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, the Prince Street Gallery in New York, Broad Street Gallery in Athens, Georgia, and the Arc Gallery in Chicago. Most recently, MacLeish made a foray into public art with directing a mural project in Huntingburg, Indiana titled “Home is where i belong.”
The artists will give a gallery talk Thursday, April 20 at 6:30 pm.
The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm.
