Julie Langsam: Revisiting Paradise


The School of Art+Design is pleased to announce the exhibition Revisiting Paradise, comprised of Art+Design alumna Julie Langsam’s paintings and drawings, on view at the Richard & Dolly Maass Gallery February 17-March 21, 2014. Thirty years after graduating from the School of Art+Design, Julie presents a new series of works that reflect on how the modernist architecture of the campus and its utopian ideals influenced her artistic practice. Langsam is best known for her paintings of iconic Modernist buildings designed by celebrated architects such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Within these paintings, the isolated buildings are positioned on the horizon line between an expansive and lustrous sky at sunset, and abstract color fields derived from Ad Reinhardt’s paintings from the 1950s. Here, she brings these paintings full circle to Purchase College, where the grand scale and the flatness of the buildings highlight the architectural legacy of the college, designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes within a rural landscape in the early 1960s and ’70s.

In Revisiting Paradise, Langsam will present a new series of watercolor paintings and graphite drawings based on images of the campus’ brutalist brick buildings and the original blueprints from the 1971 MoMA exhibition and catalogue Architecture for the Arts: The State University of New York College at Purchase, curated by Arthur Drexler. In returning to Purchase College and the Visual Arts Building, Julie continues to introduce new structures to her body of architectural scenes. Langsam will feature a site-specific painting on the gallery walls based on the original blueprints of the Neuberger Museum, layered and transformed by abstract color fields, selected randomly by chance. In further conversation with the architecture of the gallery and wall painting, she will unveil a site-specific floor piece made out of carpet based on the original designs of the Visual Arts Building.

Julie Langsam is currently an Assistant Professor of Drawing at Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts. Recent solo exhibitions include Now(here) at 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, NY; Building & Blueprints at Espai 8, Spain; and Floor Plan Prototypes, Reykjavik Art Gallery, Iceland. She is the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and is represented in collections throughout the United States. Julie received her BFA from Purchase College, SUNY in 1983 and a MFA from Queens College, CUNY in 1985.

March 13, 6:30pm: Q&A with Cole Akers, Curator and Special Projects Manager of the Philip Johnson Glass House, Visual Arts Building, Room 1016

This exhibition is on view Feb. 17, 2014 – March 21, 2014.
Gallery Hours: Monday-Friday, 10am-5pm

Event Location and Ticket Information

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Richard and Dolly Maass Gallery at Purchase College
735 Anderson Hill Road
Purchase, NY 10577
Handicap Accessible? Yes

Date: Monday, February 17, 2014 - Friday, March 21, 2014
Times: 10:00 am - 5:00 pm

Ticket pricing:
Free event
Get tickets now

Presenter: Purchase College School of Art + Design
Presenter Website: www.purchase.edu