Curators’ Talk: Two Views on the Art of Lionel Maunz

Although trained as a painter at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, New York–based artist Lionel Maunz works primarily in iron, steel, and concrete sculpture, employing casting as an integral part of his methodology, as well as delicate drawings in graphite on paper. His art connects with a centuries-old Gothic lineage of horror, agony, and the grotesque originating in classical art inspired by religious fervor and the narratives of Christianity, and continuing through to contemporary art.

Join us to consider two perspectives on the artist’s work in this talk by Senior Curator Heather Pesanti, who curated the exhibition on view Discovery of Honey / Work of the Family, and Carter Foster, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Blanton Museum of Art, who collected Maunz’s drawings during his previous tenure with the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Talk begins at 7P. Come before dark to see Lionel Maunz’s new outdoor sculpture on the lower grounds of the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park. The Gatehouse Gallery, featuring the artist’s sculptures and drawings, will stay open until 9P for the evening.

Lionel Maunz: Discovery of Honey / Work of the Family is on view at the Gatehouse Gallery and grounds of the Betty and Edward Marcus Sculpture Park at Laguna Gloria though May 14, 2017.

About the Curators

As Senior Curator of The Contemporary Austin, Heather Pesanti has organized monographic exhibitions of the artists Marianne Vitale, Robert Therrien, and Monika Sosnowska, with forthcoming projects by John Bock and Wangechi Mutu. In 2015, she organized the museum’s largest exhibition to date, Strange Pilgrims, a fourteen-artist, thematic exhibition on experiential art that engaged three venues. In 2014, Pesanti was paired with the artist and critic Robert Storr as joint visiting critics in the Viewpoint speaker series at The University of Texas at Austin. Pesanti has also been guest curator for Artpace’s International Artist-in-Residence program in San Antonio, Texas, in 2011, and Scotiabank Nuit Blanche in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, in 2014. Prior to Austin, Pesanti was Curator at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, for five years. During her tenure, she organized the historic exhibition Wish You Were Here: The Buffalo Avant-garde in the 1970s, a large-scale survey of Buffalo’s dynamic arts scene in the 1970s (2012).

In a museum career spanning twenty-five years, Carter E. Foster has specialized in the history of drawing and the continuities of artistic practice from the Renaissance to the present, and has organized dozens of exhibitions covering this range. In 2016, he moved to Austin to take on a new role as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs at the Blanton Museum of Art. Previously, Foster worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art for over eleven years and was on the team curators who developed the Whitney’s inaugural display in its new building, America Is Hard to See. An expert on Edward Hopper, he organized the 2013 exhibition Hopper Drawing and edited and co-authored its award-winning catalogue. Foster writes extensively on postwar and contemporary art. Prior to the Whitney, he held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

IMAGES: Senior Curator Heather Pesanti. Photograph by Chris Garza / Courtesy Carter Foster