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Gardens at The Grace: Selections from the Permanent Collection

Saturday, March 16, 2019 10:00 AM - Saturday, August 10, 2019 5:00 PM
The Grace Museum
102 Cypress Street Abilene, TX 79601
ROMARE BEARDEN, Girl in the Garden, 1979, lithograph, Collection of The Grace Museum

What do artists Romare Bearden, Charles Taylor Bowling, Ken Hale, Jimmy Jalapeeno, Loren Mozley, Andy Warhol, Dan Wingren, Roger Winter, and Tony Sheets have in common?

Clue #1: This is not a trick art history question.

Clue #2: It does have something to do with gardens.

Answer: Each artist had a work of art on view in Gardens at The Grace, an exhibition featuring artwork from The Grace Museum’s vast and varied permanent art collection.


Each piece was selected to focus on the idea that gardens, like works of art, are created with a particular event or memory in mind. Watercolor, oil paint, acrylic paint, and ink on paper and canvas in artists’ hands produce very different images of similar subjects.

In the 1979 Space Fruit series, Warhol isolated fruit from the garden in bold, flat, Pop Art shapes, and colors. Jimmy Jalapeeno, Charles Taylor Bowling, and Tony Sheets present more realistic views of particular landscapes. Mid-century modernist Loren Mozley painted a cubistic abstract watercolor of the Pedernales River. Famous African-American artist, Romare Bearden, depicted a woman welcoming us into her garden using bold, flat shapes, created with colorful ink on a lithographic stone for the 1979 American Portfolio Series. Roger Winter invited us to join him on a nature walk in his small, 1989 oil painting, New Walking Stick – Self-Portrait. Contemporary artist Ken Hale painted a large canvas featuring a central flower pot floating in a blue field of outlined objects. Each artist is sharing their unique version of a well-known subject – our relationship with the natural world.

This project is supported by a grant from the Abilene Cultural Affairs Council and the City of Abilene.

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