Le Grand Bal 'Legends of the Arts' Art Auction
Select Artists and Artwork
Art Exhibition: March 16 - 27, 2015
Silent Art Auction at Le Grand Bal: March 28, 6 - 8 p.m.
Presented by Lamar University's Friends of the Arts, Le Grand Bal is the major annual fundraiser for the College of Fine Arts & Communication. The exhibition will feature more than 200 works by students, faculty, alumni and special friends of Lamar – a diverse range of original paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, ceramics and jewelry. Bids will be submitted at the silent auction at Le Grand Bal "Legends of the Arts" on Saturday, March 28, 2015, from 6 to 8 p.m.
Honorary Guest Artist: John Alexander
John Alexander is a world-renowned artist whose work pays tribute to the rich tradition of painters throughout the history of art. His early works were primarily semi-abstract landscapes, and later, dense, expressionistic paintings. His more recent drawings and paintings include beautifully rendered birds, plants and animals (often those native to Texas and the Southern Gulf Coast states), and satirical works of characters and masked figures representing the most dysfunctional members of society.
Alexander received an art degree from Lamar in 1968 and an M.F.A. degree from SMU. Alexander taught at the University of Houston in the 70s, then moved to New York where he began to make his mark on the art world. He was awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1981 and another by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1984.
Alexander had a major retrospective at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston in 2007. His work is included in the permanent collections of leading museums around the United States, including the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in D.C., the Museum of Contemporary Art in L.A., the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. His work has also been collected by numerous private individuals throughout the country.
Artwork for auction:
Dancing Heron, 2013
Monoprint
37 1/2 x 28 1/2 inches
Keith Carter
"Tres Caballos," Mixed Media, 20x24 inches, pictured above
"Magnolia, Mixed Media, 20x24 inches
"White Roses," Mixed Media, 20x24 inches
"Wooden Bridge 1," Mixed Media, 20x24 inches
"Wooden Bridge 2," Mixed Media, 20x24 inches
Keith Carter is an internationally recognized photographer who has been shown in more than 100 solo exhibitions in 13 countries, and has had 11 monographs of his work published. He is known for creating blurred images with limited depth of field, which give his work a sense of mystery. Keith currently holds the Endowed Walles Chair of Art at Lamar University. He earned the Texas Medal of Arts and the Lange-Turner Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
Carter's work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; National Portrait Gallery, D.C.; J. Paul Getty Museum; MFAH; George Eastman House; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Wittliff Collections, San Marcos.
David Everett
"Devotee"
Wall-Mounted Polychromed Wood
7 1/2 x 19 1/2 x 5 3/8 inches
Beaumont native David Everett earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Texas in Austin. David took art classes from Lamar University in the 1970s. Everett is known for his beautiful hand-carved and colored wood sculptures of animals. Having grown up in Southeast Texas, he is partial to images of fish, turtles, birds, horses, buffalo and jackrabbits. He also creates stunning bronze sculptures and woodcut prints.
His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout Texas, as well as in New Mexico, Colorado, Georgia, Florida, Pennsylvania and Wyoming. His work is in numerous private and public collections throughout the state, including the Art Museum of Southeast Texas; the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas; the Grace Museum, Abilene; and the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University, San Marcus.
Michael Kennaugh
“Through the Wet Leaves,” 2013
Oil on Canvas
11 x 14 inches
"Cattle Beach," 2013
Oil on Canvas
11 x 14 inches
Michael Kennaugh received his B.F.A. from Lamar University in 1986 and his M.F.A. from UNT in 1990.
Kennaugh is known for abstract paintings, drawings and painted wood assemblages and sculptures. His paintings have a lyrical, spontaneous quality about them, which makes it surprising to learn that the works are carefully planned with meticulous drawings and explorations of color palette. The paintings are not direct copies of the drawings, however. As Kennaugh paints, the curved lines and muted colors evolve during the process to become something fresh and different.
Kennaugh’s work is included in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as well as in corporate collections both national and international. The Art Museum of Southeast Texas is featuring his work in a solo show in the fall of 2015. LU recently purchased a large painting for the university’s new Administration Building and Honors College.
Paul Manes
26 x 22 inches
Paul Manes received his B.F.A. from Lamar University in 1983 where he studied under Jerry Newman. He recently sold his apartment and studio in New York, and moved with his wife, Brenda, to Colorado. Manes is known for paintings of classic airplane bombers seen head on as if flying into the face of the spectator and also for images of empty bowls. For Manes, bowls are common objects which represent a connective thread amongst the global community. "Everybody, no matter how poor, across all cultures, has a bowl in his hands,” Manes says. “It can contain food, and hope, and often it is empty."
Manes has had exhibitions in Dallas, Houston, Miami, West Palm Beach, New Orleans, Baltimore, New York, L.A. and in France and Italy. His work is included in the collections of the Art Museum of Southeast Texas; the San Antonio Museum of Art; the Detroit Institute of Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Ken Mazzu
Ken Mazzu works in a variety of media, including oil on canvas, watercolor and ink wash. His past imagery has focused on landscape ideas of industrial decay and urban detritus which he renders in abstract form. More recently, he has been working on cityscape paintings based on photographs. These works allow Mazzu to create new interpretations of the city framed within a historical context. Ruins have fascinated Mazzu since he visited Bolivar Peninsula as a child and was intrigued by the slowly deteriorating structures and changes in the landscape caused by storms over a period of summers.
Mazzu earned his B.F.A. from Lamar in 1992 and his M.F.A. from the University of Houston in 1997. He is currently a faculty member at the Glassell School of Art in Houston. His work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston as well as in numerous corporate and private collections throughout Houston and the U.S.
Jim Richard
"Modern Circles," 2005
Collage
7.875 x 7.625 inches
Born in Port Arthur, Jim Richard received his B.S. from Lamar University in 1965. He currently teaches art at the University of New Orleans. Richard is known for his collages and paintings of interior spaces. He never includes figures in his work, but prefers to mix textures and patterns with furniture, lamps, fixtures and numerous art objects to create confusing, compressed spaces that look realistic at first glance, but are actually fictitious. In describing his work, Richard has said, "I take things out of context in the rooms, such as decorative objects and patterns and swatches, and put them back together in a kind of emblematic arrangement... Sometimes the rooms are so claustrophobic. They are as discomforting as they are comfortable."
Richard won the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Award in Painting in 2006 and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in Painting in 2004. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in NY; the Museum of the Twentieth Century in Vienna, Austria; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, Georgia; the Ogden Museum, New Orleans and the New Orleans Museum of Art.
