LIFE ON EARTH
A Series of Drawings and Paintings by
Emilio Cruz

LIFE ON EARTH is a new exhibition that premieres a recently completed series of 40 drawings and 36 paintings by artist Emilio Cruz, inspired by Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos etchings and Black Paintings. The exhibition is curated by art historian and author, Paul Staiti, Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation, Art Department, Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA. Created in 2002 and 2003, this new series of works continues Cruz's artistic search for a moral imperative in our post-modern world.

Curator, Paul Staiti, in his essay for the exhibition writes, "...mordant without pathos, the works have descended conceptually from a particular strain of fantastical art that attempts nothing less than the visual articulation of the stealth demons that ceaselessly kiss reality and trump the rational." Staiti continues "...Cruz's style is masterful, classical, even beautiful."

Emilio Cruz writes, "What I learned from Goya is that when one is trying to create works that demand intrepid moral resolve, it is imperative that the space be composed in a manner that it invites suspension of judgment, unless it will fall victim to romanticism and sentimentality. Because we are either alone in the universe or exist as an element of the divine, the space must bring into focus the terrifying irrationality of that knowledge. For the enemy is never man, it is irrationality. As a result, paranoia, xenophobia, and fear of the unknown are dramatically portrayed in this series, entitled, LIFE ON EARTH to capture the consuming complexity of our contemporary dilemma, bridging time past and time present."

Born in New York City, Emilio Cruz has been cited by such important art historians as Harry Rand Curator, Painting & Sculpture of The National Museum Of American Art as one of the important pioneers of American Modernism of the sixties when he first began fusing Abtract Expressionism with figuration. During this period he exhibited with such important New York galleries as Virginia Zabriskie and Martha Jackson. These paintings became closely associated with Jan Muller, Lester Johnson and Bob Thomp-son. Henry Geldzahler former 20th Century Curator of The Metropolitan Museum Of Art now deceased in 1984 wrote, "Emilio Cruz' work deserves to be widely known and handsomely supported."

In the seventies Cruz lived in Chicago and taught at The Art Institute Of Chicago returning to New York in 1982 when he once more began to exhibit there. Geno Rodriquez Curator & Executive Director Of The Alternative Museum wrote: "Emilio Cruz, a brilliant and impassioned artist current paintings are monumental, imbued with intelligence, fury and an apt sense of irony. They reflect the turbulent world within which we live." In 1990 art critic Geoffrey Jacques wrote: "Emilio Cruz paints humanities essence. Mythology and archeology are the foremost concerns of the painter Emilio Cruz. Dinosaurs, skeletal humans and fossil-like images are used in his work as metaphoric signpost in a consideration of the basic questions of existence."

At The Rose Art Museum Boston in an exhibition titled, Alchemies Of The Sixties, Cruz's work was included amongst other more recognized American modernist masters as Jasper Johns, Frank Stella, Morris Lewis. For his one man exhibition at The Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts March 1997 Paul Staiti writing for the catalogue wrote: "Emilio Cruz's Homo sapiens series is a strange and haunting genealogy of the modern soul... What is at stake here more than biopolitical culture, is the remystification of the body and mapping of consciousness."

Emilio Cruz is also a poet and playwrite whose plays written in late seventies Homeostasis: Once More The Scorpion and The Absence Held Fast To It's Presence was produced in 1981 by Jean Erdman and Joseph Campbell in New York at The Open Eye Theater and later performed in France in The World Theater Festival in Nancy France, Paris and Italy where they received extraordinary reviews as the outstanding work of the festival.

Emilio Cruz studied in New York and has taught at New York University, Pratt Institute, Parsons School Of Design, Cooper Union. He is in such outstanding collections such as The Museum Of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, National Museum Of American Art, Museum of the University Of Texas at Austin, Museum of the University of Tucson, Hirshhorn Museum, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, Wadsworth Atheneum, The Studio Museum in Harlem. He has received several scholarships and Fellowships including two National Endowment for the Arts.

At present Emilio Cruz is living and working in New York where he has developed this beautiful and provacative series of works, LIFE ON EARTH.

The exhibition will be available beginning in 2004. Please call for more details.

LIFE ON EARTH

Exhibition Details

Contents:    40 framed drawings, 30" x  40"
                    36 paintings - various sizes
                    Text panels & photo mural

Curator:      Paul Staiti

Space Req: 250 - 300 running feet or 3000 sq feet. approx

Loan Fee:    Price on request

Insurance:   Exhibitor responsible

Shipping:     Exhibitor responsible

Req:            Appropriate security

Dates Available: Jan. 2004 - 2007

Please contact LTE for details: 310-397-3098

E-mail: landau@a-r-t.com

LIFE ON EARTH
by Emilio Cruz

Knowing the present quandaries challenging our viability as a com-manding species on this earth, and in respect to Hieronymous Bosch's ironic Garden of Earthly Delights about which I wrote so much in my novel, Luminous Journey, subtitled: Somewhere On The Outskirts Of Purgatory, and as a lover of Francisco Goya's Los Caprichos, I began to compose this series of drawings. What I learned from Goya is that when one is trying to create works that demand intrepid moral resolve, it is imperative that the space be composed in a manner that it invites suspension of judgment, unless it will fall victim to romanticism and sentimentality. Because we are either alone in the universe or exist as
an element of the divine, the space must bring into focus the terrifying irrationality of that knowledge. For the enemy is never man, it is irrationality. As a result, paranoia, xenophobia, and fear of the unknown are dramatically portrayed in this series, entitled Life On Earth, to capture the consuming complexity of our contemporary dilemma, bridging time past and time present.

From the middle and late sixties I realized that in our Modern and Postmodern world all individuals, conscious or unconscious of the fact, have the opportunity to be not only exposed to but saturated in an array of magnificent world art representing a multitude of cultures, places and times. Being so saturated, in part the result of colonialism, gives one the miraculous opportunity to comprehend and envision the distinctions and similarities that motivate and galvanize our humanity. Ultimately one can reach an understanding that our needs and desires are the same regardless of plight. Furthermore, this encounter with great art has the tendency to reshape our ability to perceive, for hindsight can lead to foresight; as T.S.Eliot wrote: "Time past and time present are both perhaps present in time future." In this process we become "Everybody" as in James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, HCE: "Here comes everybody".

Bearing witness to historical artifacts, unlike reading about history, places one in the throes of history, because the medium has been the message throughout historical time. This fact did not go unnoticed by the South American literary giant Jorge Luis Borges whose tales appear to emerge out of an ascetic wilderness of thought because he understood that life is lived cerebrally, more on the metaphysical plane than the physical. For him, the non-material world of ideas is determined by inapprehensible imagining, as postulated by Kant, Schopenhauer, and such Logical Positivists as A.J.Ayer.

Borges, entrenched in sly irony, magnificently puts these ideas to task, as exemplified by his short story, The Aleph. In this tale a man, Carlos Argentino, discovers in his cellar an Aleph where all of art, philosophy and literature come together on a point of light reflected in a mirror. At first it astounds the author who finally brings the veracity of this Aleph into question, because: "I would like to know whether Carlos Argentino chose that name or he read it- applied to another point where all points collide… Incredible as it may seem, I believe the Aleph of Garay Street was a false Aleph"… He then lists a series of places and events where other such Alephs have been reported beginning with: "Around 1867, Captain Burton held the post of British Consul in Brazil. In July, 1942, Pedro Henriquez Urena came across manuscript of Burton's, in a library at Santos, dealing with the mirror which the Oriental world attributes to Iskander Zu al-Karnayn, or Alexander Bicornis of Macedonia. In its crystal the whole world was reflected." Borges finally asked at the end of the story: "Does this Aleph exist in the heart of stone? Did I see it there in the cellar when I saw all things, and have I now forgotten"…

Amazingly as if by magic Borges introduces such complex ideas with such simple means, in this case to remind us that the compilation of conflicting temporalities may cause forgetfulness, producing a multitude of calamities. I too labor to suggest the potentiality of this dreaded outcome. So nullification of significance becomes an expressive tool, as if each state of being portrayed in these drawings threatens to erase one another.

In another story by Borges, The Garden Of Forking Paths: …" is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of a universe such as Ts'ui Pen conceived it to be. Different from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. The web of time-the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries-embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and I do not…"

Contrasting Borges while supporting his fictional thesis, in my Labyrinth, which is partially defined in these drawings, life does not exist in time and space, but space alone. Because space in my hypothesis is configured multifariously and simultaneously while capable of possessing the variables of potential experience. Thus I create interchangeable spatial events that can be rearranged by discreet factors, as they often are in time. Under these existential spatial arrangements, we are not only ourselves but also others, making the consequences of thoughts and actions infinitely more complicated.

Surely this is not new, for in the West it began with printing which allowed the mind of a single author to enter and alter the minds of many. To absorb the thoughts of an author temporarily one must become the author, as if one were performing a rite that engages transference, as in psychoanalyses. Literature then becomes not only an arrangement of words spinning tales but states of being. The word as in logos becomes life. This is what Foucault was postulating in his famous essay The Death Of The Author, for in this rite of transference originality is sacrificed upon the altar of collective knowledge. Therefore it can be said that literature engages substitution similar to sympathetic magic, akin to animistic ancestor worship.

The same can be said of pictures; one no longer needs to visit Florence Italy to see Michelangelo's David have their perception of form shaped by it. In this manner all who have seen Michelangelo become Michelangelo. To be otherwise one would have to undergo and endure an exorcism ritual so harsh as to risk their sanity.

C.G. Jung wrote in his foreword to Symbols of Transformation: "The psyche is not something unalterably given, but a product of its own continuous development. Hence altered glandular secretions or aggravated personal relationships are not the sole causes of neurotic conflicts: these can equally well be caused by historically conditioned attitudes…" To this, in this hemisphere, all other forms of identity are but romantic pretence. Europe was no longer Europe once it colonized America, Asia, and Africa. Surely no one today can deny that they are everybody, from the powerful to the powerless.

Concerning culture, our brains do not discriminate, our minds do. As a primary survival strategy the brain must absorb and record everything we encounter. Therefore involuntarily, everything that we experience and interact with becomes our self, independent of cognitive awareness or fancy. Culture is the expressed crystallization of this composition.

This too I suspected in the late sixties when I began experimenting with discursive spatial arrangements allowing for the existence of simultaneity. Besieged by information, often conflicting and contradictory, I became starkly aware that unlike primal humans who spent their lives dwelling in a geographical zone that did not exceed more than sixty miles, who knew little about the surrounding world unless they were forced to migrate, we are exposed to disparate places, people and events far beyond our reach. The constant presence of such disparate information ultimately shapes not only our perceptions, but also who we are.

So it is not simply physical travel through space that radically changed the phenomenon of being but the easy availability of information and concepts, capable of directing us by existing in the mind everywhere and into everyone simultaneously, willfully and opposed to our will.

In respect to this awareness and the constant flood of horror I witness daily from innovative electronic media, one can see world hunger and genocidal wars transpire while helplessly, passively, growing increasingly detached, snacking on some edible delight inside their personal space, miles and miles removed.

To establish, encapsulate, and express similar states of being in this series, like others I have created, it is comprised of two vital elements both discursively realized.

While viewing these works it is important to consider that the creative act of making art is in essence liturgical, for it engages a rite of passage. Through it, by the act of substitution, we exorcise and conjure human concerns: anxieties, bewilderment and console the human spirit while seeking to satisfy our need to communicate, to define our "will to overcome" as Nietzsche put it. This rite of visual communication, exorcism, conjuring, exalting, examining, searching, and praising has been performed through art for over 40,000 years. Rather one intended to beseech the gods or impress their neighbors the origin of art lies in religion. Unlike Nietzsche, but more like Dostoyevsky and Teilhard de Chardin I search for a transcending moral resolution and this I hope is expressed in my art.

Discursively there are other masters whose erstwhile spirits contribute to the creation of these images largely dependent upon disconnected relationships in order to formulate a metaphor that leaves the mind suspended in the humbling state of not-knowing, or as Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno state in their collaborative work written in 1944 Dialectic Of Enlightment, "when god was murdered so was knowledge", because knowledge is rooted in not knowing and introduces new states of not knowing, as in Gnosticism. Some of these hallowed masters of drawing and printmaking are: Albrecht Durer, Pieter Brueghel, Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, William Blake, Francisco Goya, Honore' Daumier, Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Winslow Homer.

By no means have I attempted to sycophantically imitate this diverse group of magnificent artists whose expressive powers owe much to our Paleolithic masters, but I am deeply inspired by them. For each were not only masters of their craft but also masters of metaphor, similitude and analogy.
My wish and mission remains, as always, to create unique works of art, to become a worthy contributor to this noble history. And this cannot be achieved without bringing together a synthesis of time past and time present. In this way I choose to be more like Picasso who was so entrenched in the history of art that he could not help but to be original. Or the great compassionate poet Pablo Neruda who said that he was never alone because he was the multitude. Chief Seattle wrote: "No where on this earth is there a place called solitude, for the dead do not die."

Indeed they do not because all who are alive are filled by the many. As for example when I visited Haiti, dominated by animists, I heard in my body the cries of tortured-to-death slaves whose souls could not rest unless they told their tales. By transporting these restless souls in my flesh I have become a witness. At present as in the past, art must place the beholder in a place of being. Not one that signifies localized geographical place of origin, but one that embodies a conceptual and omnipresent metaphysical state of being codifying the existence of the mind, as postulated most firmly by Schopenhauer. The limitations of our physical or material bodies, prevents the experience of life from being apprehended or perceived through the faculties without the aid of the imagination.

It is not being that determines our state of being, because by no satisfying means can existence be proven other than by existence. Scientists may be able to replicate a cell, but none can prove that this replication is more than an illusion. This I fear represents the eternal quandary. Hinduism recognizes this truth.

So I walk each day amongst the living and the dead. I do so as one called human who embodies all of those that belong to the development of an evolutionary chain leading to consciousness. Therefore I am a fish, antelope, bear, lion, goat, predator and prey, the one who sacrifices and the one who is sacrificed, and according to many modern geneticists and micro-biologists much to my embarrassment a fruit fly.

Often I transform the human anatomy, by displacement or scale. Other times I place one body or a number of bodies into another, turning the human torso into a vessel as if these merged beings are in a state of collective metamorphosis, being genetically altered, mutilated by paradox or the exigencies of war and environmental pollution.

Through art one can communicate with ghosts. To this effect in my 1979 play Homeo stasis: Once More The Scorpion I begin by writing a letter to Francisco Goya dropped off at the mail box of the land of the dead, post marked for spirits, because I state certain discouraging events have led me to write to him against sound advise. "Do not write him they say, after all he is dead and only a fool would write a dead man. But every now and then blood is splattered against the clock as I watch the frozen hands of death stand still in the belly of time."

All artists, who adore art as visual scribes are writing letters to the living, and the dead. Therefore no artists are alone for the ghosts that inhabit their minds and spirits circulate through their studios and therefore embody their souls. These blithe spirits, whose origin are rooted in Paleolithic times, are the ancestors, known and unknown, and periodically they are given to whisper secrets.

As for Winslow Homer ironically most of my life I had little interest in this artist, beyond respectful curiosity, but because of an essay written by my friend Paul Staiti, an historian of 19th Century American art, I have developed a recent interest, especially since Homer like Melville used the sea as a metaphor, signifying the second law of thermodynamics.
The discursive means I utilize to fashion my images are brought about because I realize that the irrational is a form of violence that can culminate in tyranny. Only reason stands against violence. For the development of all organic life is dependent upon survival strategies, catalyzing evolution. All disconnected developments coming about suddenly disarm the brain, but reason allows the organism to record and adapt, through reflection.

My works are not symbolic, since symbols are by and large culturally specific and therefore subject to change and misinterpretation. But they are metaphors invented by the individualized mind, yet they share universal qualities that transcend place and time because they rely upon in many cases not knowing but sensing. And these sensory impulses have the tendency to galvanize states of consciousness while serving as a springboard for ideas because they must be felt. Therefore I, as an artist in the tradition of shaman, must unnerve and disrupt to give one pause to ponder through association.

To do such discursive work one must bring to bear a multitude of intellectual and conceptual ideas seasoned by historical knowledge. So in these works I comment on art through line, edge, light and dark, form and mass and the absence of rationalism, literalism and empiricism. They must be considered non-codified events that exist on their own terms, unless I intend to manipulate being by imposing my will like a god. By using substitution, I attempt to achieve what Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno edify: " The magician never interprets himself as the image of the invisible power… The sacrificial animal is massacred instead of the god. Substitution in the course of sacrifice marks a step towards discursive logic."

Images of man- made vehicles, such as boats, emerge phantom- like out of the sullen darkness, mist, and fog following a storm at sea. Appearing ghostly and threatening, they are accompanied by other apparition- like beings caught adrift in the doldrums of a windless sea. Then there are those who are shipwrecked and destitute, no longer capable of determining their destiny. Another sea vessel is caught spinning and swirling, being whipped around and swallowed into a vortex or a whirlpool of thermodynamic waves. A few aberrant boats are captained by anachronistic beasts, such as pigs that unknown to themselves sail themselves to market. Another uses decapitated heads as oars illuminated by moon- light. And there are carriages pulled by a domesticated horse that is actually enslaved as a beast of burden dynamically affecting human history by being used to increase the speed of travel, conquest and colonization and pulling the plow that gives birth to an agricultural revolution. Ironically clever, disinterested rabbits snidely observe human folly although they are dispassionately trapped and mutilated in scientific experiments and locked in cages. All of these forms themselves repeated or mutated from other forms are made present through concave and convex shapes, suggesting sacrificial orifices as well as biological/ anatomical organism. The ships suggest the crossing of the River Styx as well as the ocean canoes of certain Pacific people, such as those brilliant master artists and craftsmen of the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. These culturally fluid analogies clearly demonstrate the collective unconscious of Carl Jung and the viability of Mircea Eliade's comparative religion.

Boats ironically have managed, through transporting goods and slaves, to fuse together disparate people from distinct continents. They meet first as master and slave and ultimately become one by mere social and economic erosion and the magnificent human spirit that makes one and all yearn to define their own path. The idea is inspired by Robert Shaw's play Man In A Glass Booth, wherein the bullet proof, protective, pristine transparent glass booth encasing these prisoners possesses ironic beauty. The very transparency of these sadistic façades has a tendency to incriminate those who are judged and those who judge, because, when they are used to interrogate political prisoners or war criminals they merge the innocent with the guilty. Ultimately this results in the incrimination of society at large. My indicted prisoners, placed on trial like Camus' Stranger, are forced to spill out their biographies and thereby incriminate themselves. So in their hands they hold interchangeable alternating heads because their will to survive forces them to create masks so the lie cannot be separated from the truth.

Trees cut down to make accommodating domestic objects aiding human comfort while destroying nature by compromising the very air we breath, are compared to the tree of life marking our DNA. According to the Hebrew Bible god gave Cherubim flaming swords to guard against man lest he gain eternal life, once god discovered that: "Man is evil". Desirable women languishing in the throes of luxury as sex objects as portrayed in Western high art give these drawings an erotic charge, and they are contrasted with agony and death to demonstrate the brain's dependence upon the apprehension of pleasure as a catalyst to further enhance evolution of the species.
Oblong shapes are manipulated as organic properties exemplifying the connection between all living things, by bringing together a female nude, a pear and a rabbit in a stasis organized like a still life in order to emphasize their metaphysical and physical connection and say all are one. Those who humble and those who are humbled are present. They huddle submissively and they rebel, both noble and ignoble. Nature puts forth an organized rebellion turning the table, topsy- turvy, to prevent further domination by man of this thermodynamic phenomenon called life. The persecuted and the persecutor are brought together in various unusual compromising exchanges. Out of the tree of life grow bodies and heads severed from the rest of their anatomies but are connected to the roots of trees in an act of metamorphous to address what is sacred and what defines sacrilege in the throes of perplexed minds disemboweled from reflection. The spinal chord expresses the role of the nervous system as the messenger of god who uses a simple configuration to create an array of creatures from hulking giant dinosaurs to fish and fowl. Dislodged mythic beings, such as a mysterious snake covered by scales that vacated the Garden of Eden, to integrate and migrate to become the human spine attached to our cerebellums leading to cerebral consciousness. People grow from trees like fruit rooted to the subterranean earth while reaching for sky and sun.

I celebrate the total biosphere's fauna and flora, blooming plants and creatures that walk, crawl, slither and swim, sometimes zoomorphic, or anthropomorphic but all in the act of deceptive metamorphosis emphasizing their living potential. The crowd and the isolated individual abandoned by reason while struggling to merge sex, birth and death to fashion free will are played out in these discursive drawings honed through both planned and spontaneous improvisation sometimes savage, tragic, macabre, humorous, erotic, and bizarre simultaneously.

Like all humans these fashioned beings are often, pompous, arrogant, proud, bedazzled, amazed, afraid, discerning, capricious, frivolous, promiscuous, stubborn, determined, foolish, humiliated, anxious, scrutinizing, condemning, approving, selfish and unconscious, full of cunning and bent on deceit, while others stand by passive and bewildered, some even recognize divine cause, reason and logic and therefore mourn our folly.

These drawings are not provocative Surreal, illustrations of dreams. They represent discursive essences of critical events compounded when we are awake, defined by somnambulists, and signifying our Life On Earth.

Emilio Cruz's
LIFE ON EARTH

By Paul Staiti
January 2003

Here are forty drawings-and thirty-four companion paintings--that compel us into the anguished zone of Emilio Cruz's Life on Earth. Mordant without pathos, the pictures have descended conceptually from a particular strain of fantastical art that attempts nothing less than visual articulation of the stealth demons that ceaselessly kiss reality and trump the rational. Most evidently hovering over Cruz's imagery like an ancestral shroud is Francisco Goya's "Black Paintings" (1820-23), a set of fourteen frescos painted into the Quinta del Sordo, and Los Caprichos (1797-98), a set of eighty etchings that, all together, imagine a hellscape inhabited by semi-human creatures of bestial appetites and impulses. The relationship between the work of the two artists is sometimes explicit, as in the imagery of Calamitous Toys, in which Cruz revives the signature owl that Goya unleashed on the sleeping artist in Capricho no. 43: The Dream of Reason Produces Monsters. The artists' moral lessons, too, seem explicitly related: now, as much as then, superstition and evil are never more than a weary eyelid away from burying rationality. But for the most part the relationship is less explicit and more diffuse, being concerned with the core capacity of art to liberate and materialize imaginative thought, and to unleash troubling mutabilities that are, in Cruz's work, moral, biological, historical, racial, and sexual, to name a few imagistic currents.

Cruz's dialogue with Goya dates back to 1979, when he wrote a play, Homeo Stasis: Once More the Scorpion, in which a character is so disheartened by contemporary events that he is moved to write a verse letter to Goya and post it at a mailbox in the land of the dead. "The heart does not always pump wisdom," Cruz admits, but "At the time of my choosing I try to plunge myself into the/ Eternal abyss to liberate myself from the false hope of/ Justice, but not from dignity."

Similar in concept to Homeo Stasis, the parables in Life on Earth are "visual letters" to Goya, who might be the only person, even in death, capable of understanding our deranged world. In a form of spiritual communion across time, Cruz turns to Goya as an orienting figure. But the imagery in Life on Earth is not strictly an homage to the eighteenth-century artist, for as Cruz knows well, every culture needs to redefine and reinterpret irrationality and evil in its own terms. As a result, Cruz's owl in the drawing Calamitous Toys stares malevolently out at us and, unlike Goya's birds of irrational prey, is no longer willing to merely spook reason, but instead sinks its talons into the skull of a man who does not have the benefit of being asleep. Still conscious, cut off at the waist to reveal a hollow trunk cavity (a la mode Hieronymus Bosch's Hell from the Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1505), and helpless to do anything about his besiegement, he imploringly yet passively stares out at us, as if to say, "neither wisdom nor consciousness will be enough to save us from the leviathan of historical accident, or from ourselves. "

Cruz wishes to assert in this drawing and across the whole of Life on Earth that the old Enlightenment polarities (rationality v. irrationality, consciousness v unconsciousness, muses v demons) now seem mild and perhaps quaint, or, at the very least, not an option in the twenty-first century, since we really can no longer expect to find any refuge from our nightmares, even in the daylight of consciousness. Our particular cultural affliction, in fact, is to be fully awake during our own ruination. Where Goya said he had chosen subjects "from the multitude of follies and blunders common in every civil society, as well as from the vulgar prejudices and lies authorized by custom, ignorance or interest," Cruz might just omit the word "civil," because, as we know, all that is polite, virtuous, or well-behaved got squeezed out long ago, victim to narcissism, spectacle, and greed. "The constant flood of horrors," Cruz says, is now channeled through media that allows us to witness "world hunger and genocidal wars" while, miraculously and monstrously, we can be found simultaneously "snacking on some edible delight" in a "personal space, miles and miles removed." In the moral twilight world of postmodernity, media elides consciousness and unconsciousness, muses and demons, misery and self-satisfaction. Purgatory is now 24/7.

Whereas Goya's political art often made reference to explicit contemporary events and persons, Cruz's is more politically generalized, though we sometimes see the residue of recent world events. For example, his drawing Harvest (do we hear an echo of Timothy O'Sullivan's Harvest of Death, or of Bosnia, Kosovo, or Cambodia?) is a killing field of still sentient skulls. Like Goya, too, there is something still residually Catholic in Cruz's political vision, as he meditates on the morphing possibilities for imagining the warfare between good and evil. But for the most part the drawings are politically evocative without being politically targeted, and exist largely independent of specific events or persons. Recalling in this aspect the hallucinatory sensibility of Bosch, they achieve their imagistic power via an inventive cast of characters: whole or amputated naked humans, wild dogs grafted onto human bodies and human heads grafted onto dogs, birds of prey, wild hippopotami, feral rabbits, and other, more indescribably, mythic creatures that populate darkly portentous spaces in which unfathomably apocalyptic events take place. And as with the work of Bosch, one does not find oneself necessarily repelled. In fact, quite the opposite, the urge for me is to pull toward the scenes with macabre fascination. Are those ecologically doomed trees trying to bust out from a greenhouse in Imprisonment of Trees? In Displacement at Eden, is the serpent separating a man, whose head is reversed on his body, from a woman, whose head grows out of the orifice of her truncated body, some kind of bizarre Genesis/Apocalypse? Do people sprout from the branches of trees in When Things are Watered? Why is there a person slung beneath the chest of running, screeching four-legged creature that seems to have survived from the Cretaceous period in My Favorite Pet? Doesn't the mast of that ship in Cranium Oars for Victory resemble vertebrae? And why is all this happening? As in Los Caprichos, no one knows because these vicissitudes show no causes, they sublimely happen to an irredeemable humanity.

Cruz's imagery is full of provocative references beyond the nightmare worlds of Goya and Bosch. Jorge Luis Borges' deeply metaphysical and entirely subjective Book of Imaginary Beings and Labyrinths come to mind as general influences. Kafka's identity-erasing bureaucratic torments are called up by Cruz's Somnambulance and Vacancy, in which figures are trapped in parallel planes, or file behind one another in dour sameness. His Incubus or Succubus?, in which a sleeping female nude is visited by an intrusive man, recalls Fuseli's Nightmare and Manet's Olympia at one and the same time. The strange slave imagery of Cranium Oars, Vortex, and The Captains is at the bizarre intersection of J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship, Albert P. Ryder's Toilers of the Sea, and Winslow Homer's The Gulf Stream. And passages from other drawings bear affinity to pictures by George Grosz, William Blake, and Francis Bacon.

For all the trauma, explicit and implicit, Cruz's style is masterful, classical, even beautiful. Looking at the drawings I thought about Pierre Paul Prud'hon's nineteenth-century drawings that seem to generate from nocturnal smoke. But Cruz is a less ambiguous and bolder draughtsman. The darkness of Interrogation is itself majestic and palpable, the line of Mating Game sure and sensual. And that applies to the paintings, too, which always demonstrate a draughtsman's touch, as for example in the elegantly linear S-curve of the bat's wing in the frightening Transformation of Souls, or, the mannerist manipulations of light and dark in Somnambulance. His confident technique allows the phantasmic to acquire visceral truth, despite its flagrant imaginativeness. That was the tactic Michelangelo used to make the figures in the prophetic spaces of the Last Judgment believable and frightening at the same time. Heaven and hell must be real because the bodies tell us so. Even though the subjects in Life on Earth veer into the extraordinary, the well-rendered body, however disfigured and mutated, is the key to rhetorical effectiveness.

Since anything impossible can be imagined in Cruz's Life on Earth, I can enjoy the liberty of creating critical witchcraft of my own. I can imagine his seventy-four pictures spending an evening with Robert Wilson's haunting installation, 14 Stations (2000). Derived from the tradition of Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, Wilson's gigantic environment, which has been installed at Oberammergau and MassMOCA, is meta-religious. Referring as much to the Holocaust and slave shacks as to passion plays, Wilson's rows of visitable cabins, or stations, imploringly ask, as does Cruz's Life on Earth, What is the nature of suffering and condemnation, and where are the sources of solace in this world? In my own dream, Cruz's figures and phantoms will come to life, slip out of their frames, and take up residence in Wilson's howling cabins for a nocturnal jam session. The theme du nuit? Life's buffet of pain and salvation in all its spiritual, psychological, and physical phantasmagoria. Why would anyone want to furtively watch the proceedings? Because at the end of the day we know that what we will see is what exists a millimeter below the satin veneers of life, and that it is better to let Cruz-or Wilson, or Goya, or Bosch-be our guide in representation, than to experience any of it firsthand. Goya knew that that task was his special office, and in what amounts to a "letter" posted to Cruz, he described the harrowing terrain to be experienced by any fearless artist: "imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders." Cruz read the "letter," and for that we thank him from the anxious region of our souls.

Emilio Cruz
LIFE ON EARTH

List of Works

Total number of works: 74
40 Drawings
34 Paintings

- Drawings - Paintings -

Drawings
charcoal on paper

1. A Circumstance Of Luxury And Shadows 2002 / 22"x 30"
2. Somnambulance 2002 / 19"x 25"
3. Imprisonment of Trees 2002 19"x 25"
4. Sea Ahoy For Land ships 2002 / 22" x 30"
5. Oblivion and Apparitions 2002 / 22"x 30"
6. Vacancy 2002 / 19"x 25"
7. Vortex 2002 / 20x 25"
8. Cranium Oars For Victory 2002 / 20"x 25"
9. Flight 2002 / 19"x25"
10. Incubus Or Succubus? 2002 / 19"x 25"
11.Calamitous Toys 2002 / 20"x 25"
12. Displacement At Eden 2002 / 20"x 25"
13. Talcum And Arsenic For Hatters 2002 / 20"x 25"
14. The Demands Of Pears 2002 / 22"x 30"
15. Internal Conquest Digested 2002 / 22"x 30"
16. Trojan Horse 2002 / 19"x 25"
17. North By North West 2002/ 19"x 25"
18. When Things Are Watered 2002 / 22"x 30"
19. The Natural Way 2002 / 22" x 30"
20. The Birth Of Mask 2002 / 22" x 30"
21. Visitation 2002/ 22
22. Another Way 2002/ 20"x 25"
23. Interrogation 2002/ 20"x 25"
24. Transformation Of Souls 2002/ 19"x 22"
25. Anatomical Dilemma 2002/ 20"x 25"
26. The Captains 2002/ 20"x 25"
27. Imposition Of Phantoms 2002/ 20"x 25"
28. Interruption 2002/ 20"x 25"
29.A Bit Of Liberty 2002/ 20' x 25"
30. Crystal Prison And Mask 2002/ 20"x 25"
31. Harvast 2002/ 20"x 25"
32. Revelation 2002/ 20"x 25'
33.Master And Slave 2002/ 20"x 25"
34. The Voyage 2002/ 20"x 25"
35. The Other Place 2002/ 22"x 30"
36. My Favorite Pet 2002/ 20"x 25"
37. Announcement 2002/ 20"x 25"
38. Hierarchy 2002/ 20"x 25"
39. Mating Game 2002/ 22"x 30"
40. A Few Laughs For Geneticist 2002/ 22"x 30"

Paintings

1. Minotaur / oil on canvas-2003 - 33"x 40"
2. Flinch / oil on canvas-2003 - 37"x 41"
3. Somnambulance / oil on canvas- 2003 - 60" x 60"
4. My Favorite Pet / oil on canvas- 2003- 60"x 60"
5. Calamitous / oil on canvas 2003- 50"x 38"
6. Apprehensive Mishap / oil on canvas-2003-50"x 38"
7. Bloom/ oil on canvas-2003-53"x 41"
8.  A Particular Arrangement/-2003-52"x 40"
9.  Variation of Crystal Prison /-2003-50"x 38"
10. Master/ oil on canvas/ - 2003-50"x38"
11. Transformation of Souls / oil on canvas -2003-40"x 37"
12. Incongruity / oil on canvas- 2003- 48"x 36"
13. The Casting/ oil on canvas- 2003-50"x 38"
14. Stone is a Forehead/ oil on canvas 2003-50"x 38" (original title=Petrified Mirror)
15. Fragment/oil on canvas-2003-40"x 37"
16. Reconstruction of Terror/ oil on canvas 2003 60"x 60'
17. Portrait of Frank Bowling/ oil on canvas/2003-53"x 41"
18. Portait of No-one II / oil on canvas/ 2003-53"x 41"
19. Portrait of No-one III / oil on canvas/ 2003-53"x 41"
20. Portrait of No-one IV / oil on canvas/ 2003-53"x 41"
21. A Bit of Liberty 2003/ oil on canvas-2003- 41"x 36"
22. Vacancy/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60"
23. Crystal Prison Mask/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60"
24. Engineering/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60"
25. Displacement at Eden/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60"
26. Bliss Factor/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas /50"x 38"
27. The Captains / 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60"
28. Interruption/2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60'
29. The Demands Of Pears / oil & charcoal on canvas / 72"x 60"
30. Cranium Oars/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x 60"
31. My Favorite Pet One 2002/ oil on canvas / 50"x 38"
32. Vortex/ 2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas/ 72"x60"
33. Predator/2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas / 50"x 38"
34. Master/2002/ oil & charcoal on canvas / 41"x 33"

Place of Birth: New York, New York

EDUCATION

Art Students League, New York, NY
Seong Moy, Provincetown, MA
University of Louisville, KY
New School for Social Research, New York, NY

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2001 Skoto Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Molly Barnes Gallery, Santa Monica, CA
1997 Homo sapiens Series, Portraits of No-One and Vertebrae, Steinbaum
Krauss Gallery, New York, NY
Homo sapiens Series, The Museum of American Art, Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA
Homo sapiens Series: 18 Panels, Maurice N. Flecker
Memorial Gallery, Suffolk County Community College, New York
1991 Drawings Informing the Painting, Galerie Francoise et Ses Freres,
Baltimore, MD
1990 Vessels Incarnate, Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY
1998 Kingsborough College, Brooklyn, NY
California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA
1987 Spilled Nightmares, Revelations & Reflections, The Studio Museum in Harlem
New York, NY
1986 Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY
1985 Hand in Hand Gallery, New York, NY
Alternative Museum, New York, NY
1978 Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, IL
1977 Krannert Center, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL
1976 Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, IL
1975 Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, IL
1974 One Illinois Center, Metropolitan Structures, Chicago, IL
Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH
1973 Walter Kelly Gallery, Chicago, IL
1969 Loretto Hilton Gallery, Webster College, MO
1965 Zabriskie Gallery, Provincetown, MA
1963 Zabriskie Gallery, New York, NY

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2000 Frere, New York Independent Art Fair, New York, NY
1999 Alchemy of the Sixties, The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
1999 African American Art @ 2000: Public Voices/Private Visions,
Rockland Center for the Arts, West Nyack, NY
1999 Slave Roots: The Long Memory, Kenkeleba Gallery, New York, NY
1999 Dialectica, New York, NY
1998 Gifts for A New Century, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY
1997 Salon de Dibujo de Santo Domingo, Museo de Arte Moderno de Santo Domingo
1996 Four Collectors, The Century Association, New York, NY
1996 Wheel of Fortune, Artists Interpret the Tarot, Lombard/Fried Fine Arts,
New York, NY
1995 Body Language, Jamaica Arts Center, Jamaica, NY
Face to Face, Artists on Artists, Gallery Swan, New York, NY
Serial Histories, Lombard/Fried Fine Arts, New York, NY
New York University Faculty Show in Two Parts, Apex Gallery, New York, NY
1993 Ciphers of Identity, Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore, MD
organized by Maurice Berger (travels to: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts,
New York, NY; University of South Florida, Tampa Bay, Florida: University
Of California, Irvine; New Orleans Center for Contemporary Arts, Louisiana;
Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas)
Emilio Cruz and Kathy Acker, Two Person Exhibition, Galerie Francois et Ses
Freres, Baltimore, MD
Current American Identities, Biennial of Painting, Cuenca, Ecuador (travels to Panama City,
Panama; TequCigulpa, Honduras: San Salvador, El Salvador; San Jose, Costa Rica;
Medellin, Columbia; Bogota, Columbia; Montevideo, Uruguay; Asuncion, Paraguay
Santo Domingo
Dominican Republic; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Merida, Venezuela; Caracas, Venezuela)
Artists Respond: The "New World" Question, The Studio Museum in Harlem,
New York, NY
New Acquisitions, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Free Within Ourselves: Africian American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art, National Museum of American Art, Washington, DC;
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; IBM, New York, NY
1992 Dream Singers, Storytellers and African American Presence, Jukui Fine Arts Museum,
Japan;Tokushima Modern Art Museum; Otani Memorial Art Museum; New Jersey
State Museum, New Jersey
Gallery Revue, Porter Randall Gallery, La. Jolla, California
Socrates Unbound, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York
Felipe Almada,Emilio Cruz, Edouard Duval-Carrie 3 Person Show, Porter Randall
Gallery, La Jolla, California
1991 Artistas Latino Y Afro Americanos En USA, Museum National De Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile
1992 Grass Roots Arts Energy, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY
Woven Spirits, G.R. N'Namdi Gallery and the Creative Arts Center of Pontiac,
Michigan
1990 Beasts and Dreams, an Artists Place, the Gallery of the Gandy Brodie School of Fine Arts West Townsend, VT
The Decade Show a collaborative exhibition of The Museum of Contemporary
Hispanic Art, The New Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
INTROSPECTIVE: Contemporary Art by Brazilians & Americans '90. The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY; '89, California AFRO American Museum; traveling
1989 Adler Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
Contemporary Nudes, One Penn Plaza, New York, NY
Vero Beach Art Center, Vero Beach, FL
1988 Alice and Look Who Else Through The Looking Glass, Bernice Steinbaum Gallery, New York, NY
Contemporary Art, The Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
1900 To Now: Modern Art From Rhode Island Collections, The Museum of Rhode
Island School of Design, Providence, RI
1987 South Florida University
Josiah White Exhibition Center, Jim Thorpe, PA
The Modernist Tradition 1950-1980, Portland Museum of Art, ME
Call of the Wild: Animal Themes in Contemporary Art, Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
1986 Anita Shapolsky Gallery, New York, NY
Kingsborough Community College, Brooklyn, NY
The Animal Within, The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn, NY
Kind of Blue, Museum of the Provincetown Art Association, Provincetown, MA
(traveled to Northeastern University, Boston, MA)
Forum Gallery, New York, NY
Fetishes, Figures and Fantasies, Kenkeleba House, New York, NY
Five Expressionist Painters from New York, Newton Arts Center, Newtown, MA
Choosing: Changing Perspectives in Modern Art and Art Criticism by Black
Americans, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, IL. (traveling exhibition)
1985 Meeting of the Avant-Garde Kenkeleba House, New York, NY
Hand in Hand Gallery, Three person show, New York, NYA Tribute to Martha Jackson, Arbitrage Gallery, New York, NY (traveling exhibition)
Recent Acquisitions and Notables from the Permanent Collection, The Studio Museum In Harlem, New York, NY
1984 Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963-1973, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY (traveling exhibition)
1982 Adler Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
1981 Nancy Lurie Gallery, Chicago, IL
1980 The Art Institute of Chicago, IL
1979 The Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
Hanser Fuller Gallery, San Francisco, CA
Florida Technological University, Orlando, FL
1976 Neuberger Museum, State University of New York, Purchase, NY
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL
1975 The Classic Revival, Illinois Bell (traveling exhibition: Lobby Gallery, Illinois Bell, Chicago: Lakeview Center for the Arts, Peoria, IL: Quincy Art Center, Quincy, IL; Kirland Gallery, Millikin University, Decatur, IL; Mitchell Museum, Jackson, MI;University Gallery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN through 1976
28th Illinois Invitational, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL
Women Choose Men, ARC Gallery, Chicago, IL
Art In the Business Environment, Leverhouse, New York, NY
The Other Tradition, Michael Wyman Gallery, Chicago, IL
Acquisitions 1970-75, Martha Jackson West, New York, NY
1974 Art in the Business Environment, James Talcott Inc., Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center, New York, NY
Summit Art Center, Summit, NJ
Chile Emergency Exhibition, 383 West Broadway, New York, NY
Art On the Midway, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1973 University Art Museum, University of Texas, Austin, TX
The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1971 World Trade Center, New York, NY
The New Consciousness, Hudson River Museum, New York, NY
1970 Spanish Pavilion, St. Louis, MO
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
1969 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA
1968 Smithsonian Institution, National Collection, Washington, DC
Allentown Museum, Allentown, PA
U.C.L.A. Art Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
State University of New York, University Gallery, Binghampton, NY
1966 Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI
Ithaca Museum, Ithaca, NY)
First World Festival of Negro Arts, Dakar, Senegal
Bowdoin College Museum, ME
Contemporary American Figures, Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, NY
1965 Germantown Art Association, PA
Contemporary Figure Painting, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, NY
1964 Richard Grey Gallery, Chicago, IL
Dayton International, Dayton, OH
1963 HCE Gallery, Provincetown, MA
Sun Gallery, Provincetown, MA

SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Albright Knox Museum
Bell Telephone Co.
The Brooklyn Museum
The William Benton Museum of Art
Ciba-Geigy Corporation
First Pennsylvania Banking and Trust Co.
Freedom National Bank
Greenwich Public Library
Hirshhorn Museum of Art
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art
Kingsborough College
Kemper Insurance Company
Parrish Art Museum
Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art
Museum of Florida International University, Cintas Collection
Museum of Art Association of Provincetown
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Museum of the University of Texas at Austin
Museum of the University of Tucson
National Gallery of American Art, Smithsonian Inst.
New England Center for Contemporary Art
New Jersey State Museum
Newark Museum
H.F. Philipsborn and Company
Portland Museum of Maine
The Studio Museum in Harlem
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford
World Trade Center

SELECTED PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

David Anderson
James Michener
Noah Goldowsky
James Talcott
Richard Grey
Meyer Shapiro
Walter Gutman
Jeanne Siegel
Joseph Hirshhorn
Rabbi Malcom Thomson
Martha Jackson
Virginia Zabriskie
Sam Lecher
Robert Zolla
Leonard Lewis

AWARDS

1998 Doing Art Together 1998 Honoree
1996 Youth Friends Award, The School Art League
1994 Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant
1987 National Endowment for the Arts
1984 World Culture Prize-Statue of Victory Centro Studi Richerche Delle Nazioni
Artemercato Internationale Accademia Italia
1981 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship
1970 National Endowment for the Arts
1965 Cintas Foundation Fellowship
Fulbright Scholarship
1964-65 John Jay Whitney Fellowship, Rome
1962 Walter Gutman Foundation

HONORARIA

1996 Columbia University, Teachers College
Art in General Artists' Studio Tour & Reception-Spring Benefit
Judge National Scholastic, Young Artists and Writers Award (and 1995
1993 Maryland Institute, College of Art
New Jersey State Museum
1989 Contemporary Art in Context, Museum of Modern Art, New York
1986 Boston College of Fine Art, Boston, MA
Yale University, New Haven, CT
1985 City College of New York, NY
1975 Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH
1969 University of Missouri
1968 Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Biography/Bibliography-Emilio Cruz
1966 Cooper Union, New York, NY
1983 Yale University, Hartford, CN

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

1995 Assistant Professor, New York University
1994 Assistant Professor, Pratt Institute
1988 Associate Professor, Cooper Union
Associate Professor, Parsons School of Design
1987 Visiting Artist, SUNY, Purchase, New York
1970-82 Professor of Painting and Drawing, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

Museum of American Art of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, March 8, 1997, Emilio Cruz, Home sapiens series, exhibition brochure, essay by Paul Saiti
New York Magazine, January 30, 1995, The 100 Smartest New Yorkers, p.41,42
Acme Journal, Vol. 1, November 3, 1994, Kinshasha Holman Conwill, Considering Cultural
Permissions, p20-22
The African Americans, Viking Studio Books, p160-161
Elle Décor Magazine, Winter 1990, John Howell, p112-115
Free Spirit Magazine, Summer-Fall 1988, cover and 2 page Article
Evslin, Bernard, Monsters of Mythology, Geryon, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, p4, 40, 76
Evslin, Bernard, Monsters of Mythology, Cerberus, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987, P6, 19

PERFORMANCES

Emilio Cruz is a published poet and writer and has adapted and written works for theater. As Founder and Artistic Director of Spectacle, Inc., a multi-media theater production company incorporating paintings, film, poetry, movement and music, he was invited to participate in the 1981 Festival Mondial du Theatre in Nancy, France. The tour included performances in New York City at the Open Eye Theater, in Paris at the Maison de la Culture and in Milan. The works performed were Homeostasis :Once More the Scorpion and The Absence Held Fast to its Presence, both written and directed by Emilio Cruz.

His works include:

Spirit of Influence
Music & Poetry, Knitting Factory, 1996

Compassion, Images from A Dark Room
Jamaica Arts Center, 1996

Compassion, Season of The Blind
Lombard/Fried Gallery, 1995

Trilogy for A Distant God
Aaron Davis Hall at City College, 1993

Get Down Perfume
Anita Shapolsky Gallery, 1990

Cage
The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1987
BACA Downtown, February 1987
Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1987
Anita Shapolsky Gallery, October, 1986

The Absence Held Fast to Its Presence
Washington Project for the Arts, November, 1982
Randolph Street Gallery, 1981

Homeostasis: Once More the Scorpion (in repertory with The Absence)
Festival Mondial Du Theatre, November 1981
Paris, France
Nancy, France
Turino, Italy
Milano, Italy
Theater of the Open Eye, New York, 1981
MoMing Dance Center, Chicago, IL, 1980
Eleventh Street Theater, Columbia College, 1978

Musical Homage to Ants and Other Symbiotic Creatures
Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, 1976
N.A.M.E. Gallery, Chicago, IL 1976

Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation,
Art Department
Mount Holyoke College
South Hadley, Massachusetts

I. EDUCATION

Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, 1979
M.A. University of Massachusetts, 1973
B.A. University of Michigan, 1972

II. POSITIONS

1993- Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation
Mount Holyoke College

1979-1993 Assistant/Associate Professor of Art
Mount Holyoke College

1978-1979 Assistant Professor of Art History
The Johns Hopkins University

III. PUBLICATIONS

"The Capitalist Portrait," Portraits of Power: The Collection of the New York
Chamber of Commerce, forthcoming, Columbia University Press, 2004

"The State of American Art," Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France,
exhibition catalogue, New Orleans Museum of Art and the University of
Washington Press, 2003

"Con Artists: Harnett, Haberle, and their American Accomplices,"
Deceptions and Illusions: Five Centuries of Trompe L'Oeil Painting,
exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art and Lund Humphries,
Washington, 2002

"Five Centuries of Trompe L'Oeil Painting," American Art Review, XIV,
no. 5, 2002, pp. 168-77.

"Winslow Homer and the Drama of Thermodynamics," American Art, 15,
no. 1, 2001, pp. 11-33

Emilio Cruz: Homo Sapiens Series, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Academy of the Fine Arts, 1997

John Singleton Copley in America, (co-authored with Carrie Rebora),
New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams,
1995, xiii + 348 pages; reprinted, Readings in American Art, ed. by
Marianne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy, New Haven, Yale University Press

Selected Reviews of John Singleton Copley in America:

John Updike, The New York Review of Books, 42,
December 21, 1995, pp. 59-63
Robert Hughes, Time, 146, October 9, 1995, pp. 72-73
Hilton Kramer, The New York Observer, September 18,
1995
Robin Lippincott, The New York Times Book Review,
November 26, 1995, p. 18
Pauline Maier, The New York Times, September 24, 1995,
pp. 34-36
Nancy Stapen, The Boston Globe, July 21, 1995
Alfred Corn, Art News, 94, May, 1995
Richard Saunders, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29, 1996,
pp. 334-35
Ellen G. Miles, The Archives of American Art Jounral, 34,1996,
pp. 24-26

"John Singleton Copley in America, (co-authored with Carrie Rebora),
American Art Review, 7, no. 3, 1995, pp. 118-23

"The Desire to Collect," Collective Pursuits: Mount Holyoke
Investigates Modernism, South Hadley, Mount Holyoke College
Art Museum, 1993

"Ideology and Rhetoric in Erastus Salisbury Field's Historical
Monument of the American Republic," Winterthur Portfolio, 27,
no. 1, 1992, pp. 29-45.

"Illusionism, Trompe l'Oeil, and the Perils of Viewership," The Still
Life Paintings of William Michael Harnett, New York, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art and Harry N. Abrams, 1992, pp. 30-47

Samuel F. B. Morse, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University
Press, 1990, xxii + 300 pages

"Compliance and Resistance: Samuel F. B. Morse, Puritan in Arcadia,"
The Italian Presence in American Art, New York, Fordham University
Press, 1989, pp. 95-105

"American Art in the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum," (co-
authored with Wendy Watson), The Magazine Antiques, 132,
November, 1987, pp. 1122-31

Minerva Chapman, South Hadley and Washington, The Mount
Holyoke College Art Museum and The National Museum of Women
in the Arts, 1986

"Rembrandt Peale on Art," The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and
Biography, 90, no. 1, 1986, pp. 91-109

"God, Family, and Art: Unpublished Letters from Samuel F. B. Morse,"
The Archives of American Art Journal, 25, no. 4, 1985, pp. 10-15

Samuel F. B. Morse, New York, The Grey Art Gallery, New York
University, 1982, xi + 98 pages

"Ideology and Politics in Samuel F. B. Morse's Agenda for a National
Art," Samuel F. B. Morse, Educator and Champion of the Arts
in America, New York, The National Academy of Design, 1982,
pp. 7-53

"Samuel F. B. Morse's Search for a Personal Style: The Anxiety of
Influence," Winterthur Portfolio, 16, no. 3, 1981, pp. 253-81

"Rembrandt Peale's Portrait of Captain Paul Ambrose Oliver and
His Daughter Mary, 1825," Bulletin of The William Benton Museum
of Art, I, 1979, pp. 3-14.

"The 1823 Exhibition of the South Carolina Academy of the Fine Arts:
A Paradigm of Charleston Taste?" Art in the Lives of South Carolinians,
Charleston, The Carolina Art Association, 1979

"John Ashe Alston: Patron of Samuel F. B. Morse," Art in the Lives of
South Carolinians, Charleston, The Carolina Art Association, 1979

"Samuel F. B. Morse in Charleston: 1818-1821," South Carolina
Historical Magazine, 79, April, 1978, pp. 87-112

IV. IN PREPARATION

American Hands and American Minds: Art and Architecture
in the Age of Jefferson

V. EXHIBITIONS

Curator, with Gail Feigenbaum, Victoria Cooke, David O'Brien, and Susan
Taylor LeDuc, Jefferson's America and Napoleon's France, New Orleans
Museum of Art, 2003; 250 paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture,
silver, documents, 275 page catalogue

Curator, with Carrie Rebora, John Singleton Copley in America,
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Metropolitan Museum of Art;
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Milwaukee Art Museum,
1995-96; 81 paintings, 348 page catalogue

Curator, Minerva Chapman, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum;
National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1986-87; 87 paintings and
drawings, 60 page catalogue

Curator, with Gary Reynolds, Samuel F. B. Morse, Grey Art Gallery,
New York University, 1982, 50 paintings, 98 page catalogue

Curator, with John Dobkin, Samuel F. B. Morse: Educator and
Champion of the Art in America, National Academy of Design,
1982, 122 paintings and drawings, 112 page catalogue

VI. FELLOWSHIPS

1998 J. Clawson Mills Senior Fellow, Department of American Paintings
and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

1991-92 J. Clawson Mills Senior Fellow, Department of American Paintings
and Sculpture, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

1991 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, Winterthur Museum,
Gardens, and Library

1990 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar,
Houghton Library, Harvard University

1987 Fellow, Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies

1986-87 National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellow

1985 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute
University of California, Berkeley

1977-78 Rockefeller Foundation Fellow

1975-76 Samuel H. Kress Foundation Fellow

CONTACT INFORMATION

To Schedule Dates and
For More Information Please Contact

LANDAU
TRAVELING EXHIBITIONS

Mitzi Landau, Executive Director
Jeffrey Landau, Director

3485 Greeenwood Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90066

Tel: 310.397-3098
Fax: 310-397-3018

E-mail: landau@a-r-t.com

LTE Website: www.a-r-t.com/lte