Join us for a panel discussion featuring Katherine Page, Mennello Museum of American Art Curator, Eleanor Heartney, Art Critic, and Sean Cavanaugh, Artist and Grandson of Sally Michel on September 21st at 1:00pm.
KATHERINE PAGE
Katherine Page is a Modern and Contemporary art curator who, in her role as Curator, Art & Education at the Mennello Museum of American Art, has internally curated over twenty original and collections-based exhibitions, authored essays in five catalogs, and helped to tour two exhibitions to five venues. She has also acted as a liaison, partnering with prestigious institutions for loaned objects and traveling exhibitions.
Original exhibitions Page has curated include Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism (2024), Anila Quayyum Agha: Flourishing Patterns (2023), Impression and Reality (2023, essay), American Artists in the Southwest: Gifts from the Melanson Holt Collection (2021, catalog essay), Earl Cunningham (2019, 2021) Immersion into Compounded Time and the Paintings of Firelei Báez (2019, catalog essay), and The Unbridled Paintings of Lawrence H. Lebduska (2019, catalog essay).
She has authored several texts accompanying her collections-based exhibitions drawing important links between traveling or temporary exhibitions. These have included Turning Toward Modernism (2023), Appreciating the Everyday (2022), Ephemeral: American Impressionists and the Influence of Japan (2021), Visionary Form in Southern Black Folk Art (2021), and Portrait of a Woman (2021).
She has provided curatorial support for exhibitions In Conversation: Will Wilson (2023, Art Bridges), Floating Beauty: Women in the Art of Ukiyo-e (2021, Reading Public Museum), Mira Lehr: High Water Mark (2020), Edward Steichen: In Exaltation of Flowers (2020), Shifting Gaze: A Reconstruction of the Black and Hispanic Body in Contemporary Art (2019, essay contribution and interview), Jiha Moon: Double Welcome, Most Everyone’s Mad Here (2018, Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art), Julie Heffernan: When the Water Rises (2018, LSU Museum of Art), Grace Hartigan 1960 - 1965: The Perry Collection (2018), and The Beautiful Mysterious: The Extraordinary Gaze of William Eggleston (2017, University of Mississippi Museum).
Page holds dual Bachelor of Arts Degrees from the University of South Florida, Tampa in Art History and Anthropology and a Master of Arts Degree in Anthropology from the University of Central Florida, Orlando. She is a member of the Association of Art Museum Curators.
ELEANOR HEARTNEY
Eleanor Heartney is a New York based art writer, cultural critic and curator who has been writing about art since 1981. She is Contributing Editor to Art in America and Artpress and has written extensively on contemporary art issues for many other magazines including ArtNews and Brooklyn Rail.
She has authored numerous books on contemporary art, including Critical Condition: American Culture at the Crossroads, Postmodernism, Defending Complexity: Art Politics and the New World Order, Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, Art and Today, and Doomsday Dreams: the Apocalyptic Imagination in Contemporary Art. She is a co-author of After the Revolution: Women who Transformed Contemporary Art and The Reckoning: Women Artists in the New Millennium. She has contributed to numerous museum publications include Mira Lehr: Arc of Nature by Taschen and Luise Kaish: An American Art Legacy, among others.
Heartney is a past President of AICA-USA, the American section of the International Art Critics Association. She was the 1992 recipient of the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism. In 2008 she was honored by the French government as a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Heartney is a renowned writer whose work has often transformed knowledge about the role, influence, and significance of women artists and with a corrective lens has brough new awareness to the contributions women artists have often made, but previously overlooked, to art history.
SEAN CAVANAUGH
Taking inspiration from the grand tradition of American nineteenth-century landscape painting, particularly that of the Hudson River School, Sean Cavanaugh’s work, like that of his predecessor, draws inspiration from nature and a key eye for detail. Not only does Cavanaugh revisit ideas of American wildness in his work, but he often does so by documenting his travels. His favorite settings include the Catskills of upper New York state and the vast wilderness of the West, including the formidable mountains of Montana and the rugged California coast.
Cavanaugh’s work conveys this natural subject matter by immersing the viewer in the setting, often zooming in, and focusing on the minute details of an individual tree or capturing a solitary wave as it breaks and spreads across a rocky beach. The artist refers to this as macro abstraction, so close that reality blurs itself into abstraction. This approach to documentation and depiction runs counter to the grandeur of Thomas Cole or William Trost Richards but, in doing so, encourages a more intimate engagement.
Cavanaugh’s dedication to painting and focus on the natural world is in his lineage and is, as such, an extension of a family legacy in American painting. The artist grew up in a family of painters—his mother, March Avery, and his grandparents, Sally Michel and Milton Avery are all artists whose works reflect a deep engagement with nature.
Born in 1969, Cavanaugh received a Bachelor of Arts degree in art and environmental studies from Pitzer College in Claremont, Califoria. He has had numerous solo gallery and museum exhibitins thrughout the country and abroad, most recently at the Lowe Museum at the University of Miami. His work has recently been shown at the Royal Academy of Art in London and can be found in public collections in California, including the Claremont Colleges, the Art in Embassies program in Karachi, Pakistan, the Farnsworth Museum in Maine, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Waqas Wajahat (2022)
Sally Michel: Abstracting Tonalism is the first museum retrospective in over 20 years of Sally Michel's Modernist landscapes and figurations from the 1930s - 1990s, long overlooked in traditional Art Historical discourse. Michel’s modern use of simplified color and line ensured that the mood and atmosphere of her own personal moments could be universally understood as the Tonalists before her - especially the paintings of Florida, which radiate with soft pastels that recall mid-century beachside motels, glow with neon sunsets, and diverge with the stark tones the sun brings to a landscape after late afternoon rain.
