In the last of our 12 for 12 series celebrating Columbus’ Bicentennial we celebrate Alice Schille.

Acknowledging the contributions of one of Ohio’s most important Impressionists, Alice Schille was a pioneer in the art world. The Columbus native’s talent and drive led her to become one of the few women of her time to make a living as an artist.  Some of her finest works focus on her extraordinary fluency in watercolor and positions her alongside her peers in the development of Modernism and the watercolor movement.

American painters such as Schille reinvented Impressionist painting, creating works with a distinctly American stamp.

“At the turn of the century, Impressionism was the style in this country.  However, we never just copied the French, but each artist gave the style his or her particular American ‘twang,’ “ says Melissa Wolfe, our Curator of American Art.

(Connie (Constance Smith), by Alice Schille. Museum Purchase)

In the next in our 12 for 12 series highlighting local artists for the Columbus Bicentennial, we feature James Roy Hopkins and Edna Boies.

Ohio born James Roy Hopkins (1877-1969) met his future wife Edna Boies (1872-1937) while they both were students at the Art Academy of Cincinnati.  James was primarily a painter and Edna quickly became an accomplished printmaker, fascinated with 19^th century Japanese woodblock prints.  The couple married in 1904 following a two year stint James had made in Paris to study at the Académie Colarossi.  During their honeymoon, they had a protracted visit to Japan where Edna further perfected her woodblock printmaking techniques.  James and Edna settled in Paris as did many American artists of the day only to return home to Cincinnati, Ohio when World War I broke out.  James taught at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and Edna successfully continued her career making floral woodblock prints.

The summer of 1915 was pivotal for both artists.  Edna visited artist friends who were living and working in Provincetown, Massachusetts where she began using the so-called “white line” method of making woodblock prints that was special to a small group of artists there. These prints were less laborious to produce than previous methods and their look tended to reflect the Modernist aesthetic that was becoming widespread in American art.  The Columbus Museum of Art’s recently acquired Garden Flowers is a prime example of her floral work likely made in Provincetown but in the traditional multi-block method.   James, on the other hand, visited Cumberland Falls, Kentucky, a rural resort fashionable among Cincinnati society, and was captivated by the hand-working Appalachian people who worked at the local Brunson Inn.  One character in particular, Andy Vanover—and later other members of his clan—was a frequent sitter for James’s paintings.  In subsequent summers, Edna would join James in Cumberland Falls and she too produced some marvelous woodblock prints, images of rural Appalachia that have become as highly prized and her husband’s oil paintings of similar subjects.

Edna and James both led productive and successful careers.  Edna traveled extensively between Provincetown, Paris, New York, and Columbus, where James had been appointed artist in residence at the Ohio State University.  He soon was given the position of chairman of OSU’s art department.  Although they worked in different media and styles—Edna in a Modernist style, James in an Impressionist—they valued each other’s work and maintained a loving and mutually supporting relationship throughout their lives.

(Edna Boies Hopkins, Garden Flowers, c. 1915, Color woodcut,
Museum Purchase Howald Fund)

In the next in our 12 for 12 Columbus Bicentennial series honoring Columbus artists from our permanent collection, we highlight photographer Kojo Kamau.

Throughout his life, Kojo Kamau has made major contributions to the vitality of the arts in Columbus. His photographs chronicle Columbus not only as his home, but also as a cultural, artistic, and political crossroads. For five decades, his work has detailed a changing landscape, acknowledging the troubled political and social history of African Americans, but always through a positive lens. Community, travels, portraits of artists and musicians, both local and international, and social issues are constant themes. Kojo was greatly inspired by Elijah Pierce, whom he photographed numerous times (as you can see in the above picture). In addition to his photographic work, Kojo has been an essential, avid activist and supporter of the arts. In 1979 he and his late wife, Mary Ann Williams, founded Art for Community Expression (ACE), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the work of African-American artists.

Born Robert Jones in 1939, in 1970 he changed his name to Kojo Kamau, which means “unconquerable quiet one” in Yoruba, one of the many languages spoken in West Africa. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology, The Ohio State University, and the Columbus College of Art and Design to study photography. From 1964 until 1994 Kojo was the chief photographer for The Ohio State University College of Medicine. Currently he teaches photography at Columbus State Community College.

(Above: Pierce Painting a Carving in His Shop by Kojo Kamau from the Columbus Museum of Art permanent collection).

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

For the next in our 12 for 12 Columbus Bicentennial series honoring Columbus artists from our permanent collection, we highlight OSU graduate, teacher and Pop Art sensation Roy Lichtenstein.

Roy Lichtenstein was a well-renowned American painter, sculptor and printmaker whose work was heavily influenced by advertising and comics. Lichtenstein attended the Ohio State University earning his BFA in 1951, then set off for Cleveland to work as an art teacher. By the early 1960s Lichtenstein gave up teaching to paint full-time and, WHAM!, become a defining member of the Pop Art Movement.

Lichtenstein drew from comic book themes such as passion, romance, science-fiction, violence and war, and used commercial art methods to create his signature Ben-day dot paintings. Lichtenstein also explored a a variety of historical art periods and transformed other artist’s works such as Pablo Picasso, Gilbert Stuart and Claude Monet. “These rank among the best experiments by any artist in blurring the distinction between high and low art. Lichtenstein is one of the few artists able to be ironic and exuberant at the same time, and nowhere do you feel this more than in his paintings that tweak the history of art,” said Paul Goldberger in Vanity Fair.  Currently The Art Institute of Chicago has a large Lichtenstein retrospective consisting of about 160 of Lichtenstein’s work on display. 

Lichtenstein’s sculpture Brushstrokes in Flight welcomes visitors to Columbus at Port Columbus International Airport.

Interesting Lichtenstein Facts:
•    Lichtenstein used to hide cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny, in some of his early paintings.
•    In 1944, Lichtenstein designed a painting for the hull of the United States entry in the America’s Cup yacht race

(Above: Roy Lichtenstein, Modern Head #2 from the CMA permanent collection.)

Columbus native Emerson Burkhart believed all the world could be painted in Columbus and once declared, “I don’t need to go anywhere, it’s all here.” Burkhart is the next in our 12 for 12 series, our Columbus Bicentennial series highlighting Columbus artists from the Columbus Museum of Art permanent collection.

Burkhart was a dedicated painter of the American Scene, a school of artists from the Midwest in 1930s and 1940s whose league also included Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry. Burkhart worked on murals for the Works Progress Administration including murals on display at the Greater Columbus Convention Center and OSU’s Stillman Hall.

“To come upon a painting by Burkhart, even in so fine a collection as that of the Columbus Museum of Art, is to feel that one has stumbled on something very special that others have missed,” CMA Folk Art Curator Michael Hall says in his book Emerson Burkhart: An Ohio Painter’s Song of Himself.

In this piece by Emerson Burkhart, The Confused Process of Becoming (Portrait of Roman Johnson), Burkhart painted fifty-four slashes on the back of the canvas to denote each session he worked on the painting.

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

In the next of our 12 for 12 series in celebration of the Columbus Bicentennial, we feature Columbus photographer Abdi Roble.

Abdi Roble was born in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1964 and immigrated to the United States in 1989, first to Washington, DC and a year later to Columbus, Ohio. Self-taught in photography, Roble has been engaged for many years in the Somali Documentary Project, an ambitious mission he founded to create a visual archive of Somali populations outside of their native country. He has traveled to Dadaab, Kenya, to photograph life in the refugee camps, capturing the ethos of the diaspora from an intimate perspective. Working under unpredictable conditions, with available light and a hand-held camera, Roble has been building a photographic record of and for a globally dispersed people.

Roble has had several exhibitions in Columbus including shows at the MPX Gallery the Ohio Art Council’s Riffe Gallery. His one-person presentation at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2007, entitled Stories of the Somali Diaspora, also traveled to the Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine; the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota. All of the venues for Stories of the Somali Diaspora have significant Somali populations. In 2008, The Somali Diaspora: A Journey Away by Roble and Doug Rutledge was published by the University of Minnesota Press.

(Photo by Abdi Roble, First Day of School Portland Maine. From Columbus Museum of Art permanent collection).

Art Speaks. Join the Conversation.

In the next of our 12 for 12 series in celebration of the Columbus Bicentennial, we feature native Columbus glass artist Christopher Ries.

While bow fishing as a child in Little Darby Creek, glass artist Christopher Ries was fascinated by the optical illusions created by light underwater. Ever since, Ries has been seeking to share his discoveries into the mystery of light as revealed through the medium of glass. Guided by this “inner necessity,” a phrase borrowed from Wassily Kandinsky, Ries sought material of increasing optical purity for his sculptures. Having found a lead crystal that transmits 99.8 percent of the light that strikes it, Ries has worked to create larger and more ambitious pieces.

Clearly Ries takes pride in his ability to create monumental pieces from cast crystal blocks. But there is a more profound reason for his fascination with scale. With a grander, more ambitious scale, the viewer can more readlily “enter” the piece and can set up an “I-Thou” relationship with it, eliciting the desired aesthetic and spiritual experience. Through the reflective power of glass, Ries combines his love of nature with his technology skills to create breathtakingly beautiful, deceptively simple, yet complex forms that pull the viewer into an intimate world of images that dance and soar within the sculpture.

Ries grew up on a farm in Central Ohio. He attended OSU and earned a BFA in ceramics and blown glass works, before he went on to earn his MFA at the University of Wisconsin where he assisted Harvey Littleton, the founder of the American Studio glass movement. Ries’ works have been displayed around the world. His major glass piece, Opus, greets travelers at Port Columbus International Airport as they are flying out or coming home. Currently Ries serves as the artist in residency for Schott Glass Technologies in Pennsylvania.

Ries’ work will be part of our upcoming exhibition Celebrating Glass: The 50th Anniversary of the American Studio Glass Movement, which opens at Columbus Museum of Art on May 11, 2012.

Above image: Lotus by Christopher Ries, 1987.

In the next in our “12 for 12″ series, our Columbus Bicentennial initiative highlighting Columbus artists from CMA’s permanent collection, we feature Aminah Robinson.

For more than sixty years, Columbus artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson has been creating art inspired by the African concept of Sankofa, understanding the past in order to go forward. Her work reflects the drawing, paper-making, and needlework traditions that she learned from her parents and the training she received in art school. Aminah creates sculpture, large complex work she calls RagGonNons, rag paintings, paintings on cloth, drawings, and books about her family and community, African-American history, her travels, and the stories she has been told by her elders. Her goal is to inspire others to research and document the history of their families and communities and to “pass them on” to the next generation.

When she was asked to illustrate Evelyn Coleman’s manuscript for To Be A Drum, Aminah reflected, “I was touched deeply. I was transported to a past, present, and future that blended together like the sound of beating drums. I saw Africa, the Middle Passage, slavery, the civil-rights struggle, black artists, teachers, and heroes, and always, the children, looking toward tomorrow.” In 2002, the Columbus Museum of Art organized Symphonic Poem, a retrospective exhibition of her work that traveled throughout the United States. In 2004, Aminah was awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, given to individuals, “who have shown extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”  In 2008, the Museum launched Aminah’s World, where visitors can learn about Aminah and her work and create their own online art inspired by the artist.  CMA continues to feature the unique work of this artist through continuing exhibitions including 2007′s Along Water Street and our 2011 exhibition Street Talk and Spiritual Matters.

Aminah Robinson Columbus Walking Tour
In much of her art, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson documents the history of the Columbus neighborhoods where she has lived and worked for all of her life. Take a walking tour of the Discovery District where you can see Robinson’s works in the Columbus Museum of Art permanent collection, the State Auto Insurance Garage, and the main staircase of the Columbus Metropolitan Library.

State Auto Garage, Washington Street, just east of CMA
Aminah wrote and illustrated A Street Called Home, an accordion-style book, about the Mt. Vernon Avenue neighborhood where she grew up. In 2005, a group of students from the Columbus College of Art and Design painted this mural based on the art in the book. Look for a school-age Aminah drawing on the sidewalk alongside two artists painting on easels.

Columbus Metropolitan Library, 96 South Grant Avenue
In 1990, Aminah was asked to create a work of art for the main staircase of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. The scenes that she depicts are drawn from stories about old Columbus neighborhoods that she heard from her elders as well as from the research she conducted at the library. Look for scenes from the Sells Brothers Circus, the Ohio Theater, the Columbus Dispatch, and the neighborhood known as the Blackberry Patch.

In honor of the Columbus Bicentennial, each month throughout 2012 we will highlight a local Columbus artist from the Museum’s collection. Look for “12 for 12″ blog posts each month, plus follow us on Facebook and Twitter for interesting tidbits about the artists’ life and work. To kick things off we’re starting with George Bellows.

George Wesley Bellows (1882 – 1925) was arguably the most celebrated American painter of his generation. Born in Columbus, Ohio, he attended The Ohio State University, where he played on the varsity baseball and basketball teams. Bellows left Columbus in 1904 to study art in New York City, quickly becoming associated with the charismatic artist Robert Henri and his artistic group later characterized by the term Ashcan School. Bellows’ work exemplified Henri’s call to depict the experience of the everyday, often gritty working-class, world around him.  “It seems to me,” he wrote, “that an artist must be a spectator of life: a reverential, enthusiastic, emotional spectator, and then the great dramas of human nature will surge through his mind.”  The artist’s facile brushwork perfectly conveyed the teeming vitality and heady brashness of human and natural drama.

By his mid-twenties, Bellows had risen from art student to art luminary, winning nearly every major award in the art world, and becoming a member of the prestigious National Academy at the young age of twenty-seven. His dazzling career, however, was brief; he died tragically at the age of forty-three from a ruptured appendix. In his short professional life, Bellows created an enormous body of work that includes more than seven hundred paintings, almost two hundred editions of lithographs, and an equal number of drawings. He is celebrated equally for his seascapes, portraits, city snow scenes, and socially engaged genre, as he is for his depictions of working-class urban life. The Columbus Museum of Art has one of the largest and most important collections of works by Bellows in the world.