Gornik & Grover at Writers Speak Wednesday in Southampton

[caption id="attachment_47280" align="alignleft" width="300"] Andrea Grover. Drawing by Shantell Martin.[/caption]

Artist April Gornik will be in conversation with Parrish Art Museum Curator of Special Projects Andrea Grover in the first program of the winter Writers Speak Wednesdays series of free artist and author talks and readings open to the public at Stony Brook Southampton. Ms. Gornik and Ms. Grover will be the program’s featured guests on Wednesday, January 27, at 7 p.m. in the Radio Lounge on the second floor of Chancellors Hall.

High on the list of topics the two women will discuss will be “April Gornik: Drawings” (FigureGround Press, 2014), an extensive compilation of charcoal drawings done by Ms. Gornik since 1984. Included in this collection of 204 drawings are short introductory essays by Steve Martin and Archie Rand as well as a long, informative conversation with Lawrence Weschler that explores Ms. Gornik’s process, subject matter, and aesthetic disposition.

The book also includes an eight-page, handwritten score for a cello and piano composition, “For April,” by East End composer Bruce Wolosoff, inspired by one of Ms. Gornik’s paintings. The musical piece is available through iTunes with purchase of the book.

The drawings in the book have been described by the publisher as “lush and wide-ranging in scope and subject,” landscapes that “call out the wild and the cultivated, from the desert to the forest to the sea, and show both the progress and consistency in her evocative approach to drawing.”

[caption id="attachment_47281" align="alignright" width="200"] April Gornik. Photo by Ralph Gibson.[/caption]

Ms. Gornik's art has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1998); East Hampton’s Guild Hall Museum (1994); the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art (1993); and the Parrish Art Museum (1988). She received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Guild Hall Museum in 2003. A mid-career retrospective began at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase, NY, in fall 2004, and traveled to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Nebraska and the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio.

As the Century Arts Foundation Curator of Special Projects at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, Andrea Grover is initiating new models for temporary and off-site exhibitions via the museum’s Platform and Parrish Road Show series. In 2014, Grover received the prestigious Emily Hall Tremaine Exhibition Award for the forthcoming exhibition, “Radical Seafaring,” at the Parrish Art Museum in 2016.

For more information, call 631-632-5030 or visit www.stonybrook.edu/mfa.