This week at the Mulvane Art Museum

Mulvane Art Museum Newsletter - July 2016

Zak Barnes: At Home in Bazaar

The Mulvane Art Museum is pleased to present Zak Barnes: At Home in Bazaar, an exhibition of paintings by this talented Kansas artist. The exhibition will run from Tuesday, July 12 through Saturday, September 3, 2016. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, July 15, from 5:30-7:30 p.m.

"Born and raised in Kansas, I feel a deep connection to the prairie landscape and to the people of this land. These are the base and anchor of my work, and set the emotional tone for any narrative that plays itself out in the paintings." --Zak Barnes


	Zak Barnes, Bazaar Monday

Kansas may be base and anchor for Barnes, but he paints his state with a sense of humor that rivals Garrison Keillor's in his depiction of his prairie hometown. Like Keillor's Lake Woebegone, Barnes's Bazaar, a tiny town south of Cottonwood Falls, is an odd mix of an ideal rural past with a modern and disjunctive present. Icons of Kansas culture like picket fences, windmills, buffalo, sunflowers, tornadoes, corn and prairie fires stand cheek by jowl with above ground swimming pools, wine glasses, TVs and boom boxes. It makes for a semi-realistic, yet slightly bizarre view of Kansas today.

Barnes calls his figure subjects, "Narratives in a loose sense. I reference folk art, surrealism and contemporary compositional practices to create ambiguity in both period and environment. Natural and manmade elements are placed in concert, creating a place of pleasant sharing." The works frequently do create a "place of pleasant sharing," as women, never men, picnic on quilts, lounge on overstuffed couches and lawn chairs, tailgate, barbeque, watch TV and play music. But, surrealistic oddities abound. Skeletons read books. Cars fly. Women in bikini tops sport guns and other weapons. A dinosaur and a semi-truck share the road. As Barnes explained, "Figures and objects interact within their environment with a certain disregard for physical laws," as for example in Shady Bonanza, where the engine of a plane appears to be a salon hair dryer over the head of a woman talking on a phone. In the same painting, we see Barnes's "contemporary compositional practices," where the patterns of tire treads, piano keys and a Navaho blanket merge and flatten the composition creating a very lively two-dimensional design.

But what does it all mean? The paintings are ambiguous enough to be open to interpretation. For example, in Bazaar Tractor Pull, a woman wearing boxing gloves is surrounded by two pink angels, one of whom pulls a suitcase marked with a sign for Kansas 177, the highway that runs through Bazaar. Behind her are a picket fence, tractor and a field. In the distance is a city of skyscrapers. Is this an allegory of the pull between the pleasures of the country and the allure of big city life? Who knows? The inclusion of other items like planets and a halo of Roman numerals just adds to the mystery of this colorful painting where the setting sun falls beautifully on swaying corn.

Exhibitions and Events

Klassics for Kids

May 27 - September 3

Drawn from the Mulvane Art Museum's permanent collection, this exhibition of art from the 16th through the 20th centuries has depictions of brains, fantastic rooms, scary and imaginary animals, superheroes, baseball bats, fighting silverware and finger-wagging grown-ups.

Brown Bag Conversation

August 31, 12:00 Noon to 1:00 pm

Zak Barnes and three Topeka figure painters, Barbara Waterman-Peters, Brad LeDuc and Ye Wang, professor of painting at Washburn University, will discuss the joys and challenges of telling stories in paint.


	Bud Holman, Kansas Sunset

Bud Holman: A Retrospective

July 19 - October 22

Born on a farm north of Topeka in 1926, Bud Holman first worked as a Regionalist. In 1954 he moved to New York and developed a highly abstracted landscape style. Holman later settled in Arizona, where he continues to paint each day.

To learn more about our exhibitions, click here!

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