65th art of the northeast

June 6 - July 26, 2015

THE CURATORS:

Download the digital catalogue

_Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam founded and oversee two artist project spaces in the Midwest: The Suburban (est. 1999) in Oak Park Il and the Poor Farm (Est. 2009) in rural Northeast Wisconsin. Killam is an Associate Professor of Art at College of DuPage and Grabner is a Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Michelle Grabner also co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

A note from the curators:

Contemporary art is shaped by an ever-widening orbit of ideas, materials and context. The lines that once demarcated a hierarchical separation between the crafts and the fine arts, between regional locations and cultural centers are negligible. This is based on the speed and circulation of information, especially the jpeg. The result is the collapse of traditional boundaries yielding networked systems of engagement and complex forms of art-making; Moreover creating vast and diverse audiences.

The work submitted to the 65th Annual Art of the Northeast Exhibition reflects the multitudinous contours of contemporary art. In an effort to slow down and to award close and prolong viewing, much of the work that we enthusiastically gravitated to continues Modernism’s interest in formal abstraction and material exploration. Yet storytelling, the aesthetic of wonder (including observations of the natural world), and Pop and vernacular motifs are also powerfully represented in our juried endeavor.

In our selection, one can identify a privileging of foundational forms. Abstraction and elemental vocabulary is the basis of all forms of knowledge. It was a great delight for us to observe the many ways artists employ primary language as a means to achieve complexity in idea and form. Because it is said that we are living in an age of distraction, attention is an exceedingly valued human state. That is the quality we attempted to identify in the work we selected from the many extraordinary submissions. We were looking for work that represented an ethics of attention that reflects our cultural time.
—Michell Grabner and Brad Killam, May 2015

about the exhibition:

Begun in 1949 as the "New England Exhibition," the competition was founded by Silvermine Guild Members Miriam Brody and Revington Arthur to showcase the art of the region. Over the years, the exhibit has presented works by emerging and under-known artists, giving them a platform to reach a much larger audience than ever before.

Utilizing all of our galleries, AoNE is a prestigious and popular annual exhibition, and a focal point of the Center's calendar year. In 2014, artists from Washington. D.C to Maine have submitted over 500 entries. The winner receives a top prize of $3,000 and a solo exhibition at Silvermine Arts Center.

Well-known curators of AoNE have included art critics, artists, curators and directors representing major museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, The New Museum and the Whitney Museum.

Thank you to our sponsors:

The Silvermine Arts Center acknowledges, with gratitude, the following corporate sponsors for their support of the arts and for their contributions to this exhibition.

Andy and Marsha Glazer

MEDIA SPONSORS: