I said last week I'd post Brad Cushman's essay on "El Grito" and today I've been trying to figure out a way to do that. But it appears my best bet is to post the catalogue for UALR's show here.

Slideshow

El Grito

Click to View 6 slides

I just went out to UALR to see "El Grito (A Cry for Independence)," an exhibit of work by Chicano artists pulled together from artists and collections across the country by gallery director Brad Cushman and assistant Nathan Larson. The work in the galleries provokes thoughts about immigration, the maquiladoras in Mexico that assemble our the "Made in the USA" products with cheap labor, racist attitudes, what people will go through to make a better living and more. I was thinking about all that when I passed the construction site north of the Fine Arts Building. All the workers were Hispanic. And, ironically, they were taking down a fence.

In the slideshow above are images of work by Hugo Crosthwaite ("Atlanta," the graphite and charcoal collage of a man and a boy), Camilo Ontiveros ("No Benefits," altered roadsign in his Public Interventions series), Margarita Cabrera ("Nopal con Tunas," cactus sewn from Border Patrol uniform fabric), Vincent Valdez ("Stations," the lithograph of the boxer and Jesus, from the Arkansas Arts Center Foundation), Nery Gabriel Lemus ("Four Migrating Black Bellied Whistling Ducks and Four Young Men," charcoal and ink-jet print) and Delilah Montoya ("Humane Borders Water Station," photograph of three water tanks, mounted on aluminum).

"Atlanta" is a hard piece to look at, which was the artist's intention. It is a 13-by-10 1/2-foot chaotic assemblage of drawings that functions to represent the chaos of life. "Humane Borders" is very affecting, the tanks marked "agua" placed in the vast arid Sonoran desert, where activists have placed water stations.

Brad Cushman has drafted an essay on all the work; will link when he says I can.

• Edwards' "Hellmouth"

Artists whose works are in "True Grit" include Judith Brodsky, Peter Campus, Warrington Colescott, Larry Edwards and Lee Friedlander. Artists Les Christenson and John Salvest curated the show to pose these questions:

"What fuels the unwavering devotion of these artists to work and career? ... In a culture preoccupied with newness and mesmerized by youth, isn’t there still something to be learned from that which endures?"

There's a reception tonight at 5 p.m.

• Frey's "Weeping Woman"

The Arts Center has a great exhibit in its main galleries (Wolfe and Rockefeller) that I'm betting will be a huge crowd-pleaser: "Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey." Some will compare it favorably to the former show in that space, World of the Pharaohs, which put the Arts Center's finances in the ditch, though the two really shouldn't be compared. I have to say, however, Frey is more fun.

Frey (pronounced Fry) fixed her star in the (mostly male) galaxy of American ceramic artists with monumental ceramic figures and assemblages of kitsch figurines. “Bigger, Better, More” features paintings, sculpture, vessels and wall-mounted plates; contributing pieces to the exibit are the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.; the Butler Institute of American Art and other fine arts collections. It’s a significant show that offers a rare opportunity to walk among, and be dwarfed by, the work of the late California artist.

Frey’s bulky and flattened colossi, glazed in bright colors; her bricolage pieces that combine mermaids, roosters, China goddesses and the like, and her wall-sized paintings fill the Rockefeller and Wolfe galleries with Cubist sensibilities and the color and gesture of Matisse. It is work that is both personal, reflecting the role of men and women in her life, and iconic, thanks to her obsession with junk. An example here of the two combined is the 7-foot-tall, 7-foot-tall “Family Portrait,” in which men in suits and women in dresses stand amid a cluster of nostalgia — the Mandarin figurine, the boy with a bat, a milkmaid.

Frey’s hand-built figures have wide-eyed expressions and stiff forms; she worked in sections of clay so massive the figures had to be cut apart before they could be fired and glazed. Frey applies paint to the sculpture as Cezanne or Picasso would to plane, giving her figures green cheeks, yellow noses, red hands, blue shadows. Male figures more than eight feet tall take an intimidating pose, arms akimbo and heads tilted down toward the viewer. She often represents women in flowered dresses and hats and heels, drawn from the women in her life, who were strong in their own way. “Double Grandmothers with Black and White Dresses,” two 7-foot-plus women with forearms extended, dominate the space around them.

The figurines appear in her two-dimensional work — as themselves as objects, filling a room from which a man is fleeing (“Studio View”), or as subject, creating a garden tableau of jointed doll, fawn, little girl (“China Goddess Painting”) — representations of representations of archetypes. Frey also makes monuments of her assemblages — in “Junkman,” she’s stacked slipcasts of Woody Woodpecker, a train, a putti, a horse head, the tugboat “Little Toot,” glazed the sculpture in white and painted over it in China paint. For all her love of massive form, Frey has a beautiful line.

An excellent catalog that accompanies the exhibit (available for sale in the gift shop) discusses the largest painting in the exhibit, "Studio View: Man in Doorway," in which a man heads for the doorway to leave a room swirling in hundreds of objects:

"For Frey, figure and figurine, person and sculpture, were compellingly conflated, as she danced her life with a her ultimate partner, art. Ambitious and ambiguous this epic painting is a final, frenetic assertion of how idiosyncratic, confrontational, and — even when it depicts departure — how emphatically and intensely personal the art of Viola Frey can be."

The show runs through Nov. 28.

• Gregory Moore's "Robin," acrylic on found metal

Thanks to social networking and my friendship with Fayetteville art maven Shannon Mitchell, I can blog about the exhibits in the galleries of Fayetteville Underground (now on their mailing list I hope!): "Ghosts in the Landscape No. 2," photographs by Christian Demare in the Hive; "Continental Shift," works from the Seattle-based collective in the Revolver; "Reclaimed Surfaces," paintings on found objects by Gregory Moore in the Vault, and "Let's Eat," vessels by Karan Freeman in the E Street Gallery. They all look great — and they're only up through August, it looks like. At 6:30 on Aug. 26, Moore and Leilani Law will give gallery talks, Moore on his work, Law on "Continental Shift." Take a look at the FU's blog and let me know what you think (especially love to hear from Fayettevillians who've seen the work in person).

Update:
Dwain Cromwell e-mailed to draw my attention to a piece Moore did on an elevator panel:

Happy Hour in the Heights starts in about half an hour; at Stephano's Gallery, painter and sculptor Robert Sherman will be on hand to talk about his work. The event runs 5:30 to 9 p.m. at the Kavanaugh Boulevard gallery.