Artists in Residence program to host
noted artist, screenings of PBS series

The Artist in Residence program at the Texas A&M College of Architecture will feature a world-renowned artist and show advance screenings of a PBS show about the arts during the Fall 2009 semester. 

Judy Pfaff’s work, said New York Times writer Roberta Smith, has always been suspended between painting and sculpture, wall and floor, and high and low culture.

“She has been creating elaborately impure, implicitly narrative environments for more than 25 years,” wrote Smith in the Times’ Sept. 12, 2003 edition.

Pfaff will be sharing thoughts about her work when she visits Texas A&M for a lecture at 5:30 p.m. Nov. 9 in Langford C 105.

“Pfaff creates exuberant, sprawling sculptures and installations that weave landscape, architecture, and color into a tense yet organic whole balancing intense planning with improvisational decision-making,” said Carol LaFayette, chairwoman of the Artist in Residence program and associate professor of visualization.

Pfaff’s work received a rave review from Smith in a 2003 exhibit.

“She is at the top of her form in the airy, exhilarating ‘Neither Here Nor There,'” wrote Smith in the Times’ Sept. 12, 2003 edition. “This work fuses elements of painting, sculpture and drawing with a disarming sense of clarity and suspension. It surrounds you, yet it seems almost transparent; you can see through it but also see most of it at once, simultaneously taking in modernist I-beams and grids; a bright red Chinese pagoda column; the roof line, molding and tin ceilings of a 19th-century American house; meandering bands suggestive of tile borders in a Persian mosque, except that they are free-floating and made of aluminum; and stacked plaster forms that suggest biomorphic sculpture and the pagodas of the Pagan plain in Burma.”

The program has also hosted three prebroadcast screenings this fall of “art:21 — art in the 21st Century,” a PBS series that focuses on contemporary visual art and artists in the U.S. 

The final screening is scheduled at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 12 in Langford C 105. 

The show provides footage of artists at work as they transform inspiration in art and talk about their thoughts as they grapple with the physical and visual challenges of achieving their artistic visions. 

- Posted Oct. 5, 2009 -