George Wardlaw: Crossing Borders

The critical essays in this book characterize Wardlaw's work, placing it in context with the significant art movements of his time, beginning in1947 with non-objective painting and tracing his journey through six decades of art making.

Never confined by categories, Wardlaw explores medium, form, scale, and color on his quest for creative and spiritual resolution. From his Baptist and Native American roots to Judaism, from the rural south to the urban northeast, from painting to sculpture and back again, Wardlaw produced series after series of profound artworks-an exploration across geographical, physical,intellectual, philosophical, and spiritual boundaries.

Wardlaw was a member of the avant-garde art scene in New York City during the 1950s and 1960s and went on to become an important figure in American art, driven by his passion and desires rather than popular trends. His significant and impressive body of work reveals a unique story, both personal and universal, weaving one man's perspective into the larger canon of twentieth-century art.

Publisher: Marshall Wilkes

Published: United States, 20 January 2012

Format: Hardback, 184 pages

Age Range: 15+

Dimensions: 2.9 x 2.9 x 0.3 centimeters (1.55 kg)

Writer: J Richard Gruber, Ori Z. Soltes, Suzette McAvoy

About the AuthorJ. Richard Gruber is director emeritus of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans (UNO). He was director of the Ogden Museum and a member of the UNO faculty from 1999 to 2010. He has also served as deputy director of the Morris Museum of Art and director of its center for the Study of Southern Painting in Augusta, Georgia; director of the Wichita Art Museum in Wichita, Kansas; curator then director of the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, in Memphis, Tennessee; and Dirctor of the Peter Joseph Gallery in New York. Ori Z. Soltes is Professorial Lecturer in Theology and Fine Arts at Georgetown University and former director of the B'nai B'rith Klutznick National Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., where he curated over eighty exhibitions on a variety of subjects. Suzette McAvoy is the director of the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Maine, and the former chief curator of the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland. She has lectured and written extensively on the art and artists of Maine. She lives in Belfast, Maine, with her husband and daughter, all of whom are avid sailors of the Maine coast.

ReviewsA lavishly illustrated and richly deserved paean.-- "Art New England"
Responding to these formidable works, one feels acutely keyed in to the artist's anima, a deeply inspiriting encounter.--Grace Glueck, former art critic, The New York Times