Jody Clowes

Charles Munch is well known in the American Midwest for his bold, luminously colored paintings of people and animals in expansive landscapes. For twenty-five years, his richly imagined images have explored the tangled relationship between tame and wild, between humans and the rest of the natural world. The elegant simplicity of his pictures has caused them to be described as 'nature icons'. ""Charles Munch, Dreaming in Color"" reveals Munch's transition from the poetic realism of his early work to the brilliant semi-abstraction of today, as well as the personal and artistic crisis at the heart of that dramatic transformation. Jody Clowes contributes a probing essay of critical analysis. Richard Ely's long biographical essay narrates one man's journey from suburban childhood to visionary landscape painter. The book also includes a chronology of Munch's artistic life and an exhibition history. Charles Munch grew up near St. Louis, Missouri, and now lives on a hilltop in southwestern Wisconsin. He has exhibited his paintings in twenty-five solo shows, eight of them museum shows. His work is in private collections nationwide, as well as in the collections of the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Chazen Museum of Art.

The history of contemporary American metalsmithing is inextricably linked with the academy. Since the 1950s, nearly every significant artist working in metals has trained at a university or art school - fertile ground for innovation and exploration in metalsmithing and jewelry making. The University of Wisconsin - Madison's metals program is among the best in the nation, founded on the teaching legacy of Fred Fenster and Eleanor Moty, who instilled in their students a profound respect for craftsmanship, technical innovation, formal integrity, and thoughtful design. The work in this catalogue encompasses hollowware and jewelry, wearable sculpture, poetic and narrative objects, and conceptual installations. The show at the Chazen Museum of Art was produced by guest curator Jody Clowes.

Don Reitz is recognized as one of the most important and influential ceramic artists of this century. Trained at Alfred University in the early 1960s, Reitz has pursued a life-long investigation of salt and wood firing of his ceramic pieces in order to preserve the energy and freshness of his artistic marks and gestures. Finding that the texture and unpredictability of salt-firing suited his work, Reitz almost single-handedly revived this neglected technique, and through long experimentation developed a range of colors and surface effects previously unknown in salt-firing. Juggling and manipulating the variables in each firing, Reitz is a virtuoso who relishes knowing what he can control and what he cannot. His work maintains a fine balance between technical mastery and improvisation. The Elvehjem Museum of Art retrospective features some seventy-four ceramic works that Reitz created between 1960 and the present.