The San Juan Islands Museum of Art is presenting Hydrographs and For All We Know, concurrently running exhibitions by two innovative artists and print makers, Nicole Pietrantoni and Dianne Kornberg. The exhibitions will open on Sept. 17, and will close on Nov. 28. Pietrantoni will present an Art as Voice event, Fractured Landscapes, Fraught Aesthetics on Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. at San Juan Islands Museum of Art.
Kornberg will present an Art as Voice event on Oct. 13 at 7 p.m., Crossing Borders, at San Juan Islands Museum of Art.
Both events will have a gallery talk and book signing to follow. Both women utilize print making to question what most take for granted, adding an artistic voice to forms otherwise expressed in purely scientific terms.
Kornberg uses print making and other creative media to create photo-based, archival pigment prints that both honor and question limits to the creation of knowledge through the scientific methods. She juxtaposes poetry by her collaborator, Elizabeth Frost, alongside scientific language and conventions applied to specimen conservation and preservation. Their work serves to create alternate ways of understanding the “evidence” around us. The artist and the poet shift their focus in the “What is Left” series, as they explore the charged and disorienting experience of grief. Pietrantoni is an assistant professor of art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Wash., where she teaches print making and book arts. With degrees in Human and Organizational Development and Art History from Vanderbilt University, an masters in fine art and masters of arts in print making from the University of Iowa, her accolades include: a Fulbright award for research in Iceland, an Artist Trust Fellowship, a Larry Sommers print making Fellowship, the Manifest Prize, and a Leifur Eriksson Foundation Grant. She is president of SBD International, the largest professional organization dedicated to print making, book arts, and papermaking in North America. Her work has been featured in over 80 national and international exhibitions and collections around the world.
Kornberg has been exhibiting her artwork nationally and internationally for three decades. Museum collections include the Portland Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and more. Her work is featured in multiple book publications including Contemporary Art in the Northwest, 100 Artists of the West Coast, and Selected Work of the Portland Art Museum. She is a professor emerita at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and resides on the San Juans. The exhibitions will open on Sept. 17, concurrent with the ongoing installation in the Atrium Gallery, A River of Migration by Gu Xiong. For info, visit www.sjima.org.
