Digital Publications
Stephen Duren: A Life of Painting
Title: "Stephen Duren: A Life of Painting"
Authors: Joel Zwart, Stephen Duren, Henry Luttikhuizen, Sigrid Danielson, Ellen Adams
Sixty years have passed since Duren first took up a paintbrush. During this time, his work has experienced a push and pull between realism and abstraction, resulting in an evolving stylistic approach. Some of his works are direct renderings of nature from his experience painting plein-air (outdoors), while others are reductions of natural and artificial spaces into forms, lines, and colors. Stephen Duren: A Life of Painting explores this evolution, his extensive career, and his deep connection to the landscape in California, Michigan, and abroad. This 84-page catalog, published in conjunction with the exhibition, includes all the works from both exhibition venues and a number of essays.
As Is
Title: "As Is: Beauty and the Body in Contemporary Art"
Authors: Joel Zwart
Our bodies are both personal objects and shared spaces. They allow us to physically experience the world and are also complex entities where concepts of beauty, self, gender, and identity intersect. Although there is a long history of artists engaging the human form, increasingly, contemporary artists have embraced the complexity and imperfection of the body as it is.
This exhibition, selected from a private collection in Chicago, brings together 19 artists from the last 25 years who actively engage the body and its changing role through their work. Drawing on historical and progressive approaches to figuration, they celebrate the body as a source of inspiration and challenge traditional notions of beauty and representation.
Vera Klement
Title: "Vera Klement"
Authors: Max Klement
Artists grant us the rare privilege of seeing through their eyes. Vera Klement shows us a powerful, personal vision through both her eye and her mind’s eye. The expansive use of white space in Klement’s paintings illuminates the objects on the canvas. They are not alienated from each other; they are in concert, in dialogue—sharing the canvas. The white canvas invokes a negative space, though silent and seemingly about nothingness, the gessoed white canvas makes the objects placed on it appear sculptural—three-dimensional—and creates an entrance to an intimate personal space, inviting us to step into her constructed world—a loved world, with all its flaws.
Mathias J. Alten: An Evolving Legacy
Title: "Mathias J. Alten: An Evolving Legacy"
Authors: Ellen Adams, Matthew Daley, and Mary Pirkola
This publication spotlights the life and artistic works of Mathias J. Alten, who called the city of Grand Rapids his home for much of his career. Grand Valley State University owns the largest known single public collection of Alten's works and papers in the world. The book, "Mathias J. Alten: An Evolving Legacy," is a hardcover monograph that includes color illustrations and scholarly essays exploring Alten's artistic legacy. A native of Germany, Alten immigrated to Grand Rapids as a teenager. Often referred to as the "Dean of Michigan Painters," Alten spent his career painting in Europe and across the U.S., but always returned to Grand Rapids, his professional base of operations and home until his death in 1938.
"Mathias J. Alten: An Evolving Legacy" is available for purchase at Grand Valley Laker Stores.
"Mathias J. Alten: An Evolving Legacy" can also be borrowed from the GVSU University Libraries.
Many of the articles are also available digitally as part of the Mathias J. Alten Digital Library.
Great Lakes
Title: "Great Lakes: Image and Word"Authors: Co-Curated by Jinny Jenkins & Patricia Clark
The lakes and water systems of the Great Lakes are a majestic natural resource too little known outside of our region. This exhibit features sixteen poets and visual artists — each with a connection to the Great Lakes — in artistic pairings designed to result in new collaborative works with a Great Lakes theme.
Shared Passion
Title: "Shared Passion: A Gift of Stuart & Barbara Padnos Foundation Collection"
Authors: Ellen Adams & Nathan Kemler
The first public showing of this important and generous gift of art was an exhibition titled Shared Passion: A Gift of the Stuart & Barbara Padnos Foundation Collection, presented in the Art Gallery of the Performing Arts Center, August 22 – October 31, 2014, on the university’s Valley campus.
Cyril Lixenberg
Title: "Cyril Lixenberg: an Artist's Journey"
Authors: Timothy Chester, Ellen Adams, and Jason Kalajainen
This exhibition and accompanying printed and online catalog were conceived as an important means of showcasing and celebrating the university's comprehensive holdings of the creative life work of the Dutch artist Cyril Lixenberg.
Printed copies available for pickup at the GVSU Art Gallery.
- 2013 Michigan Museum Association Quest for Excellence Award Winner
- 2014 Silver ADDY Award Winner
- 2014 AAM Museum Publications Design Competition
- Rack Card, First Prize, budgets less than $750,00: Supplementary Material
- Honorable Mentions, budgets less than $750,000: Exhibition Catalogs
MULTiMEDiA
Title: MULTiMEDiA
Authors: William Lieberman & various artist contributors
These exhibitions were conceived as important components of the rich slate of programs that mark the university’s fiftieth anniversary.
Printed catalogs are no longer available. Please use the link below to view the virtual catalog.