2 - De-Natured: Works from the Anderson Collection - William Allen

SJMA PodCast

The San Jose Museum of Art is pleased to offer this audio tour to compliment your visit to the exhibition De-Natured: Works from the Anderson Art Collection. In it you will hear commentary by curator Heather Green, interviews with several of the artists in the exhibition, and insight into the collection provided by Harry W. Anderson himself. You can download it to your iPod or other audio device for your next visit to the museum! In this episode William Allen speaks about his large scale painting, Half a Dam, in the exhibition De-Natured: Works from the Anderson Collection; on view at the San Jose Museum of Art October 13, 2007 - January 6, 2008. Broadly defined, to denature is to change the character or condition of something. In the milieu of contemporary painting, sculpture, and work on paper seen in this exhibition, it is the connection between artist and nature that has changed. Gone are the romantic vistas and picturesque scenes of traditional landscape painting. Instead we find images of pollution and alienation that mirror the post-war urban-industrial landscape, depictions in which artistic media have been pressed into embodiments of natural elements (and vice versa), and abstractions that highlight a distance between the world perceived and the world represented. Featuring works by artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Roy DeForest, David Hockney, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Frank Stella, Louise Nevelson, and Richard Diebenkorn, the art of De-Natured presents a sampling of the many ways that artists have engaged with their changing environs. At a time when we are increasingly “growing up denatured,” as one New York Times writer recently described the divide between urban and pastoral life, these artistic collisions with nature (or its absence) have much to tell us about our own relationships with the environment, both natural and urban. This exhibition was curated by Heather Pamela Green, a doctoral candidate in Art History at Stanford University, and features work drawn from the Collection of Harry W. and Mary Margaret Anderson, as well as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco's Anderson Graphic Arts Collection.