Featured Artist Adrienne Simmons
The Architecture, Design, and Art Library proudly presents the work of featured artist ‘23-24 Adrienne Simmons. Her exhibit, A Landscape, Shifted, will be on view until July 2024.
Statement
Do you ever feel a distinct type of pain when reflecting on a place in your past? The Welsh have a word for this feeling called hiraeth, which translates to “distance pain.” It’s not quite a nostalgic yearning, but the true pain of loving a place. Having moved frequently around the US, I often experience this sense of place-pain.
My work responds to the landscapes I visit. I’m drawn to the way the land shapes our personal histories and memories. I collect the fragments of our lives—domestic textiles, collected water, crushed seashells, clumps of earth, and vines to make homemade charcoal. These found materials are collaged with satellite imagery, cyanotype, and acrylic mediums in an intuitive and alchemical practice. This multimedia exploration allows me to establish a sense of place, map ideas of collective memory, and attempt to embed the landscape into the surface of my work. Ultimately, the connection made with the land and the resulting work reconciles my hiraeth.
Bio
Adrienne Simmons is a multi-disciplinary artist currently based in Houston, TX. She explores ideas of cartography and memory with found materials to untangle the relationship between people and their environments. Drawn to real and imagined landscapes, she uses printmaking, cyanotype, found objects, textiles, and abstract imagery in an attempt to understand how memories are embedded into spaces and places. Her work has been collected by UTMB and MD Anderson, and she has shown at the Houston Center for Photography, the Print Museum, and the Blaffer Art Museum, while pursuing her MFA at the University of Houston (2024).
Rare Diego Rivera Books Now on View
Four books on the works of Diego Rivera from the Kenneth Franzheim II Rare Books Room are now on display in the William R. Jenkins Architecture, Design, and Art Library. The bound books and portfolios are liberally illustrated with reproductions of frescoes, watercolors, portraiture, as well as other genre and media. All were published in Mexico between 1934 and 1967. Rivera was arguably the most important figure in the Mexican mural movement. His style featured “a new iconography based on socialist ideas and exalted the indigenous and popular heritage in Mexican culture.” (O’Connor, F. (2003). Rivera (y Barrientos Acosta y Rodríguez), Diego. Grove Art Online.)
The works on view are:
12 reproductions in color of Mexican frescoes by Diego Rivera
Acuarelas, 1935-1945: Colección Frida Kahlo
El genial muralista mundialmente discutido maestro: Diego Rivera
Pop-Up Art Library + FFAT 4/5
Pop-Up Art Library + First Friday Art Tours
Come find us during First Friday Art Tours at Blaffer Art Museum. We’ll have a selection of books thematically related to the museum’s current exhibition available for check out. Lunch will be provided after the tour.