Wood Now
Contemporary Wood Sculpture


(Wood Turning Center, Philadelphia, PA) Wood Now features bold contemporary sculpture using wood as the medium. This exhibit opens at the Wood Turning Center, at 501 Vine Street in Old City, on Friday, June 2 at 5:30 pm. Featuring work by six established artists, the work shows their transitions to architectural and massive forms using sawing, splitting, sandblasting, shrinkage and spatial orientation.

Wood Now was organized cooperatively by the Wood Turning Center and the Craft Alliance of St. Louis, Missouri with a full-color catalog. Mark Leach, Chief Curator of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, North Carolina, selected the artists and work to explore the intersections of ideas, formation and haunting statements. Leach states, “Landscape, geologic time and process as well as humanity’s relationship to nature are visible subjects in the works of all of the artists represented here.” The artists represented include: Christian Burchard, Robyn Horn, Stoney Lamar, George Peterson, Michael Peterson, and Grant Vaughan.

This exhibit continues a long standing collaborative endeavor between the Craft Alliance and the Wood Turning Center. Twenty years ago, the Craft Alliance invited the Wood Turning Center to curate an exhibition on wood turning – a field rapidly expanding beyond conventional forms and process. The 1987 exhibition, Works off the Lathe: Old and New Faces, was organized by Albert LeCoff, Executive Director of the Wood Turning Center. Established and emerging artists were asked to make a piece in search of some new direction, without their usual concerns for the market place. The artists’ responded brilliantly and so did viewers and buyers. This jump started a long relationship between the organizations with wood art as a mutual interest.

“The Center enjoys these collaborations with the Craft Alliance as they provide opportunities to periodically examine changing ideas, trends, and artistic variations in the resulting work,” says Albert LeCoff, Executive Director of the Wood Turning Center.

Wood Now is on display at the Wood Turning Center from June 2 through July 15. The opening reception will be held on First Friday, June 2, from 5:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. The opening and gallery talk are free and open to the public. Reservations are not required. The exhibition catalog is available for purchase from the Wood Turning Center.

The public is invited to view the show during normal gallery hours: Tuesday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Saturday Noon to 5 p.m.

Wood Now is supported in part by the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the William Penn Foundation of Philadelphia, and the Windgate Charitable Foundation.

The Wood Turning Center is a Philadelphia-based, not-for-profit arts gallery and educational center which promotes the field of wood art, turned and carved. For more information about the Wood Now exhibit, please call the Wood Turning Center at (215) 923-8000 or visit www.woodturningcenter.org.


Contact: Suzanne Kopko
Phone: 215-923-8000
Email:
Exhibition Images available