EASTON — Lee Glazer, senior curator, took time to walk through the three exhibits that are up at The Academy Art Museum. The offerings are wildly different in theme and materials, but all engage the mind with their stories.
Glazer is versed in the movements and times that created these artists and loves to talk to about art.
“It is a diverse array of approaches to art making. We have the old master prints by Durer. And here is a locally based Baltimore painter Philip Koch, who you can tell if you are familiar with Edward Hopper’s work,” she said.
And Darlene Taylor has a gallery full of mixed-media portraits of Black women.
The first exhibit is “Light: Paintings by Philip Koch.” There are landscapes and architectural paintings inspired by Edward Hopper. Koch discovered Hopper’s lonely representational work in the 1970s and was so interested that he went to Hopper’s coastal residence to work.
“He went to Oberlin in the 1960s, so minimalism and conceptualism are the dominant strains in art schools. Like grids, big blocky forms. Very pared down and purely abstract. Not representational,” Glazer said. “But when he went to University of Indiana for his masters, the environment was more receptive to realism.”
In the 1980s, Koch had an epiphany. He was invited to be a resident at Hopper’s former studio on Cape Cod. He goes back every summer allured by the sea views that moved Hopper as well. Koch has also painted in Maine.
“These are sort of a heightened realism, filtered through imagination and memory,” she said. The paintings have a magical realist approach to realism. You can see a boat, but it is on a river of dreams. This is not straight plein air painting.
His title of the painting “Voyage of Life” is an homage to spiritual American 19th century painter Thomas Cole, who has a famous series of paintings called “The Voyage of Life.”
“I like the blending of art historical references with lived environment — both visually and through memory,” she said.
She moved on to the next gallery. It contains the show Darlene R. Taylor “Heirlooms.” There are large portraits of Black women made of mixed medium collage. These women seem to evoke lost memories. Almost all of the artisit’s subjects’ backs are to the audience.
Taylor echoes 19th century forms like the silhouette. History serves as a muse. Lost genealogy seems to fuel this art’s search for belonging.
A lot of the pieces are big and look down on the gallery space. Looking closely, there is old fabric, burnt paper and buttons sewn in to make the story topographical, almost sculptural.
Taylor teaches English at Howard University and has a home on Tilghman Island.
“She talks of these heirlooms as being a reclamation and reconstruction of African American archives. We don’t see the face but typically it is a young woman in her 20s or 30s. This evokes some of the gaps or things that are unknown when you do archival research, particularly when you do research about African American men and even more so women in this country,” Glazer said.
That something missing informs this work.
Looking closely at Taylor’s stitching work, there are blue x’s that connote the signature of a domestic laborer.
In the last gallery is “Albrecht Durer: Master Prints (1471-1528).” He was an innovative printmaker and art theorist.
Trained as a goldsmith, this woodcut and copper plate engraving artist rubbed elbows with DaVinci and Michelangelo. His black-and-white prints have so much narrative density, often religious, that each one is like a little movie.
To say his technique is exacting would be an understatement. The Academy supplies magnifying glasses to look at the prints to ensure details are not missed.
On top of being a vaunted and celebrated artist, Durer had a marketer’s instinct to move. He was one of the first artists to create his own logo.
“These are the complete 16 engravings from Durer’s series — the engraved passion. That was a super popular subject for private devotion. It is a narrative of Christ’s last days on Earth,” Glazer said.
Durer was alive during the dawn of the early modern age in the 1600s.
“We have got the printing press and movable type, and we have got an upwardly mobile merchant class, who for the first time has money to spend on this art,” Glazer said. “Art and commerce can go together.”
The three shows run through July 14. Admission is free.
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