Third Annual Curators' Incubator Program
August 30 - October 15, 2005
Liz Flyntz, curator of Craft Pathos
featuring Mid-Atlantic artists: Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger, T. Charnan Lewis and Michael Paul Oman-Reagan
Timothy Nohe, curator of X/Y
featuring Mid-Atlantic artists: Christa Erickson, Christina Nguyen Hung and Paul Vanouse
Between August 30 and October 15, 2005, Maryland Art Place (MAP) presents a dynamic pair of extremely diverse exhibitions by two Maryland area curators as part of its Curator’s Incubator Program. This juried annual program, now in its third year, was designed to encourage diversity while mentoring emerging curators and fresh new talent by offering a flash-point look at contemporary art in and beyond our community.
This year, both of the curators in the program are Baltimore-based, with minimal experience curating visual arts exhibitions. While their exhibitions provide stark contrasts and ironies that are easily identified by the nature of the artworks and the platitudes they represent, the curators’ elemental and primary concerns are by no means unrelated. This is evident when comparing both exhibitions. One exhibit focuses on works representing low-tech work reminiscent of artwork one may find in a state fair exhibition: Liz Flyntz’s homespun Craft Pathos, features Mid-Atlantic area artists Dan Breen, Julia Dzwonkoski, Fawn Krieger, T. Charnan Lewis and Michael Paul Oman-Reagan, and explores recent politics of crafting that have moved beyond traditional unsophisticated (or middle-school) leisure activities into spheres that are more dependent on collaboration, conceptual theory, and which are based in narrative and technological experimentation.
Meanwhile, curator Timothy Nohe’s high tech exhibition X/Y, featuring Mid-Atlantic artists Christa Erickson, Christina Nguyen Hung and Paul Vanouse focuses on their highly engineered (and politically visible) works responding to culture and discourses that trace prevailing currents of human exchange and power. Several of the artists in X/Y are collaborators in the internationally acclaimed Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) based in Buffalo, NY.
