Monday, July 13, 2009

Ann Tanksley "Images of Zora" at Avisca Fine Art 07.24.09



Ann Tanksley
Images of Zora
An Exhibition of Prints based on the work of Zora Neale Hurston EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
July 24 - August 23, 2009

OPENING RECEPTION ARTIST TALK
Friday July 24, 6:00 pm - 10:00 pm Saturday July 25, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm


Celebrated printmaker and painter Ann Tanksley created a series of monotypes and monoprints inspired by the writings and life of Zora Neale Hurston in the late 1980's. This body of work became the subject of an exhibition that toured the country in the early 1990's.

Avisca Fine Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibit of 50-odd prints from this critically acclaimed body of work in their final showing as a suite, and to bring the long-archived prints to market.

The original series of 60-odd prints was first shown in New York City in 1991, in an exhibition titled Zora: A Visual Interpretation of Zora Neale Hurston: Prints by Ann Tanksley. The art critic Raymond Steiner described it as "one of the most visually stimulating exhibitions I've seen in some time."

Ann Tanksley discovered the work of Zora Neale Hurston in the mid 1980's, when she first read Hurston's 1937 book Their Eyes Were Watching God. Hurston, an anthropologist, playwright, poet, and novelist who was prominent during the Harlem Renaissance, died in poverty and relative obscurity in 1960. Rediscovered in recent years, she is now lauded as the intellectual and spiritual foremother to a generation of Black and women writers. Tanksley said in a 1996 New York Times interview that she "immediately fell in love with her writing." Her interest in Hurston led to her collaboration on a book that was never published, Zora: A Psychoanalytic and Artistic Interpretation of the Life and Works of Zora Neale Hurston, by psychoanalyst Dr. Hugh F. Butts. Tanksley has since been commissioned to illustrate Hurston's children's book, The Six Fools.

www.aviscafineart.com

No comments: