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Works by Kathleen Holder on Display through Oct. 14 Impact
Fairmont State News

Works by Kathleen Holder on Display through Oct. 14

Sep 19, 2011

The current exhibition of pastels and giclee prints, “Anamnesis – Okeanosby Kathleen Holder, will be on display through Oct. 14 at Fairmont State University.

The exhibit can be viewed in the Brooks Memorial Gallery, located on the fourth floor of Wallman Hall.  Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.

An opening reception, with a talk by gallery curator Marian Hollinger, will be held on Thursday, Sept. 22, at 7:30 pm.

Kathleen Holder is Professor Emerita from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock.  She currently resides in Buda, Texas, where she continues her prolific career as an artist.  Holder received her B.F.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.

She was a finalist for the 2009 Hunting Art Prize in Houston, received an Arkansas Committee Scholarship from The National Museum of Women in the Arts in 1998 and was elected to Phi Kappa Phi in 1994.  Holden was awarded the UALR Faculty Research Award and Summer Stipend, was twice the recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship (1990-91) and in 1984, received the NEA/MidAmerican Arts Alliance Fellowship, among other awards.

Holder writes: “Throughout my career as an artist, my work has followed a reductive path moving from figuration and figurative abstraction toward a leaner and much more subtle minimalism. Along the way I have tried to boil away excess to arrive at essence.  Conceptually I align myself with contemporaries like James Turrell, Christopher Wilmarth, while remaining historically linked with Rothko, Ryder, Blakelock and Rembrandt.

“Although I sometimes find inspiration in certain visual phenomenon, an expansive landscape, or something I have observed in nature…I am not interested in re-creating or re-presenting the experience.  I am more interested in the metaphysics of a place or experience and capturing that which is transitory or mercurial…i.e., mood, temperature, atmosphere, light.  In part, my work attempts to penetrate a steamy, ethereal world where matter is captured in a process of materialization/ dematerialization, evolution/dissolution.  The work is more a chronicle of a metaphysical journey addressing my experiences symbolically. It is more a search for the truth which exists on the other side of our limited perception of reality and deeply rooted in the subconscious.”

Holder has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her work has been reviewed nationally.  For a complete list of Holder’s exhibitions and reviews, please write or call Brooks Gallery Curator Marian Hollinger:  Marian.Hollinger@fairmontstate.edu, (304) 367-4300.

Brooks GalleryMarian HollingerSchool of Fine ArtsKathleen Holder