The 113th Annual Exhibition - Vita Wild: Contemporary Wildlife Art
VITA WILD : Contemporary
Wildlife Art
SEPTEMBER 8—DECEMBER 15, 2024
Acknowledgements
Primary thanks go to the nine artists featured in Vita Wild, for the beauty they’ve put into the world and the insights they offer through it.
We are grateful to the staff of the National Museum of Wildlife Art in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, particularly Steve Seamons, executive director, and Tammi Hanawalt, Ph.D., curator of art. Both have supported, advised, and made introductions, widening our network of wonderful American artists and gallery professionals with a special emphasis on wilderness and the floral and fauna of the west. Nathan Larramendy, director of Visions West Contemporary in Denver, was especially influential in forming this exhibition. We owe a debt of gratitude for his time and attention to this project, which could almost be subtitled Visions West East. We are appreciative of the work of gallerists at both the Denver and Montana locations.
The staff of the Alexandre Gallery in New York enthusiastically assisted us in bringing Tom Uttech’s work to the Maier. Special thanks are due to Marie Evans, executive director, for leading this effort.
Every Maier staff member contributed to realizing Vita Wild and programming inspired by it: Kathleen Fort, administrative manager; Laura McManus, curator of education; Debbie Spanich, registrar; John Spanich, museum guard and preparator, and Melinda Wheeler, gallery monitor.
Once again, our most heartfelt gratitude goes to Mary Gray Shockey ’69 who is constantly alert to potential collaborations and connects people around a common creation. Her behind-the-scenes nurturing has resulted in abundant outcomes, beneficial to the Randolph College community and all our visitors.
Martha Kjeseth Johnson, Curator, Vita Wild: Contemporary Wildlife Art Director, Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College
Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College
THE 113 th ANNUAL EXHIBITION
VITA WILD : Contemporary Wildlife Art
SEPTEMBER 8—DECEMBER 15, 2024
With a primary focus on animals in the American wilderness and their intrinsic connection to the ecosystem, Vita Wild showcases artists whose works reflect cultural and environmental changes that expand the definition and expression of traditional wildlife art. Artists include Johnny Defeo, John Hitchcock, Frances Hynes, Adonna Khare, Mark Messersmith, Shelley Reed, Lauren Strohacker, Tom Uttech, and Travis Walker.
Vita Wild features paintings, prints, and sculptures, offering diversity in a category that has its roots in realism of subject, and faithful representation of habitat. Some artists, like Khare and Reed, carry on the tradition of realistic rendering, but shift the context. Messersmith’s environments are complex, fauvist explosions, anchored by lovely Renaissance predellas. Are they celebrations, or the apocalypse? Hitchcock’s depictions of buffalo resemble the Kiowa Comanche beadwork of his mother’s ancestors and he invites the viewer to find small, hopeful moments amid chaos and complexity. Strohacker and Walker are interested in how our spaces are shared across species. Strohacker’s work urges us to reflect on the nonhumans that co-inhabit with us even densely human-built domains, while Walker’s images are imbued with a wry humor as his wolf roams the galleries of an art museum. Defeo’s paintings contain both a serenity and an undercurrent of foreboding and imminent threat. Uttech and Hynes conjure a sense of the sacred that binds the human and the animal. Together these artists offer an abundance of imagery connecting us to wild lives.
The exhibition’s title and content is inspired by Randolph College’s motto, Vita abundantior —the abundant life as an overarching goal of liberal arts education through exploration and encounters with the complicated spectrum of human creativity.
Johnny Defeo
“I make artwork that illustrates that our relationship to the land is not a simplistic tale of good vs. evil or man vs. nature, but a complex and layered one. These works ask the viewer to listen to the call of the wild, and look for balance in the way they consume, interact, and participate in the dually robust and fragile ecosystems of America.”
“Most of my work centers around landscapes, magical encounters with wildlife, and places of sanctuary. In my paintings I imagine a time that predates the daily rituals, bloody fights, healing ceremonies, and protective structures created by humans. Or maybe a time when all of us are gone and there are just herds of wild horses roaming the plains, coyotes skulking through the long shadows of day’s end, and mountain vistas devoid of vacation homes, forest roads, and ski lifts. I oscillate regularly, as I am sure many do, between wishing to save the world, to commit myself to the best course and fight for a better future, and wishing the planet would just hurry up and get it over with already. The scenes in my paintings could be omens, dreamy premonitions, or stolen glances of the inevitable—a soft eyed look at our lands unpopulated, when the wild and untamed is punctuated with moments of serenity with no one there to see it.”
Johnny DeFeo resides in Taos, New Mexico. He received an MFA in painting from the University of Colorado in 2017. Shortly after graduating he co-founded Adventure Painting, a traveling artist residency, alongside painter Aaron Zulpo. The Adventure Painting residency takes artists out of their studios and into America’s most beautiful locations with the goal of expanding the visual lexicon of landscape painting. Adventure Painting was selected as an Armory Show off-site project in 2021, and featured in the New York Times.
DeFeo’s aesthetic is wild and playful, utilizing a dose of humor to create objects that illuminate the connections between beauty both quintessential and manufactured. His work consists primarily of landscape scenes, many of which include animals. Often, the perspective expressed in these scenes is that of the animal, shifting the subject away from a human vantage point and revealing the mysteries of the natural world. Imagining that the creatures inhabiting America’s wilderness could be storytellers through objects and images the way that humans can, these objects portray the natural world with a tender perspective, and with mystical and legendary qualities. His works have been included in exhibitions throughout the United States and in Germany.
Johnny Defeo, Drinking Dark Water, 2023, acrylic on panel, 26 x 36 in., Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
John Hitchcock
“I work with images referencing beads, bombs, floral patterns, buffalo and owls to speak about issues of indigenous historical trauma. Many of the images are interpretations of stories told by my Kiowa/Comanche grandparents and abstract representations influenced by beadwork, land, and culture.
When I was a child, kaku (Comanche Grandmother) asked me to design floral patterns and geometric shapes for her beadwork designs. This is how I learned how to draw. She would explain how Comanche people used color in their regalia as she beaded. I would sit at the table with her drawing patterns as she told stories.”
John Hitchcock is a contemporary artist and musician based out of Madison, Wisconsin. Hitchcock is an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and Comanche and Northern European descent. He is the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of art and Director of the Studio Learning Community at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he has taught printmaking since 2001. He holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas Tech University.
Hitchcock’s works on paper and multimedia installation consist of prints and moving images that mediate the trauma of war and the fragility of life. Images of U.S. military weaponry are combined with mythological hybrid creatures from the Wichita Mountains of western Oklahoma to explore notions of assimilation and control.
He is the recipient of numerous awards, including The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Artistic Innovation and Collaboration grant, New York; Jerome Foundation Grant, Minnesota; and the Creative Arts Award, Emily Mead Baldwin Award in the Creative Arts and the Kellett Mid-Career Award at the University of Wisconsin. Hitchcock’s artwork has been exhibited at U.S. and European venues including the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., International Print Center New York, the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in Air, Land, Seed on the occasion of the Venice Biennale 54th International Art at the University of Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy.
Prolific and generous, Hitchcock has had over 60 solo exhibitions and has engaged with communities in nearly 20 residencies.
John Hitchcock, Songs In The Sky 1, 2020. drawing and unique screen print on paper, 22 x 30 in., Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Frances Hynes
“I was born mid-century on the cusp between Aquarius and Pisces. And my painting exists on a cusp between here and there, then and now, imagery and abstraction. The work alludes to landscape and seascape, weather and atmosphere, transitions of dawn and dusk, the moon, planets and stars. Our human presence in all this is suggested in marks and hidden imagery often at the edges of the canvas. The edges of the canvas are important and reveal the history of the painting, which is created over a span of time by additions, subtractions and layering of color, marks, images, and lines. And the work reveals itself slowly and differently over time. The multiple layers, and marks speak to the viewer; and listen to the viewer and encourage reverie and thought. One goal is to make my paintings beautiful and for them to bring peace, joy, harmony and pleasure to the homes where they are shown and to the people who see them each day. Looking back over five decades of my painting life I see that I reinvent myself as an artist about every ten years. I have explored place, events and time: scale, materials and imagery.” elizabethmossgalleries.com
Frances Hynes received her Bachelor of Arts from St. John’s University and Master of Arts from New York University, where she performed in Outskirts, choreographed by Robert Rauschenberg in 1967. Hynes also studied art at the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy.
Hynes has had over 40 solo exhibitions, namely at the Poindexter Gallery, New York; New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; Springfield Museum of Art, Ohio; Jacksonville Museum of Contemporary Art, Florida, among others. Recent group exhibitions include three invitationals at the National Academy of Design—where she was awarded the Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize for Painting—and two at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, both in New York. Her artworks are represented in museum collections such as: the Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; and the Zimmerli Art Museum, New Brunswick, New Jersey. Since 1973, her paintings have traveled internationally with the Art in Embassies program.
Frances Hynes, American (born 1945), Riddle of the Hybrid, 1997, oil on denim, image size approx. 41 x 60 in., Gift of the artist in memory of the Nolen-Hynes family, 2024
Adonna Khare
“Raised in a small town in Iowa, I’ve been drawing my family and animals since I was three. I create using the pencil, the eraser and a sock as my tools. The drawings are not pre-planned rather they evolve through my experiences with people and the absurdities of life. The result is a group of drawings where the animals coexist in a world beyond ours, and are inexplicably tied together, often not by choice.
The animals are more of a language for me, my chosen vessels for telling stories, each drawing like a chapter out of my life. They are also a way to allow the viewer to associate their own experiences.
My hope is that someone is affected by it and makes a change, even a small one.”
Adonna Khare specializes in carbon pencil on paper drawings. Though committed to these fairly humble tools, the scale of her work ranges from life-size to massive murals covering entire walls. She says of her process, “I draw how one might sculpt,” as her hand creates marks, erases, and blends, pushing and pulling her images to life.
Khare received her Masters of Fine Art from California State University Long Beach. In 2012, she won the world’s largest art competition, ArtPrize, competing against over 1500 artists from around the globe.
Her work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, The Huffington Post, American Art Collector, Juxtapoz Magazine, Hi-Fructose, Mashable, My Modern Metropolis and more. Her drawings have been exhibited at Crystal Bridges Art Museum, Boise Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Grand Rapids Art Museum, The Long Beach Art Museum, Yellowstone Art Museum and others. Her work is included in prestigious public and private collections throughout the U.S. and internationally.
Adonna Khare, Bison and Bears, 2020, carbon pencil on paper, 96 x 144 in., Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Mark Messersmith
“I’ve been interested in a group of painters who came to Florida from the Northeastern United States immediately following the Civil War. Artists such as Martin Johnson Heade, George Inness, Thomas Moran, James Audubon and Winslow Homer to name but a few. They came with and painted with a romantic vision of this exotic, southern landscape. Although they looked at this world as artists with some scientific curiosity and even concerns, they still painted it through rose colored field glasses of dreamy romantics.
My work builds on stories (either real or conjectured), and my observations and concerns for wild creatures that move within the shrinking natural Florida environs they still manage to inhabit. Creatures moving between and over one another, trying to survive the persistent pressure and chaos of our human self concerned lives within a darkening illumination of their own fading wilderness.
Yet, powerful birds, vigilant panthers, wary gators, audacious bears, blackwater swamps, old cypress trees, still survive in the American southeast, just beyond the highways and careening logging trucks, citrus stands and track housing. My work is not so much an indictment of development, hunting, clear-cutting or carnage of the animals on our backroads and highways, but more of a prompt to steer we human ‘sinners’ from our current road to perdition, back on to a path of righteous stewardship of the ‘natural’ environment.
My work is really about our relationship to all other living creatures and their tenacity at this precarious moment, a moment midway between hope and despair.”
Renowned for his vivid and intricate paintings, Mark Messersmith’s work is a testament to his ability to portray the Gulf Coast with beauty and empathy. Messersmith paintings and sculptures create a complex tapestry of texture and color, portraying the Gulf Coast environment in a manner that initially appears idyllic in its richness. However, a closer examination reveals a more profound narrative—a commentary on the ongoing battle for survival and habitat, not just among wildlife, but also between humans and nature.
Messersmith, a professor emeritus of Florida State University, has received multiple accolades for his remarkable contributions to the arts. This includes four Individual Artist Fellowships from the State of Florida, two Ford Foundation Fellowships, two fellowships through the National Endowment for the Arts/Southern Arts Federation, and a prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation award. His artwork has been acquired by esteemed public collections throughout the United States.
Mark Messersmith, Dawn of Uncertainty, 2024, oil on canvas with carved wood elements, 84 x 74 in., Courtesy of the artist
Mark Messersmith, Autumnal Equinox, 2019, oil on canvas with carved wood elements, 82 x 67 in., Courtesy of the artist
Mark Messersmith, Twilight’s Lucidity, 2019, oil on canvas with carved wood elements, 72 x 84 in., Courtesy of the artist
Shelley Reed
“During art school and for a few years after, I made colorful paintings, both abstract and realistic. But I wasn’t painting anything I felt was personally important. ‘Originality’ had been drummed into us in art school, but I did not have a grand statement. While living in London and haunting the museums, I found in an 18th century painting a detail—a hunting dog—that felt eerily contemporary. I radically increased the scale of the image and painted it in black and white. This has been the basis of my art for the last 30 years—looking back to see how artists commented on their times, how that might still be relevant today, and what that reveals about our social evolution.
I appropriate images from art history, creating small, large, and sometimes very large oil paintings in black and white. My imagery has ranged from mythic figures and classical heroes to still-lives that focus on beauty and mortality. My most recent paintings depict animals as metaphors for human nature, often in narratives where they are vain, silly, or potentially dangerous.
As the child of European Jews whose lives were devastated by WWII, I was brought up understanding that, while we’re capable of doing good, our potential for evil is constant and barely restrained. I use art history to address how our animal natures have or haven’t changed, and what that signifies for our collective future.”
A 2023 MacDowell fellow, Reed was an artist-in-residence at the Lux Art Institute in 2017. She was awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants in 2015 and 2006, as well as Berkshire Taconic Artist’s Resource Trust Grants in 2015 and 2005. In 2013, Reed was awarded a Traveling Fellowship from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was a finalist for a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in 2012. She was the recipient of the Maud Morgan Award from the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 2005.
Reed’s work can be found nationally in public and private collections including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Columbia Museum of Art, National Museum of Wildlife Art, Fidelity Investment Corporation, Wellington Management Company, 21c Museum Hotels, Bank of Boston, Rose Art Museum, Fitchburg Art Museum, Danforth Museum, and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park.
Shelley Reed, Bison II, 2023, oil on paper, 41 1/2 x 29 1/2 in., Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Shelley Reed
Shelley Reed, These Green Pastures, 2021, oil on canvas, 84 x 360 in., Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Lauren Strohacker
“Wildlife is artificial. Even an encounter with a living, breathing animal is bound by unseen regulation. Habitats are fragmented, populations are controlled, predators are decimated, and survivors are displaced to the edge of human comfortability. Boundary lines are drawn and animals are expected to obey. Subversion of this obedience is punishable by death. These realizations underpin my exploration as an artist. I produce conceptual, new genre public artworks that center wild animals with sitespecificity. This interdisciplinary community work is meant to condemn the human-animal distanciation narrative of colonialism, conceptualize a cityscape re-enchanted by regional wildlife, and promote interspecies municipalism. Both real and imaginary encounters with animals influence human perceptions of cohabitation vs. eradication, a dichotomy that ultimately determines the uncertain fate of wild lives.
In the midst of consumer–driven ecocide and the systemic annihilation of other-than-human animals (theriocide), a confrontation of anthropocentric placemaking is vital within and beyond the artworld.”
Lauren Strohacker is an eco-political artist whose work emphasizes the non-human in an increasingly human-centric world. She creates multidisciplinary interventions that examine the ever-growing conflict between humans and animals as our manufactured environments (physical and economical) expand into natural habitats. Strohacker received a BFA from The Ohio State University and an MFA from Arizona State University.
Strohacker’s co-creative and site-responsive practice routinely collaborates with both local and national wildlife conservation organizations to conceptualize animals who have been displaced by the colonial built environment, controlled by the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, and erased by the anthropocentrism of capitalism.
Conceptually, Strohacker’s focus on wildlife and public space reflects larger contexts of ecology, politics, and radical interspecies municipalism. visionswestcontemporary.com, annenbergphotospace.org
Lauren Strohacker Running Mexican Wolf No. 1, 2023 aluminum, powder coat 53 x 25 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Tom Uttech
“There is no connection to religion in my paintings, although I’m magnificently aware of something that’s beyond what is here. I’m in constant awe of it. I’m trying desperately to reveal what that is in my paintings…When you get into a detailed study of what’s in the world, it’s magic beyond belief.”
Cozzilino, Robert. To Live with Wild Things: Tom Uttech’s Worlds, 2012
“The best response to my paintings would be for you to…go straight to the wildest piece of land you can find and sit down to let it wash over you and tell you secrets.” toryfolliard.com
Tom Uttech paints imaginary woodland scenes that celebrate the verdant natural world he has been closely acquainted with since his childhood in Merrill, Wisconsin. His paintings are based on the woods of the Precambrian Shield, a stretch of land across the northern United States and South-Eastern Canada, where the ancient igneous rock that forms the core of the continent is exposed, and miles of lakes, woodland, and wildlife lie untouched by human influence. Uttech’s appreciation for this land is clear in his devotion to recreating what it feels like to be in those woods, particularly at dawn and dusk, when the mystical powers of the forest and its wildlife are most evident. The effect of these effervescent, detailed paintings are like that of illuminated manuscripts. They appeal to the viewer in a nostalgic, and almost reverential way—there is a familiarity, but there is also, in the abundant presence of the wildlife and the glow of the horizon, a hint of something we cannot comprehend.
After completing his studies at Layton School of Art and the University of Cincinnati, Uttech was a professor of art at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, until 1998. Since the inclusion of his paintings in the 1975 Whitney Biennial, Uttech’s work has been the subject of over thirty-five one-person exhibitions. He continues to live and paint in Wisconsin. philippe-alexandre.squarespace.com
Tom Uttech, Nin Dibando, 2022, oil on luan plywood, 14 ¾ x 17 in., Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery
Tom Uttech
Tom Uttech, The Tree of Good & Evil, 1988, oil on canvas, 66 x 72 in., Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery
“Night at the Tate was inspired by the artist Francis Alÿs who is well known for releasing a live fox in the Tate Museum (with permission), filming it, and showing the final video work as art. I have been thinking about wild animals and how they interact with man, and this real life event was a perfect subject for a painting. My recent work has included animals relaxing in swimming pools, confronting tourists, challenging RVs, and as the subjects of monuments/statues in urban environments.”
After graduating with a degree in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, the allure of the western landscape drew Travis Walker to the valley of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where he lives and works. He appreciates what he calls the “elevated perspective” of the area and the grand scale of the terrain. “It makes you and your problems seem small. You are not so wrapped up in yourself,” he says. “Moving out here allowed my soul to settle.”
Walker is represented by Tayloe Piggott Gallery in Jackson, Wyoming and Visions West Contemporary in Montana and Denver, Colorado. He has been featured in SouthWest Art Magazine, Big Sky Journal, Mountain Living, Forbes, and The Guardian. He is the founder of the nonprofit Teton Artlab, an Artist In Residence program based in Jackson Hole.
Travis Walker, Night at the Tate, 2023, acrylic on canvas, 40 x 30 in., Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Checklist of the Exhibition
JOHNNY DEFEO
Drinking Dark Water, 2023
acrylic on panel
26 x 36 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Run and Run and Run and Run and Run and Run, Grief is storm cloud that cannot be outrun, 2023
acrylic on panel
17 x 19 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Take a Moment to Look at the Moonlight, Even when Wolves are Closing In, 2021
acrylic on canvas
48 x 48 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
JOHN HITCHCOCK
Songs in the Sky 1, 2020 drawing and unique screen print on paper
30 x 22 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
FRANCES HYNES
Riddle of the Hybrid, 1997 oil on denim
image size approx. 41 x 60 in.
Gift of the artist in memory of the Nolen-Hynes family, 2024
ADONNA KHARE
Bison and Bears, 2020 carbon pencil on paper
96 x 144 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
MARK MESSERSMITH
Autumnal Equinox, 2019
oil on canvas with carved wood elements
82 x 67 in.
Courtesy of the artist
Dawn of Uncertainty, 2024 oil on canvas with carved wood elements
84 x 74 in.
Courtesy of the artist
Last Sanctuary, 2023 oil on canvas with carved wood elements
87 x 62 in.
Courtesy of the artist
Twilight’s Lucidity, 2019 oil on canvas with carved wood elements
84 x 72 in.
Courtesy of the artist
SHELLEY REED
Bison II, 2023 oil on paper
41 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
Perched (after Audubon), 2023 oil on canvas
40 x 30 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
These Green Pastures, 2021 oil on canvas
84 x 360 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
Young Bull 1 (after Potter), 2021 oil on paper
30 x 20 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
Young Bull II (after Potter), 2021 oil on paper
30 x 22 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
LAUREN STROHACKER
Running Mexican Wolf No. 1, 2023
aluminum, powder coat
25 x 53 in.
Courtesy of Visions West Contemporary
Climbing Black Bear, 2023
aluminum, powder coat
85 x 24 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
TOM UTTECH
Nin Dibando, 2022 oil on luan plywood
14 ¾ x 17 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery
The Tree of Good & Evil, 1988 oil on canvas
72 x 66 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery
Aenigokoweenowin Ogidj
Auzhawaegaum, 1992 oil on linen
87 1/2 x 76 1/2 in.
Courtesy of the artist and Alexandre Gallery
TRAVIS WALKER
Night at the Tate, 2023
acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 in.
Courtesy of Visions West
Contemporary
ABOUT THE ANNUAL EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY ART
The First Annual Exhibition was installed at the College in 1911. It is the longest-running series of original exhibitions of contemporary art staged annually by any small liberal arts college in the United States. Careful acquisition from each of the Annuals has resulted in Randolph College’s outstanding collection of American art, chiefly paintings, works on paper, and photographs dating from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
The Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art has been an important and distinctive academic experience, year after year fulfilling its original goal of providing students with a primary resource which brings them closer to understanding and appreciating art as an expression of their own time in history.
Catalogue design by Janet Fletcher, Studio 5 Graphics, Lynchburg, Virginia Printed by PrintWorks, Lynchburg, Virginia
