Francesca Fuchs
American Genre: Contemporary Painting

The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art
Portland, Maine
July 20 – September 15, 2017

From Maine College of Art: “The Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College of Art is pleased to announce American Genre: Contemporary Painting curated by artist, writer, and curator Michelle Grabner. Grabner is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

American Genre: Contemporary Painting is an exhibition built on a triad of traditional painting genres: still life, landscape, and portraiture. Fifty-two paintings by fifty-two American artists offers a critical balance to the conditions of atemporality, affected responses, and the material turn shaping much of contemporary painting discourse. Alternatively, this exhibition employs historically recognized groupings of subject and forms. Genres incorporate and invoke structures of knowledge by performing classification. Deeply embedded in everyday life, genre is conspicuous and powerful in its ability to chart historical continuity and differences through its organizing forces.”