Gallery

Ordinary Saints
On Display: August 2022 - October 2022
Reception: Homecoming Weekend - Date/Time TBD

Paintings by Bruce Herman for a collaboration with poet Malcolm Guite and composer J.A.C. Redford. 
Part of Gordon College's 2022 Homecoming.

About the Exhibition: After many years of working with the human figure in an implicit narrative context, I decided to try to paint particular persons (instead of “types” or generalized figures that are subservient to the narrative). The traditional posed portrait was not what I was after, rather I wanted to make an image that seemed to mediate the “real presence” of the person (as opposed to an idealized or flattering portrayal). When I completed the painting of my father, I suddenly remembered my childhood desire as a young artist: to make a painting of a person that “felt” like them even more than simply reproducing a likeness. I’ve included a couple of formal portrait commissions I’ve done for comparison. The requirements of formal institutional portraiture were a challenge but I believe that I managed, in spite of these constraints, to communicate something of the person there as well.

About Bruce Herman: Bruce Herman’s art has been exhibited in Boston, New York, Los Angeles and most major cities in the U.S.A.  and abroad in Italy, England, Israel, Japan, and Hong Kong. Herman’s art is in many public and private art collections––among these, the Vatican Museums in Rome, Cincinnati Museum of Fine Arts, and Hammer Museum Grunewald Print Collection in L.A. 

Herman’s art and writings are published in a thirty-year retrospective in Through Your Eyes 2013, Eerdmans Books, Grand Rapids. His published essays are found in many print and online journals including IMAGE, Comment, Books and Culture, and many others. 

Herman has taught for three decades and curated over 100 exhibitions for Gordon College. He holds the endowed Lothlórien Distinguished Chair in Fine Arts at the school and is Gallery Director and Art Collection Manager. 

Bruce Herman's Website
Instagram: @bruce.herman

To Be Continued: An Artistic Dialogue
On Display: August 2022 - October 2022
Reception: Homecoming Weekend - Date/Time TBD

Alumni artists commissioned to make work in honor of Bruce Herman's retirement. Works displayed concurrently with the Ordinary Saints exhibition.

Reflecting the Glory
On Display: October 2022 - December 2022
Recpetion: TBD

Featuring new works in gold leaf by Sandra Bowden. 

About the Exhibition: I have come to see that my work as an artist is described best as seeking connections to our past. For over fifty years I have worked in a sequence of multiple series of paintings and prints that related to archaeology findings, geological forms, early languages, musical scores, ancient illuminations and the history of art. Each of these areas of exploration has enhanced my appreciation for the great treasures from our shared past.

Reflections of Glory is my most recent work continuing this conversation of connections as a way to pay homage to the “Icons of Western Art.” This show highlights several gilded encaustic panels that recall many iconic paintings from art history. Their distinct shapes identify the historic work, but because of their solid gold surface, allow the viewer to delight in the radiance of each panel, while drawing on memory and imagination to fill in the forms.

Two multi-panel installations are featured in Reflections of Glory. Forty encaustic gilded panels and forty black panels that are incised with text, become 40 Days/40 Nights. Another multi-panels work has 100 5”x 5” gilded squares entitled One Hundred Percent.

To compliment the wall-mounted paintings, several artist’s books provide a rich three-dimensional dialog between the works. I have fixed open actual books, allowing the open face of the book to be the painted surface—many incised with text.

Artists do not merely put on canvas what can be seen. They try to uncover something beyond the range of the eyes. I believe that art is a means to illuminate both the interior life and the exterior world, both seen and unseen. I hope Reflections of Glory will lead those who see the exhibition beyond the edge of their consciousness into a place of splendor, wonder and transcendence.

About Sandra Bowden: Visual artist Sandra Bowden has been interpreting Scripture and her own spiritual walk through mixed media for more than forty years. She has been acclaimed as one of the most unique, impressive and inspiring Christian artists in America. Bowden’s work has been featured in books, magazines and gallery shows across the United States, Canada, Italy and Jerusalem.

Her work fuses the vivid yet traditional imagery of the Old Testament – stone tablets and artifacts, Hebrew inscriptions, architectural depictions – with images of Christ’s passion, important music scores, and God’s natural creations. She has issued several series of artworks over the years: crucifixion scenes, artistic use of text and color, new interpretations of classic religious artwork, even altered books with applied textures and hues. God’s grandeur and creativity shine through in each piece of her art.

“My Christian faith has been the driving force behind my art,” Bowden says. “I look at the making of a piece of art as a kind of doxology, a prayer or conversation with God. I don’t mean this in any mystical way, but my ideas come out of my theology and thoughts about God. I am somewhat of a theologian, but one who translates those interpretations into visual form.”

Sandra Bowden's Website

Winter Exhibition 2023
On Display: January 2023 - March 2023
Reception: TBD

Featuring new mixed media and 3-D works by David Kasparek.

About David Kasparek: David is a designer, artist, and an associate professor of graphic design at Messiah College in Grantham, PA. He received his Master of Graphic Design (MGD) from the College of Design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C.

David’s ongoing personal and client-based work — as well as his teaching — focuses on creating meaningful visual form which communicates, shapes, or creates content in compelling ways (through various media and processes).

His work has appeared in national and international publications such as Print Magazine, Design: Type: A Seductive Collection of Alluring Type Designs (Rockport), Design for Special Events: 500 of the Best Logos, Invitations, and Graphics (Rockport), The Big Book of Graphic Design (Collins Design), Graphic Design and Religion (GIA), Print Magazine, Typography 3: Global Vision (Duncan Baird Publishers), and Two-Color Graphics (Rockport).

He has exhibited his work at various venues, including Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA; Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA; and Biola University in La Mirada, CA (a joint exhibition with painter Daniel Finch).

David Kasparek's Website
Instagram: @d_kasparek
 

Spring Exhibition 2023
On Display: March - April 2023
Reception: TBD

A husband and wife retrospective by Theodore & Catherine Prescott.

About Theodore Prescott: Prescott’s approach to sculpture is rooted in his interest in the poetic and associative nature of material substances. He is versatile in the use of traditional sculptural materials like wood, stone, and metals, but has also employed unconventional materials like salt, coal, and honey. The sculptural vocabulary of his work is derived from modernist art, but he seeks continuity with the past, and does not see what is new as replacing or negating what has gone before. Prescott’s subject matter and ideas often draw upon the beliefs and ideas found in the Christian tradition.

About Catherine Prescott: It’s natural for me to turn things that move me into an image.  When I am reading, thinking, listening, or just looking, I constantly turn my perceptions into pictures in my mind. 

I work primarily with portraits and care very much about getting a likeness, but accuracy in likeness is not enough; we all know there is more to a person than meets the eye.  In what we see of someone’s face, or hands, or way of sitting, there are a thousand clues to the interior behind it. One might call it soft observation, unspoken and unproven, but nonetheless a history of feelings in the presence of a person.  I love to make the most of those clues in my paintings.

I hope my work triggers some recognition of truth in another person and gives us access to each other.  I hope that in knowing each other we can know that we are not alone. 

Theodore Prescott's Website
Catherine Prescott's Website

Student Exhibitions 

Findings 2023 
On Display: February 2023 - Dates TBD, The Small Gallery / Barrington Loggia
Opening Reception: TBD

A mentor/mentee exhibition by current Gordon College Art majors and Art alumni.