“Crawford & Sage" at the Quad City Arts Center -- through October 4.
Through Friday, October 4
Quad City Arts Center, 1715 Second Avenue, Rock Island IL
With the first day of the exhibition and its August 15 opening reception held in conjunction with this year's Alternating Currents festival, Rock Island's Quad City Arts Center will be housing, through October 4, a two-fer of evocative works by a pair of disparate artists, the Crawford & Sage exhibit showcasing woodcut prints by Cathie Crawford and ink and watercolor drawings by Whitney Sage.
Originally from New York City, Cathie Crawford lived six years in Saudi Arabia and France. She has concentrated on the color reduction woodcut since earning an MFA degree in 1987 from Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. Her work has been included in 35 solo exhibitions, 90 juried national shows, and 25 international juried exhibitions since completing a BFA from the Ohio State University in Columbus Ohio. Additionally, Crawford has received 50 awards at both the national and regional levels, eight of them since 2021 alone.
To date, Crawford's extraordinary woodcuts have been exhibited in 32 states, as well as in Bulgaria, Cuba, France, Italy, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom. The artist's prints are also included in private and corporate collections in eight countries including the Print Center New York in New York City; the American University Museum in Washington DC; the Safeya Binzagr Darat in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; the Newark Public Library, Newark, New Jersey; the Casa de las Americas, Havana, Cuba; and Illinois' Peoria Riverfront Museum.
Regarding her latest exhibit, Crawford says:"The beauty of water and the ever-changing colors of the landscape have been a constant source of inspiration throughout my almost forty-year concentration on the reduction woodcut. Taking a break from my more figurative work with up to 21 runs thru the press, my recent work has been a gradual transformation to a more non-objective approach to the landscape. These woodcuts are a convergence of color, line, shape, and texture in an ambiguous space with whispers of landscape. I have been striving to pack as much color as possible in the fewest runs through the press using blended or split - fountain rolls of transparent inks."
Whitney Lea Sage is a multidisciplinary artist and educator currently serving as Assistant Professor of Art at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois. As a native of the suburban Detroit area, the rich cultural heritage of Midwestern cities is a major influence upon her work and identity as an image maker. The drawing-based work currently on display at Quad City Arts uses the visual language of domestic architecture to address the history and current struggles of rust belt communities and communicate related emotional crises of identity loss and homesickness.
A selection of Sage’s recent work has been featured in notable group exhibitions at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, the Painting Center, Superfront LA Gallery, the Lexington Art League, the Muskegon Museum of Art, the Kennedy Art Museum and the Dennos Museum Center. In addition, the artist's work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions at Buckham Gallery, the College of Southern Nevada, the Galesburg Community Art Center, Workhouse Arts Center, ROY G BIV, and Ripon College.
The works in her latest exhibit, says Sage, "focus their lens on the sprawling neighborhoods of Detroit and Highland Park, Michigan, many rendered endangered and unrecognizable due to generations of disinvestment and abandonment. The harsh erasure of the home within my work represents the endangerment of accessible landmarks of communal memory and history though I am to build connections through our shared protective impulse for the people and places we love."
An opening reception for Crawford & Sage will be held at the Quad City Arts Center Gallery in Rock Island on August 15 from 6 to 8 p.m., with guests invited to meet the artists and enjoy complimentary refreshments. The exhibit itself will be on display from through October 4, regular gallery hours are Mondays through Fridays 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free. For more information, call (309)793-1213 and visit QuadCityArts.com.
