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Eleanor Dickinson: A Retrospective
August 26, 1995 to October 22, 1995
Throughout Eleanor Dickinson's work, the human form is seen as a reflection of the soul. Walter Hopps, former director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, has called Dickinson "one of the country's most powerful artists committed to figure drawing." The current exhibition presents works from three of Eleanor's most successful exhibitions. All the work has been done on black velvet, one of the most vilified media in art. Originally used out of respect for the people of the Appalachians whose revival services she captured on paper, audiotape, and videotape, Eleanor discovered the velvet's jet black intensity to be a dramatically expressive component in the compositions.
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The four works from Revival! were done in the late 1970s and early 1980s and movingly reflect Eleanor's interest in capturing the intensity and prayerful spirit of the Southern Revival. The four works from Mark of the Beast were done in the mid-1980s and place human suffering within the context of the belief in the Apocalyptic conflict between good and evil.
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The eighteen paintings from the Crucifixions series represent the artist's collaborative work with her subjects from the mid-1980s to the present. These subjects are not mere models; rather, they are people Eleanor has known and for whom the Crucifixion has significance, because they are believers or because they have experienced their own time of suffering, or both.
Inspired by the dramatic Baroque style pioneered by the 17th-century Italian painter Caravaggio, Dickinson employs extreme foreshortening and tenebrism (high contrast of light and shade, enhanced in this case by the use of black velvet as a medium), to place us at the foot of the cross of each of these people, elevating commonplace suffering to a monumental scale.
Eleanor Dickinson was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1931. For the past four decades she has lived in San Francisco; since 1971 she has been on the faculty of the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. She has had twenty-four solo exhibitions nationwide at such institutions as the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., Houston's Menil Collection, the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco's De Young Museum, the J.B. Speed Museum in Louisville, and the Tennessee State Museum. In 1994, Dickinson was honored by the National Women's Caucus for Art (the major organization of women artists, curators, and art historians) with the President's Award for her contributions to the women's movement and to the arts.
As a Southern Baptist, I was raised to believe that every person carried their own cross through life. I came to recognize that the bodily posture of crucifixion with arms outstretched was also the posture of praise and worship . . . This series of crucifixions is a collaboration between the subjects and the artist showing this mixture of pain and praise. | Eleanor Dickinson
above:
Installation view of Eleanor Dickinson: A Retrospective at MOCRA, 1995. Photo by Jeffrey Vaughn.
Exhibition |
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Bernard Maisner: The Hourglass and the Spiral |
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre |
Erika Diettes: Sudarios |
Regina DeLuise: Vast Bhutan 鈥 Images from the Phenomenal World |
Calligraphic Art of Salma Arastu |
Thresholds: MOCRA at 20 - Part Two, The Second Decade |
Rebecca Niederlander: Axis Mundi |
Jordan Eagles: BLOOD / SPIRIT |
Thresholds: MOCRA at 20 - Part One, The First Decade |
Archie Granot: The Papercut Haggadah |
A Tribute to Frederick J. Brown |
Patrick Graham: Thirty Years 鈥 The Silence Becomes the Painting |
Adrian Kellard: The Learned Art of Compassion |
Good Friday: The Suffering Christ in Contemporary Art |
James Rosen: The Artist and the Capable Observer |
MOCRA at Fifteen: Good Friday |
Michael Byron: Cosmic Tears |
Miao Xiaochun: The Last Judgment in Cyberspace |
MOCRA at Fifteen: Pursuit of the Spirit |
Oskar Fischinger: Movement and Spirit |
The Celluloid Bible: Marketing Films Inspired by Scripture |
Arshile Gorky: The Early Years 鈥 Drawings and Paintings, 1927鈥1937 |
Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds |
Junko Chodos: The Breath of Consciousness |
DoDo Jin Ming: Land and Sea |
Rito, Espejo y Ojo / Ritual, Mirror and Eye: Photography by Luis Gonz谩lez-Palma, Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Pablo Soria |
Radiant Forms in Contemporary Sacred Architecture: Richard Meier and Steven Holl |
Daniel Ramirez: Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus, an Homage to Oliver Messiaen |
Avoda: Objects of the Spirit 鈥 Ceremonial Art by Tobi Kahn |
Tony Hooker: The Greater Good 鈥 An Artist's Contemporary View of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study |
Andy Warhol: Silver Clouds, an encore presentation |
Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds: A Fortieth Anniversary Celebration |
Lewis deSoto: Paranirvana |
Robert Farber: A Retrospective, 1985鈥1995 |
Bernard Maisner: Entrance to the Scriptorium |
Tobi Kahn: Metamorphoses |
MOCRA: The First Five Years |
Steven Heilmer: Pietre Sante | Holy Stones |
Utopia Body Paint Collection and Australian Aboriginal Art from St. Louis Collections |
Manfred Stumpf: Enter Jerusalem |
Frederick J. Brown: The Life of Christ Altarpiece |
Edward Boccia: Eye of the Painter |
Consecrations Revisited |
Keith Haring: Altarpiece 鈥 The Life of Christ |
Ian Friend: The Edge of Belief 鈥 paintings, sculpture, and works on paper, 1980鈥1994 |
Eleanor Dickinson: A Retrospective |
Post-Minimalism and the Spiritual: Four Chicago Artists |
Consecrations: The Spiritual in Art in the Time of AIDS |
Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art, Part One |
Body and Soul: The Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater |
Transformations: Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre |
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre |
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre |
Georges Rouault: Miserere et Guerre |
Visible Conservation |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection: The Romero Cross |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Highlights from the MOCRA Collection |
Sanctuaries: Recovering the Holy in Contemporary Art, Part Two 鈥 Three Major Installations |
Beyond Words: Three Contemporary Artists and the Manuscript Tradition |
MOCRA: 25 |
Gary Logan: Elements |
Gratitude |
Surface to Source |
Quiet Isn't Always Peace |
Tom Kiefer: Pertenencias / Belongings |
Double Vision: Art from Jesuit University Collections |
Lesley Dill: Dream World of the Forest |
Jordan Eagles: VIRAL\VALUE |
This Road Is the Heart Opening: Selections from the MOCRA Collection |
Vicente Telles and Brandon Maldonado: Cuentos Nuevomexicanos |
Open Hands: Crafting the Spiritual |
Selections from the MOCRA Collection |