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Rockwell Kent Review Available; Museum Exhibits Being Readied for 2021-2022 Season


rick shaefer

The newest edition of the Rockwell Kent Review, the annual journal devoted to the life and work of the artist, is available for purchase from the Plattsburgh State Art Museum.

kent cover imageKent, American artist, illustrator, author and political activist, lived 44 of his 89 years on his farm in AuSable Forks, N.Y. After his death in 1971, his widow, Sally Kent Gorton, presented SUNY Plattsburgh with a representative collection of her late husband’s works that became the foundation of the Rockwell Kent Collection. In 2000, she donated hundreds of additional works, writings, letters and other ephemera to the collection.

Kent’s work and much of the college’s exclusive collection can be seen in the Rockwell Kent Gallery, second floor of Feinberg Library. The Rockwell Kent Review, and its predecessor, The Kent Collector, contains essays on Kent, his work and American art from the first half of the 20th century. For more information, including how to order the current issue of the Kent Review and digital copies of past issues, visit https://bit.ly/3z2vwmU.

 The Plattsburgh State Art Museum is also gearing up for the fall season with artist Rick Shaefer’s “Refugee Trilogy,” a suite of large-scale charcoal drawings in the Burke Gallery that depict his reaction to the ongoing immigration crisis unfolding across the globe that “began to distill for me the journeys taken by refugees everything,” Shaefer writes. The three thematic scenes, each measuring 96 inches by 166 inches, are in a chronology suggested by news reports.

“Land Crossing,” the first of the three, addresses the hazardous journeys faced by refugees fleeting war, famine, drought and other events. “Water Crossing” portrays the perilous journeys across open water; and “Border Crossing” addresses the conflicts and hostilities faced at borders.

The Burke Gallery, second floor of Myers Fine Arts Building, will then feature “North by Nuuk: Greenland after Rockwell Kent,” a contemporary look at the people, social and primal geographic landscapes of Greenland by photographer Denis Defibaugh, from January through mid-March, 2022.

Defibaugh captured his journey from Nuuk to the settlement of Illorsuit, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, following Kent’s earlier footsteps and offering a fresh look at Greenland. As climate change continues to dramatically affect the ice cap, settlements are slowly being abandoned and populations continue to decline. Defibaugh presents a layered comparative of contemporary Greenland and the Inuit culture of the early 1930s.

“North by Nuuk” is paired with “Projection,” Rockwell Kent’s original lantern slides of Greenland from the museum’s permanent collection, in the Slatkin Gallery.

The museum rounds out its 2021-2022 year with the Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Exhibit from mid-March through May. The last two BFA Senior Exhibits were forced by COVID to remote access. This will mark the first in-person senior exhibit since the pandemic shuttered campus in March 2020.

For more information on any of the Plattsburgh State Art Museum offerings, email [email protected] or visit https://www.plattsburgh.edu/plattslife/arts/art-museum/index.html.

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