Target Wednesday After Hours
at the Frost Art Museum
March 4, 2009 from 6-9pm
Meet artist John Sanchez at 7:00pm
Meet award-winning sculptor John Henry at 7:30pm
FIU’s Frost Art Museum presents an evening featuring award-winning sculptor John Henry and FIU artist John Sanchez in its fourth Target Wednesday After Hours event on March 4 from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m.
John Henry, known throughout the world for his large-scale steel sculpture, will discuss his recent seven-city installation, Drawing in Space: The Peninsula Project. Maquettes of the sculptures are currently on display at the Frost Art Museum through March 11. The evening will also feature the MFA opening exhibition with paintings by John Sanchez and music by FLEA (FIU Laptop & Electronic Arts) Ensemble, FIU’s newest musical group.
Target Wednesday After Hours provide an excellent opportunity to meet and socialize with other people interested in the arts while learning more about the museum, exhibitions and artists. The event is free and open to the public.
The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum
Florida International University
10975 SW 17th Street
Miami, FL 33199
www.thefrost.fiu.edu
305-348-2890
John Henry
The Peninsula Project is a state wide exhibition that showcases not only Henry’s large scale sculptures but the Floridian landscape itself. Henry will install nine large scale sculptures in seven cities across the state of Florida. The Miami sculpture, which towers at 80 feet and weighs between 60 and 70 tons, will be placed in Bicentennial Park’s Deep Water Slip.
Drawing in Space will incorporate the large scale sculpture in the Floridian landscape. Henry specifically chose Florida for this project because of its unique geographic environment. The fact that Florida is a peninsula surrounded by two major bodies of water, offering a sunrise on the east coast and sunset on the west, is an endless fascination of Henry’s.
It is the project’s intention for each sculpture to incorporate itself into the landscape and interact with the community to create an after-image in the mind of the traveler moving from venue to venue across the state.
“This concept is an integral part of the objective of visualizing the separate sculptures as a unified work of art,” Henry said. “Each sculpture is part of a continuous sentence all referencing one another, each an individual part of a greater whole. In many regards, it may be seen to be all one work! It is very much about the process of working together to extend the influence of a particular part of a visual vocabulary.”
The Frost will host the project’s signature exhibition, Peninsula Project Illustrated.This exhibition will highlight and illustrate the entire process and concept behind Drawing in Space. The gallery space will showcase all nine monumental works in the seven participating Floridian cities. With models of the sculpture and large photographs of the pieces set in their various landscapes, the exhibit will be a tribute to the artists’ unprecedented use of the Floridian peninsula as his canvas.
In his work, MFA student John Sanchez represents fleeting moments of our everyday lives that often go unnoticed in the great race to wherever it is that we are going. Street lights, parked cars and lonely buildings are all common subjects in his work.
Sanchez purposely places his subjects in low light to conjure 19th century portraiture. The works are executed using a combination of reference and improvisation to create a solid composition, with very little editing, in an attempt to paint them as fast as these moments occur.
Image Credit:John Sanchez, Spin, 2008,
Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 inches
Courtesy Dorsch Gallery, Miami
FLEA (FIU Laptop & Electronic Arts) Ensemble is FIU’s newest musical group. The group performs exciting new work and reinterprets avant-garde classics by combining hi-fi and lo-fi technologies. Each piece offers new ways of (re)interpreting technology.
