Public Invited to Speak with Artists and View Work at Opening Reception

[IOWA CITY, IOWA, APRIL 19, 2018] —Three award-winning artists pushing the boundaries in their fields are opening a month-long exhibit at C.S.P.S. Hall Thursday, May 3 with a free reception from 5-8 p.m. Visitors are invited to view the work and speak with the artists, who are Grant Wood Fellows at the University of Iowa Grant Wood Art Colony. The 2017-18 visual art fellows are Brandon Coley Cox and Joe DeVera, and the theatre fellow is Joe Osheroff. All are chosen by a committee of UI faculty for their ability to expose UI students to diverse practices and for their commitment to create work during their time at the university. “The artists’ practices all bring a unique perspective to campus, which they share through teaching and collaborations,” said Maura Pilcher, Grant Wood Art Colony director. “During their fellowship, the artists have experienced time to make work. This is a luxury for most artists—to have space and time to create. Brandon, Joe, and Joe have taken advantage of this opportunity and have been quite prolific. Most if not all of the work to be displayed will have been created during their fellowship at the Grant Wood Art Colony.”

The exhibition, entitled Grant Wood Fellows’ Exhibition 2017-18, will display the artists’ variety of work and interest in expanding beyond their disciplines of painting, drawing, printmaking, and theatre. “Each fellow’s practice veers into other media to accomplish whatever message he wants to achieve,” Pilcher said. The Grant Wood Fellows’ Exhibition 2017-18 runs from May 3 to June 3. All are welcome to see this ongoing, free exhibition, Monday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, from noon to 4 p.m.

Grant Wood Fellows’ Exhibition 2017-18 Reception
Hosted by the Grant Wood Art Colony
Thursday, May 3, from 5 to 8 p.m.
C.S.P.S. Hall, 1103 Third St. SE, Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
No tickets are necessary for this event.

The Artists

 

Brandon Coley Cox earned his MFA from Yale University, along with the Ely Harwood Schless Award for Excellence in Painting. Cox has been awarded other residencies in the past at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in Times Square and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Cox has work in several permanent collections including The International Print Museum in Southern California and the Museum of Paper and Watermark in Fabriano, Italy. His current studio practices involves fusing Eastern and Western traditions of object making to achieve indeterminable forms. His most recent body of work entitled "Mining for Truth" is the silent uplift on another day and night of evil, anti-humanist, anti-ancient life views of the world. Using rare earth minerals, piezoelectric stones that produce negative ions, and Eastern methods of creating plaster; he is interested in mirroring the transmutative qualities of ancient Egyptian alchemy while speaking truth to Western power structures. Using gravity as a press and various materials as mark making tools, he attempts to push printmaking and painting into areas of both beauty and energetic use.

 

Joe DeVera, Grant Wood Fellow in Painting & Drawing, has also been awarded the Joshua Tree Highlands Art Residency (2015), The Terra American Art Foundation Summer Fellowship (2016) and the Cloud Projects Prize (2016). DeVera received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2014) and his BFA in Painting from California State University, Fullerton (2011), where he also served as an adjunct lecturer for several years.  His work examines the experiential concerns of creating objects that function as both biographical/historical signifier and active social instrument. He explains, “My process undoubtedly revolves around a large introspective element, given the nature of my personal history; having immigrated from the turbulent social climate of the Philippines to the USA as a youth, and further having twice-deployed in the second Iraq War as a US Marine. Thus, much of the work is inevitably informed by my interest in the cultural aestheticization of war and tragedy, and how objects not only attain a certain amount of active subversion, but also contribute to our views in regard to catastrophic events in memoriam.  Sculptural installations and paintings are produced in to not only explore the possibility that art objects can be created to reclaim what may be lost in our collective memory, but also welcome the challenges of representation when dealing with loss of an unimaginable scale.”

Joe Osheroff, Grant Wood Fellow in Interdisciplinary Performance—Theatre, is the Artistic Director of Homunculus Mask Theater (New York, NY).  He founded this company in 2010 as a means of presenting original, devised theater that explores contemporary mask work.  Since then, Homunculus productions have been recognized with six NY Innovative Theatre Award nominations and three NY Innovative Theatre Awards (Best Director, Best Choreography, Best Design).  As an actor, Osheroff recently appeared in the Broadway Tour of the multiple Olivier/Tony Award winning production of War Horse.  He is a Professor of Acting at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.  Joe has studied mask performance and mask making at the D’ell Arte School of Physical Theater, as well as with Ralph Lee and Donatto Sartori.  He has an MFA in Acting from the University of California at Irvine.  Visitors will have the opportunity to see a recording of the recent performance of Visual Mixtape and see some of the 40 masks that he created for the production inspired by his youth. “My friends and I would record the songs off of vinyl or from other cassettes, and it was a meticulous exercise. The flow of the tape, the pace of it, the order of the songs, the cover art, the themes, were all part of the process,” Osheroff says. “Each tape was meant to create the perfect vibe, something that would resonate in that moment in time for whoever the tape was meant for. This show takes that notion of putting together a specific soundscape, adds about 40 of my original masks, and puts it on a stage. It literally is a visual mixtape.”