Margaret Lanzetta: Pet the Pretty Tiger installation view
Holy Cross’ Cantor Art Gallery Presents
Margaret Lanzetta: Pet the Pretty Tiger, Works 1990 -2010
Exhibit features Holy Cross alumna’s artwork spanning 20 years
The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross presents Margaret Lanzetta: Pet the Pretty Tiger, Works 1990-2010. The exhibition will be on view from Oct. 21 – Dec. 15. An opening reception will take place on Thursday, Oct. 21 from 5 – 6:30 p.m. at the Gallery.
Pet the Pretty Tiger will be the first-ever in-depth survey of the New York artist’s painting, printmaking and early rubber sculpture. For more than 20 years, Lanzetta, has produced a body of work on paper, Mylar and canvas that has remained remarkably consistent and vital through her use of imagery based on non-objective geometric forms and flat patterns derived and inspired by natural and architectural forms.
The artist describes her work as, “a personal, spiritual take on the anonymity of geometry, the repetitive patterns transformed into a ‘physical mantra’ by processes of accretion and layering.” Lanzetta combines both digital technology and various printmaking processes, such as stamping or silkscreen. The exhibition will trace the origins of Lanzetta’s use of pattern and texture from the subtle coloration of early ink on paper pieces, through vibrant colorations on mylar, to more recent works of oil, enamel and acrylic on canvas.
Lanzetta has been the recipient of three Fulbright/Hays Senior Research Fellowships for travel and research in Germany, Sumatra and Indonesia, and most recently to Syria and India. She has also received residencies at programs including the MacDowell Art Colony in New Hampshire, Dieu Donne Workspace in New York City, and the British Academy in Rome, which have provided further opportunities to develop her work.
Accompanying the exhibition is an 88-page catalogue with essays by New York poet, art critic and curator John Yau; San Francisco bay area poet and performance artist Judy Halebsky; and curator and artist Carol Schwarzman, who divides her time between Australia and New York.
In an ever-shifting, visually over stimulated world Yau writes in his essay that, “one of the artist’s reoccupations is how to read and understand a constantly changing, visually insistent, multitudinous world. In Margaret Lanzetta’s bold, graphic paintings, the artist weaves, jams together, and recombines patterns and shadow images in order to understand their often-unacknowledged presence in our lives.”
Margaret Lanzetta graduated cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from Holy Cross in 1979 and received her M.F.A. from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Public Library in New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in the UK; the Yale University Art Gallery; and the Fogg Museum at Harvard University.
Gallery Events
A series of lectures and events will be held at Holy Cross in conjunction with the gallery exhibition. All events are free and open to the public.
• Thursday, Oct. 21, 5 – 6:30 p.m., opening reception at 5:30 p.m., Cantor Art Gallery
• Monday, Nov. 8, 5:15 – 6 p.m., poetry reading “Crossing Languages” with poet and performance artist Judy Halebsky, Cantor Art Gallery
• Tuesday, Nov. 9, noon – 1 p.m., gallery talk with artist Margaret Lanzetta, artist and writer Carol Schwarzman, and Cantor Art Gallery’s director, Roger Hankins, Cantor Art Gallery
• Tuesday, Nov. 9, 5 – 6:30 p.m., lecture “Memory and Forgetting in Australia: How Art Confronts Postcolonial Struggles with History” by curator and artist Carol Shwarzman, Stein Hall, room 129
