Anne Frank Meets Albert Schweitzer
Sculpture (with drawings)
2016
Wood, Paint, Graphite & Graphite on paper
78.5” H x 87” W x43” D
Frida Kahlo Meets Franz Kafka (2 Drawings)
2017
Graphite on Vellum
20” H x 16” W (Framed)
Carla Rae Johnson
From The Séance Series
sculpture, drawings
May 7 - June 12, 2022
Opening Reception: Saturday, May 7, 5-7pm
An ongoing series of drawings and sculptural tableaus,“From The Séance Series”, creates convergences across time, space, and culture between remarkably different individuals. Begun in 2000, this series proposes hypothetical meetings between creative and historic figures who never met during their lifetimes. For the Séance Series, Johnson selected individuals long admired and paired those whose lives, work, gender identities, cultures, personalities, or reputations are extremely dissimilar.
For each installment of this series, Johnson includes drawings that inform the sculptural tableaus. The “tableaus” provide furniture for a meeting in which the participants play a game. The tableaus are figurative through the absent, yet implied.
On display in the Gillette Gallery will be three of the seven pairings. They include: “Audre Lorde Meets Abraham Lincoln,” “Anne Frank Meets Albert Schweitzer,” and the very first showing of “Frida Kahlo Meets Franz Kafka.” It is her hope that these three pairings inform and illuminate the challenges that we confront as human beings in the 21st Century.
Carla Rae Johnson is a 2017 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Drawing, and a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in Sculpture. She is a 1990 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Her work has been exhibited in solo, invitational, and curated shows in museums and galleries nationally as well as in New York City and is included in numerous public and private collections. Works by Carla Rae Johnson have been reviewed in The New York Times, The Village Voice, The New Haven Register, The Journal News, and The Times Herald-Record.
Prior to her current position as a full-time artist, Carla Rae Johnson retired as a Full Professor of Art from Westchester Community College in Valhalla, NY (2003-2016). She was also an Associate Professor of Art in the Art Department at Marymount College (of Fordham University) from 1993 to 2003. Carla Rae Johnson received her Bachelor of Science degree in Art from Ball State University and a Master of Fine Arts Degree from the University of Iowa.
Directly connected to ideas, Carla Rae Johnson’s art often addresses issues of social, political, and cultural import. Her work includes drawing, sculpture, conceptual, performance, and installation art She finds the most challenging forms and concepts at the intersection of the visual and the verbal and delights in communicating insights with humor, word-play, and not just a little irony. She also enjoys working collaboratively with artists/peers.