Art Into Words – Craig Drennen

For the first Art Into Words opportunity of the year, come hear from Craig Drennen, a WV boy who has made good in his career as a contemporary artist. While Drennen can paint like a dream, his visual and conceptual responses to Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens have led him to integrate installation, video, and performance into his practice. Artist Talk, Monday, January 27 in VAC 209 @ 6pm.

Craig Drennen is an artist based in Atlanta, GA who identifies primarily as a painter even though the centrifugal force of his studio practice often propels him outside the practice of painting. Recent solo exhibitions include “Mit Zuckerstange” at Flyweight Projects in Brooklyn and at Cloaca Projects in San Francisco. Prior to that he had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia in Atlanta, Ellen de Bruijne Projects in Amsterdam, and Samsøñ gallery in Boston. Drennen’s work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, and the New York Times, among other places. He has been interviewed by StoryCorps, Art Pulse, and New American Paintings. He teaches at Georgia State University, served as dean of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and writes occasional art criticism. In 2018 Drennen was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in the Fine Arts.

Since 2008 Drennen has organized his studio practice around Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. It is considered Shakespeare’s most problematic work and is the only one of his plays not performed in his lifetime. He chose a “failed” work because the play’s obscurity creates unpoliced cultural bandwidth that he can creatively occupy. For each character in the play he produces a distinct body of work based on contemporary associations, resulting in a collection of related pieces composed of separately considered parts. Timon of Athens allows him to build an entire imaginative universe from one discarded 17th-century play. He is represented by Hathaway Gallery in Atlanta.

Free and Open to the Public
For questions, contact sandra.reed@marshall.edu
“Funded in part by the Joan C. Edwards Distinguished Professors in the Arts Endowment
with support from the College of Arts and Media, Marshall University.”