Lecture at Art Palm Beach with Ori Z. Soltes and Booksigning with George Wardlaw

event “Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw”
speaker Ori Z. Soltes
date Saturday, January 21, 2012
time 1:30 – 2:30pm
book signing Immediately folling the lecture with George Wardlaw and Ori Soltes

“Jewish Identity and Intensity in the Work of George Wardlaw”
The art of George Wardlaw offers an ongoing dance between immutable ideas and those that keep changing. He has never allowed his work to stay confined by categories—his painting is sculptural, his sculpture is both painterly and architectural, his early small-scale metalsmithing resonate within his later gargantuan artworks. Wardlaw’s work reflects art history in both its universal concerns and, in a varied array of works, in the questions that art history raises for contemporary Jewish artists: Where does our work fit into Western art, which for so many centuries has been largely Christian art? What sorts of subjects are particularly relevant to “Jewish” art? What elements of style and symbol? How obvious or covert ought the reflections to these issues be? His work is a dazzling expression of diversely shaped identity and intensity.

Biography for Ori Z. Soltes
Ori Z. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, where he curated over 80 exhibitions on a variety of subjects. He is the author of articles, exhibition catalogs, essays, and books on a range of topics, including Fixing the World: American Jewish Painters in the Twentieth Century, Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source, Searching for Oneness: Mysticism in the Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and Untangling the Web: A Thinking Person’s Guide to Why the Middle East is a Mess and Always Has Been. He is currently completing a book on the definition of Jewish art and architecture called Tradition and Transformation.

George Wardlaw: Passage into Abstraction
An Installation at Art Palm Beach 2012

Date January 20-23, 2012
Time Noon – 7pm

West Palm Beach, Florida: Courthouse Gallery Fine Art, Ellsworth, Maine, will host an installation for American artist George Wardlaw (b. 1927) in conjunction with the launch of a book about his career titled George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders at the Art Palm Beach Art Fair, January 20–23, 2012. The three sculptures in the installation, Parting of the Red Sea, The Burning Bush, and The Ark of the Covenant, are part of Wardlaw’s Exodus I and II Series, which consist of fourteen large-scale acrylic and aluminum sculptures based on Jewish history and identity. These monumental sculptures cross the boundaries of religious perception and abstraction—“they forcibly generate a mystical spiritual sense of necessity, both pleasing and fearful,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, 1988.

Art historian and theologian Ori Z. Soltes, one of three authors who contributed to Crossing Borders, will give a lecture in conjunction with the installation about Wardlaw’s work during the art fair on Saturday, January 21 from 1:30 tp 2:30pm. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former director of the B’nai B’rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where he curated over eighty exhibitions on a variety of subjects. There will be a book signing with Mr. Wardlaw and Mr. Soltes immediately following the lecture.

Installation Description: George Wardlaw: Passage into Abstraction
The Exodus series represents Wardlaw’s desire to pass between figuration and abstraction, literalism and metaphor, between symbols and their meanings, and an aesthetic that offers pure emotion rather than intellectual exercise. The negotiation of parallel borders—between servitude and freedom, wilderness and homeland, ethnic and spiritual identity—are essential to the narrative of Exodus and reflect the crisscrossing paths within the journey of Wardlaw’s own life.

These unique sculptures are intended for a gargantuan space—each piece can stand alone, or they can stand together—in any number of configurations—like the tribes of Israel and the families within each tribe and the individuals within each family. These sculptures cut across artistic expectations and diverse religious boundaries to reveal a common spiritual concern.