Summer Show: Save the date!

The La Salle University Art Museum is proud to present Emily Richardson: Shifting Vistas in Silk, on view June 13 until August 16, 2013. Opening reception, Thursday, June 13, 2013.

Fiber artist and PA SAQA member Emily Richardson composes in sheets of painted silk organza. Photograqphs of Richardson’s abstract fiber works resemble oil paintings or even encaustics with their rich, translucent strata. The work is at a glance barely recognizable as quilt-making, at least in the traditional bedcover sense. Hand constructed from painted cloth of varying degrees of transparency, colors painted on layers of fabric show through and optically mix. This is work that must be experienced in person for full effect.

Richardson begins her process with acrylic paint, painting on wet fabric in rich jewel tones, allowing and sometimes coaxing the paint to move and pool for variated effect. The painting is undertaken without a specific sense of how it might later be worked into a composition. Richardson prefers to let her work develop in the process. Working with pieces cut from the painted fabric, the artist then pins together parts that resonate together and work towards a finished whole. The patterns Richardson creates range from striped or grid like to faceted forms that evoke waves, mountains, and even Marcel Duchamp’s Cubo-Futurist oil painting Nude Descending a Stairway No.2 (1912). La Salle University Art Museum will present a selection of Richardson’s recent fiber works in the Special Exhibitions Gallery this summer.

Philadelphia based Richardson has exhibited nationally and internationally in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Madagascar, England and Japan.

The La Salle University Art Museum is located on the lower level of Olney Hall on the campus of La Salle University at 19th St. and Olney Ave. Summer hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Thursday, except for the weeks of July 1 and August 12. The Art Museum will be open July 1-‐3 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., July 5 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., August 12-‐15 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and August 16 from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free, though donations are accepted. For further information call 215.951.1221 or visit the website at http://www.lasalle.edu/museum/.