Food For Imagination

One physician described the “beautiful formation” of the human body as inspiration for art.  Go Figure!  celebrating the human form, has just opened at the San Juan Islands Museum of Art (SJIMA) in Friday Harbor. Visitors and residents are invited to experience art of the human body as it tells stories, expresses emotion and celebrates what it means to be human.

Rebecca Albiani, art history expert – Contributed photo

As part of the expanded exhibition program, SJIMA presents A Brief History of Figurative Art by the exceedingly popular Rebecca Albiani. The presentation takes place on Sunday, October 3, at the San Juan Grange Hall in Friday Harbor at 4-5:30 pm.

Albiani, a frequent art history lecturer at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle summarizes, “The Human figure has been essential to Western art for millennia.”  Her talk will follow the development of figurative art from ancient Egypt to classical Greece and Rome.  She will examine the importance of the figure to the Renaissance, a rebirth of classical antiquity.

She will take the visitors through depictions of the human figure and how it remained central to western art through the late 19th century and how figuration became an avant-garde choice against the backdrop of 20th-century abstraction.  She will discuss how contemporary artists like those featured in “Go Figure” both respect and expand centuries of tradition as they position the human body in their artistic practices today. 

Ms. Albiani studied Italian and Art History at UC Berkeley, graduating with highest honors, and earned an MFA in art history at Stanford where she focused on 16^th Century Venetian painting.  While a graduate student she received a Graduate Lecturing Fellowship at the National Gallery in Washington D.C. and a Fulbright Scholarship.  For over 20 years she has been a popular art history lecturer with her topics ranging from ancient Egypt to contemporary art.  

Admission is on a Pay As You Can basis. Masking will be required and attendees will be asked to show proof of vaccination upon entry.

Go Figure, On Being Alive!  by Francie Allen and Going the Distance by Nola Ahola are on display at SJIMA weekly from September 24 to December 6. Hours are Friday through Monday from 11-5. Admission is $10, with SJIMA members and those 18 and under admitted free of charge. Mondays are Pay As You Can Days.  See www.sjima.org for details.

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