Released: November 1, 2010
Lincoln, Neb. - The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Department of Art and Art History and the Under Pressure Print Club (UPPC) will host Beauvais Lyons as the 2010 UPPC Visiting Artist, to be in residence November 8-12. During Lyons' visit, he will be working with students and faculty in the printmaking studios in Woods Art Building, for the production of an edition of prints for the UPPC.
Lyons will present a solo exhibition of his prints entitled "Ex Libris Hokes Archives" in the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery, Richards Hall, Nov. 4-Dec. 3. He will discuss his work with a public lecture, titled "Printed Worlds: Mock Academics" on Tuesday, Nov. 9 at 5 p.m. in Richards Hall Rm. 15, with a reception following in the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery.
His exhibition will be held in conjunction with the exhibition "Our Printed World/Collection and Response - UNL Print Students" also in the Eisentrager-Howard Gallery. In this free-wheeling exhibition, UNL print students will create an installation of their own collected printed materials - gathered and found, recycled, repurposed, re-visioned - for their own inspiration and creative response. This collection mirrors the historicisms of Lyons, as a compliment and examination of our local vernacular and excess of "printed world" sources. Expect color and text fragments, weathered ephemera and packaging, printed oddities, such as posters, cartoon, comix, and postcards, with nostalgic and humorous interpretations.
For 10 years, the UPPC has sponsored visiting print artists to UNL, enabling research and new developments in printmaking to be explored, and each year producing a high quality print with students serving as assistants to the guest artist. The goal is to understand the commitment, techniques and concepts of top professional print artists.
Lyons is Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he has taught printmaking since 1985. Lyons received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. See his web site for more information on his work.
Contact: Karen Kunc, Cather Professor of Art, kkunc1@unl.edu or (402) 472-5522
Lyons' Artist Statement: "For the past three decades I have created academic parody in a variety of mediums. For much of this time I fabricated and documented imaginary cultures. More recently I have been interested in biography, folk art, medicine and zoology. My lithographs are influenced by plates from old encyclopedias, the novellas of Jorge Luis Borges, 18th-century science, 19th-century printing, natural history museums, the travel writings of Christopher Underdown, mirrors and lenses, anthrospheres, wunderkammers, and various forms of neglected scholarship. I prize the vernacular history of art. I prefer the facsimile to the original, and the imaginary to the real. I believe history is a work of fiction."
Lyons' Biography: Beauvais Lyons is a Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville where he has taught printmaking since 1985. Lyons received his MFA degree from Arizona State University in 1983 and his BFA degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1980. Lyons' one-person exhibitions have been presented in recent years at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee; Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia; and Nowy Oficia Gallery, Gdansk, Poland. He has published articles about print theory and pedagogy in Contemporary Impressions and Printmaking Today, about art censorship in American Universities in the Art Journal and about his studio work in Archaeology and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His prints are in the collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. PA. In the United States he has been active with the Southern Graphics Council, serving as President, Editor of Graphic Impressions, and helping to organize their conferences in 1992 and 1995 in Knoxville and 2002 in New Orleans. In 2002 he received a Fulbright Fellowship to teach at the Fine Arts Academy in Poznañ, Poland, and served as the chair of the IMPACT 4 Conference held in Berlin and Poznan in 2005.