Guilford College Art Gallery

 
Judith Belzer, Canal Zone 3, 2015, oil on canvas, 84” x 38”

Judith Belzer | Canal Zone | Recent Work from the Panama Project
Main Gallery, Hege Library 
August 29 - October 30, 2016

Guilford College Art Gallery will present paintings by Judith Belzer in an exhibition titled “Canal Zone: Recent Work from the Panama Project,” from August 29 to October 30, 2016.  Thirteen canvases will be displayed in the College’s main gallery in Hege Library, and additional works on paper will be shown in the Robert C. Ketner Vitrines adjacent to the gallery entrance.  Admission to the exhibition is free and the public is cordially invited to attend.

Judith Belzer is an artist whose work has been featured in national exhibitions for more than 20 years.  In 2014, she was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for the Fine Arts, which she used to travel to the Panama Canal, in order to further her investigations into what she has called “the Edgelands, the places where the natural and man-made worlds collide”.  In her Canal Zone paintings, she creates a recognizable yet abstracted world of cargo ships on the Panama Canal, where familiar shapes are brought to life in vivid, energetic and surreal colors.  Belzer’s Edgelands are a place where super-sized steel structures intersect with water, nature can become indistinguishable from artifice, raising questions of what unity between man and nature looks like in reality, in our ideals, and in our dreams.

The artist will present a talk about her work leading up to and including the Canal Zone paintings on Thursday, September 29, at 7:30 p.m. in the Art Gallery.  Belzer is the cousin of Guilford College Professor of History Emerita Sarah Malino, and she is married to the author Michael Pollan, who will be speaking in the College’s Bryan Series at the Greensboro Coliseum on Friday, September 30.

An illustrated catalogue, with essays by Guilford College professors Damon Akins and María Luisa Amado accompanies this exhibition.  Akins is an associate professor of History at Guilford College and an affiliated faculty with the Environmental Studies Program.  Amado, who was born and grew up in Panama City, Panama, is an associate professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at Guilford College.

Artist's Talk:
Thursday, September 29, 7:30 PM
Art Gallery