Scarsdale Native Curates Exhibit at Fairfield University

"Don Gummer, The Armature of Emotion: Drawings and Sculpture" will be on view at Fairfield University's Walsh Art Gallery, from March 3 – June 11, 2016. The exhibition has been organized by Scarsdale's Linda Wolk-Simon, Director and Chief Curator of the Museums of Fairfield University.

The exhibit is a major survey of Gummer's works and includes more than 50 drawings, watercolors, cardboard and bronze models, wall reliefs, and free-standing bronze and steel sculptures by the artist. Gummer's richly-layered, cerebrally composed drawings incorporate color, encaustic (an ancient technique in which pigment is suspended in wax) and collage. In scale, they range from quick, small sketches, to elaborate monumental panels that are tapestry-like in their grandeur and proportions. Although all Gummer's drawings typically have the character of finished, autonomous creations regardless of size, many are in fact stages of a genesis: they are preliminary ideas and studies for sculptures, which show him working out, evolving, and testing different vantage points or compositions. The essential role of drawing in his creative process as a sculptor, and the fluidity of forms and ideas that mutate and migrate between media, are among the central themes explored in the selection of works on view.

Within Gummer's oeuvre certain themes and motifs recur. The exhibition presents a number of these groups of interrelated works. One is the series "Darwin's Map," which is iterated in collage drawings and wall reliefs. In both media, ribbon-like bars of color, at once fluid and masterfully controlled, form layered kaleidoscopes — suggestive, paradoxically, of stasis and flux.

Another group of work has the Twin Towers

as its subject and inspiration. Gummer executed a series of watercolors of the buildings only weeks before they were destroyed on September 11, 2001. In some they appear rigid and immutable, in others shifting and ethereal, dissolved in an atmospheric haze. Some five years after the disaster Gummer returned to the subject in a stainless steel sculpture, which will be on view in the Quick Center for the Arts.

Architecture is a leitmotif in Gummer's art and another focus of the works presented in the exhibition. Building things has always been an impulse for the artist who, early in his career, worked as a carpenter and a construction worker. (Many of his drawings and monumental sculptures have the character of a building erected to the framing stage, a residual and lingering imprint of that experience.)

Gummer's art is full of paradoxes. Movement and repose, exuberance and restraint, emotion and reticence, gravity and weightlessness, volume and void — these antitheses are perfectly synthesized in his compelling, poetic works.
everything he creates.

Two public programs are offered in conjunction with the exhibition. "Drawing and Sculpture: A Conversation with Artist Don Gummer and Curator Luke Syson" will take place on March 23 at 6 p.m., in the Wien Experimental Theatre of the Quick Center for the Arts. (Luke Syson is Chairman of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.) "Did Donatello Draw? Designing Sculpture in the Renaissance," a lecture by Dr. Michael Cole, Professor and Chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University will take place on April 20 at 6 p.m. in Bellarmine Hall. All events are free and open to the public. Please register at bellarminewag.eventbrite.com as space is limited.

Linda Wolk-Simon, Ph.D., a veteran curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the new director of the Bellarmine Museum, Thomas J. Walsh Art Gallery and University curator. She came to Fairfield after 25 years at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where, from 1986 to 2011 she served in many posts, including curator, Department of Drawings and Prints. Prior to that she was the assistant curator of the Robert Lehman Collection at the Metropolitan, a diverse collection of paintings, sculpture, textiles, glass, ceramics and old master drawings. While at The Met, she organized a highly attended Raphael exhibition and was co-curator of the well-received Art and Love in Renaissance Italy.

In addition to her curatorial expertise, Dr. Wolk-Simon has a strong teaching background, having conducted and co-taught numerous undergraduate and graduate seminars and classes at the Metropolitan and the Morgan on Italian Old Master Drawings and other topics, and lectured extensively on Italian art in various adult education programs.

Dr. Wolk-Simon holds a Ph.D. in history of art and a B.A., summa cum laude, both from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.