January 23 – March 11, 2007
Arcadia University Art Gallery
About the Show
Titled after a phrase from a Victorian carte de visite, this project by Philadelphia-based artist Gerald Nichols provides a comprehensive look at his reverence for a distressed American landscape. Filtered through Nichols’ idiosyncratic, associative systems—a sensibility that merges a concern for formal abstraction and art history with the signification and immediacy of vernacular art—this new project was conceived specifically for the gallery and constitutes the artist’s first solo exhibition in Philadelphia in nearly a decade.
Gerald Nichols (born 1938) received his MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. A recipient of a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1970, he was awarded grants from the Carnegie Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Art and Urban Resources, New York. Included in the permanent collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others, Nichols has presented his installations, public projects, paintings and constructions in group and solo exhibitions across the country. His last solo exhibition, entitled “Birds, Landscapes, Houses, and Insects,” was presented at York College of Art, Jamaica, New York, in 1999. Since 1967 he has taught painting and drawing at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), has recently served as Chair of Fine Arts, and has been a lead studio faculty in Painting in the University’s Summer MFA program since its inception in 1995.
