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"Best Exhibits 1999"
"Galleries,
Museums Spreading Their Wings"
By Sharon Kokot
As we prepare to ring in the new year, a toast to area museums and galleries is in order.
For a number of them, 1999 was when new initiatives were undertaken, or those begun several years ago came to fruition.
The Ohio Art League moved its gallery from a somewhat obscure location on Summit Street to a smart new space on High Street, putting the league front and center in the Short North and dramatically increasing visibility for the artists exhibiting there.
While the league inaugurated new digs, a number of galleries celebrated anniversaries that indicate a healthy longetivity.
Art Access, after five years in business, has become a well-established commercial gallery. Art for Community Expression, the first Columbus gallery to specialize in black American art, put on an anniversary exhibition that was nothing short of a victory party. Mounted at the Columbus College of Art & Design, the collection of work by well-known ACE artists was a testament to the gallery's success.
Further evidence of that success came in the form ofa retrospective of ACE founder Kojo Kamau's photography, presented by the Upper Arlington Cultural Arts Commission. Kamau's insightful observations of black culture in American society were complemented by the melding of idioms from traditional African and contemporary American art found in the colossal sculptures of Andrew Scott.
With that exhibition and the "Dresden–Columbus, Artistic Partnership" show, featuring work by artists who have participated in the exchange between the sister cities, the commission has achieved a new level of quality.
Other top exhibitions included Barth Gallery's presentation of evocative monoprints by Philip von Raabe and paintings by Elsie Sanchez. Rebecca Ibel Gallery's conceptual show, "Breathe," a group of "thread drawings" and an image of Maria Callas, consituted a moving meditation on the creative process by New York artist Rob Wynne. Jan Maiden Fine Art's international group show of color-based paintings provided context for the Columbus Museum of Art exhibition of New York color-based painter Joseph Marioni. Both shows demonstrated that brainy art can be sensual.
The museum continued to solidify the more ambitious program of photography exhibitions it has pursued in the past few years. Andreas Gursky's digitally manipulated blends of fact and fiction that describe contemporary places and Marilyn Bridges' aerial insights into human interaction with the environment were two of the best.
"Willem de Kooning: Drawing Seeing/Seeing Drawing" at the Wexner Center, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, offered a fascinating perspective on the importance of drawing to the career of a master of modern painting. Such exhibitions and anniversaries have made 1999 a good year for art in our town, a time of artistic coming-of-age that bodes well for the future. To all those responsible, cheers.