Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Flow, Sharon L. Kennedy

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Symbolizing purity, sustenance, tranquility, power, movement, and continuity, water is a source of life as well as destruction and death. Its surface serves as a metaphor for self-reflection and contemplation. It flows over cultural and physical boundaries. Water is indispensable to human survival, yet many take it for granted. We pollute it, misuse it, and fight over it. It is easily accessible to some while nearly out of reach to others. Flow explores the theme of water as subject and symbol, natural wonder, recreational resource, and environmental concern.

Artists with an affinity toward nature, especially landscape painters, chose water as …

Metaphors Of The Heart, Sharon L. Kennedy

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

The images in Metaphors of the Heart are the creations of impassioned photographer Luis Gonzalez Palma. The Mayan and Mestizo subjects of Palma's portraits radiate beauty and spiritual strength and at the same time an intense sorrow that tugs at the heartstrings. His photographs of empty rooms are lonely yet elegantly dignified spaces. For the viewer, the emotional connection is immediate.

Palma's life in Latin America, a place rich in cultural heritage and political struggles, and his Catholic upbringing might explain his desire and perhaps also his need to express these dualities in his photographs. Palma was born in Guatemala …

The Purpose Of Labor, Robert Silberman

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

For Gail Kendall, in decoration there is delight. No subscriber to the modernist dogma expressed by the architect Alfred Loos - that "ornament is crime"Kendall covers surfaces with eye-opening designs. Instead of the streamlined forms and unadorned austerity of high modernism, Kendall complements subtle washes or spots of color and delicate linear tracings with an unrelenting dot mania and frequent use of gold. The dots, sometimes only tiny specks, enliven the surfaces while demonstrating the expressive possibilities of even the simplest mark. The gold, far from indicating kitsch luxury, offers a reminder of the unique visual quality of gold's magical, …