July 2008

Janice Driesbach,

Director and CEO

We’ve had a terrific summer at The Dayton Art Institute and I have been enjoying the activity that comes with welcoming children into our classrooms for lively Summer Art Camp experiences.

As well a monumental new work now greets visitors at our Rotunda entrance. Helter Skelter I, a shimmering assemblage by California artist Mark Bradford (b. 1961), speaks to both a sense of place and to the varied stimuli that bombard us daily. In its distinctive construction, it is characteristic of the compositions that have earned Bradford international renown. A monumental canvas, over 35’ in length, Helter Skelter I is comprised of advertisements and merchant posters that Bradford collected from his South Los Angeles neighborhood, then soaked and glued together. He proceeded to outline areas of text with twine and cover over the resulting surface. Bradford then used a sander to reveal areas that were obscured, to evoke “conditions that are going on at that particular moment at that particular location.” Among the artistic sources Mark Bradford references in his work reflecting contemporary experience are cartography, printmaking, and the gestural marks of Abstract Expressionist painting.

We are also welcoming Will South as The Dayton Art Institute’s new chief curator. Will, who comes to Dayton from the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, is the author of many impressive publications. While he is an authority on late 19th- and early 20th-century American art, his interests are wide-ranging. He has organized exhibitions on American modernist Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Japanese prints, among other subjects. I have been particularly impressed by Will’s ability to communicate his enthusiasm for and insights on art to a wide variety of audiences, as well as by the perspectives he brings to his subject as an artist himself. We will be featuring Will as the speaker at our Members’ opening for our upcoming special exhibition, Children in American Art, and I encourage you to attend his talk and introduce yourself to him at the reception that follows or on another occasion this fall.

Best wishes,
Jan