Featuring over thirty works by New York artist Howard Skrill (b. 1962), this exhibition explores the impact of public monuments, as well as their removal, and their absence. Howard Skrill is an artist and art professor at St. Francis College, Brooklyn, NY and Essex College in Newark, NJ. He has exhibited extensively throughout New England, and his pictorial essays and other works have appeared in publications worldwide. In his drawings and paintings, Skrill documents figurative public statuary, surveys their destruction or relocation, and explores the fractured nature of personal and public memory, as well as the contemporary reaction to these historical works. Many of Skrill’s works were painted en plein air, or in the open air, recording not just the monuments, but the constant changes of light and color encountered out of doors.
On July 14, the Fairfield University Art Museum's Executive Director Carey Weber will host a virtual interview with the artist Howard Skrill as they discuss his works of art and the exhibition "Howard Skrill: Monumental Follies". The link can be found on the main page of the museum's website on the Programs tab under Tours and Gallery Talks.
On October 8, art historian Dr. Harriet Senie will give a talk entitled: Memorials Today: New Subjects, New Forms, and the Public Process. In this conversation, Dr. Senie will unpack the complex and often opaque bureaucratic processes underlying how the decisions that shape the memorials occupying real estate in our prime public spaces are made.
Harriet F. Senie is Director of the M.A. Program in Art History and Art Museum Studies at City College, CUNY, and teaches at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the author of several books and numerous articles on public art, and is co-founder of the international organization Public Art Dialogue and co-editor of its journal, Public Art Dialogue. She was a member of the Mayor’s Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers, and the She Build New York Advisory Committee.
Watch a video introduction by the artist:
Watch Dr. Harriet Senie's Open Visions Espresso event,
"Monumental Controversies: Mount Rushmore, Four Presidents, and the Quest for National Identity"