September 22 - November 12
McKelvey Charitable Fund Gallery @ 204 S. Austin
Reception September 22nd, 5-7pm
In her current body of work, To Put It Bluntly… Southern artist Mary Jenewein’s boxes, or cages as she refers to them, each making a statement by depicting an event or facet of life.
Featured in the McKelvey Charitable Fund Gallery, the new exhibition will be viewable and available for collection Sept. 22 –Nov. 12. A public reception with Jenewein will be held Sept. 22, from 5–7 p.m. at RCA to officially launch the show, which is free and open to the public.
“I was born and raised in the deep south – the land of bigotry, racism, and cruelty and also the land of some of the world’s best literature. I think the one follows the other. My father was Asian and my mother Caucasian, so I became aware of the unfairness of things early on and when, late in life, I began making art, my subject was laid out for me” says Jenewein.
Jenewein adds, “When I was little, my mom and I made peepshows of shoe boxes, magazine cutouts, colored cellophane and a light hanging above. We looked through a hole cut in the side and saw a tiny world. That world became my world, and I was at the mercy of the owners of that place. Through all these years of making art, painting, sculpting, collaging and anything else I could try, I have made boxes. The box gave me the form to hold my content. It is small, confined, claustrophobic.”
“My mother quoted Clifford Odets to me, “We are living in a time when new art should shoot bullets.” My boxes are of such a time, our time. Every artist has something stuck in her craw. She coughs and coughs and sometimes it comes out.”
“The beauty of Mary Jenewein’s shadowboxes veils the sincere and sobering scenes they depict,” said Elena Rodriguez, curator of exhibitions for Rockport Center for the Arts. “Jenewein uses symbols and allegory to describe injustices that she has seen and experienced in her own personal life.”
Biography
Mary Jenewein was born in 1933 in Franklin, Tennessee, and raised in Savannah, Georgia. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1955 with a degree in political science. In 1958, she married Larry Jenewein in Abilene, Texas, as Georgia’s miscegenation laws prohibited their union at the time. The couple welcomed their son, Brandon, in 1963 and moved to Houston two years later. There, Mary pursued her creative interests, taking art classes at the University of Houston between 1983 and 1985.