Leon Golub / Adrian Piper

The Rice University Art Gallery (formerly the Sewall Art Gallery) re-opens Thursday, 19 January, with works by internationally known artists Leon Golub and Adrian Piper. These artists work in different ways but share an activist stance: both challenge us to recognize somethin about ourselves and our society. On view in the main gallery will be sixteen of Golub’s most recent drawings and paintings, including the monumental Beware of Dog, (1992, 102” x 158”). The satellite gallery, newly dedicated to video and digital imagery works, will contain Adrian Piper’s video installation Cornered, 1988.

This exhibition inaugurates a new direction for the Rice University Art Gallery, one that explores contemporary issues to generate discourse within the university as well as Houston community. Says Davenport, “We are pleased to present the work of two artists who, with fearlessness and conviction of purpose, have long addressed issues of socio-political importance.”

Born in Chicago in 1922, Leon Golub has exhibited extensively in the US and abroad. Recognized as a master of figurative painting, his new works depart from the more concise compostitions of the past, yet he continues to use his distinct pictorial language to reflect the state of our society. His large-sized canvases convey a distinctly American sensibility: complex layering of images taken from news reports depict a dark world in which we share culpability. “I would say that my figuration is ‘American,’ aggresive and self-assured in its power claims, in its attitudes about domination. The figures may refer to South Africa or Latin America, but the force propelling the painting is American,” says Golub.

Adrain Piper is a Professor of Philosophy at Wellesley College (Massachusetts) and a conceptual artist whose work since the early 1970s has employed strategies ranging from humor to confrontation to examine racisim and received notions of identity. Cornered, 1988, is a provocative installation that deals with Piper’s analysis of her own racial identity. The work consists of a video located in the corner of a room. In front of the monitor is a long table resting on its side. With its legs pointing out from the corner, it functions as a barrier. Six feet in front of the monitor are rows of chairs to accommodate viewers watching the videotape. The surrounding wall space is empty for five feet on either side except for photocopies of Piper’s father’s two birth certificates. One identifiying him as white hangs on the right-hand wall flanking the monitor, while the other, identifying him as octoroon hangs on the left-hand wall. In the video, Piper’s monologue, delivered in an intimate, personal style presents the viewer with a master lesson in logic. Cornered is on loan from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicage. ABOUT THE ARTISTS

In 1984 Golub was the subject of a major retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. His paintings are included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s current exhibition Black Male: Representation of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art. Golub is represented by Printworks and Rhona Hoffman Galleries in Chicago.

Piper is represented by the John Weber and Paula Cooper Galleries in New York. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, AVA, and numerous NEA fellowships. She has recently exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, Kettle’s Yard/Cambridge University and the Munich Kunstverein. A conference on her work in art and philosophy was held at New York University in October 1992.

Leon Golub / Adrian Piper