13 Sep 2010

ICPA at Colgate University presents Behind the Levees by Francis Cape

The Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts and Department of Art and Art History at Colgate University present 'Behind the Levees' an exhibition by Francis Cape


August 29th – October 10th, 2010, Artist Lecture, September 15th, 4:30 pm, Golden Auditorium, followed by an Opening Reception, Clifford Gallery, Little Hall

Behind the Levees brings together for the first time several bodies of work that center around the artist's ongoing engagement with post-Katrina New Orleans. Spanning five years, the exhibition begins with 'Waterline' an installation of framed photographs taken on a 2 1/2 hour walk through the city on November 6, 2005, just two months after the hurricane, and concludes with two new gulf spill pieces created specially for the Clifford Gallery.

This project and exhibition as a whole, far from being any sort of didactic prescription, is instead a proposition: how can we re-imagine forms and models of production in response both to historical precedent and current disaster. Cape uses this aesthetic space for considering a host of difficult issues relating not just to New Orleans but to a general cycle of American production and consumption, and to the legacy of modernist debates surrounding utility and ornamentation, social idealism and mass consumerism.

Francis Cape apprenticed with master carver Dick Reid before receiving his MFA in 1991 from Goldsmiths College, London. In 1993 he moved to the U.S. and now lives and works in Narrowsburg, NY. He has exhibited at the U.S. Biennial, Propsect 1, New Orleans; the St. Louis Art Museum; P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, NY; The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT; the Public Art Fund, NY; and Murray Guy, New York. He was the recipient of a Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2001, and of a Henry and Natalie E. Freund Fellowship in 2003. Mr. Cape was appointed critic in sculpture at Yale in 2009. He is represented by Murray Guy in New York and by Andreas Grimm in Germany.

Related Event

October 6 – Dan Cameron, 430 pm, Golden Auditorium, Little Hall

Dan Cameron is Founder and Artistic Director of U.S. Biennial, Inc, which produces
Prospect New Orleans, a new international biennial whose first edition opened in
November 2008 at multiple sites around the city, and closed in January 2009. Since 2007
Cameron has also served as Director of Visual Arts for the Contemporary Arts Center,
New Orleans.

The Clifford Art Gallery presents historical and contemporary exhibitions selected by Colgate's art and art history faculty that engage issues originating in the academic curriculum.

The Clifford is free and open to the public from 10:30 a.m. until 4:30 p.m. on weekdays, and from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. on weekends. For more information please contact Angela Kowalski akowalski@colgate.edu or visit artsinstitute.colgate.edu

ICPA The Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University

The mission of the Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts at Colgate University is to support and promote excellence in the creative and performing arts, and to stimulate critical dialogue on the arts in the liberal arts context. The Institute encourages and supports projects that embody the broad vision and centrality of the arts, and that underscore the interdisciplinary, international and cross-cultural dimensions of creative and performing arts practice.

For further information on The Institute for the Creative and Performing Arts, please contact: DeWitt Godfrey, dgodfrey@mail.colgate.edu