Artists - Dunn and Brown Contemporary

PRESS RELEASE

Annette Lawrence
Indigo Sun
September 7 through October 7, 2000

Dunn and Brown Contemporary is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition of Annette Lawrence’s most recent paintings and drawings. In this new body of work, Lawrence further investigates her interest between writing, drawing, text, and language. One of the most important artists of her generation, Lawrence brings together art and music, African-American history and personal experience, and language and text in an exhibition of great sensitivity and subtlety.

Indigo Sun includes over thirty intimate works on paper completed within the past year. Throughout the exhibition, Lawrence records the passage of time in a variety of forms. In several works, Lawrence focuses on the visual format of sound by using graphs of sound waves taken from digital sound analysis. Through her fondness for the jazz legend John Coltrane and her interest in her own African-American culture, she selected the song Alabama which commemorates the memory of the four young girls who died in a racially motivated church bombing in 1963. Fragments of this abstract, visual text become the foundation for Lawrence’s own language in this exhibition.

For the past decade, Lawrence has created works exclusively on brown craft paper, including flattened brown paper bags. This highly accessible material not only represents a domestic functionality, but it also mirrors the warmth and color of skin; and more specifically, the color of the artist’s skin. While Lawrence creates all of the works for Indigo Sun on the brown paper that is so often associated with her art, she has introduced two new elements of art-making to her work in this exhibition. The color indigo and the direct physical effects of the sun on exposed paper are used by Lawrence for the first time to make many of these works. Abstract images of text and textile combine with the layers of time and history to create a delicate and moving installation.

At the age of 35, Annette Lawrence has been recognized nationally as an artist of tremendous talent. Earlier this year, Lawrence was the subject of a one-person exhibition, Concentrations 36: Annette Lawrence, at the Dallas Museum of Art. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions including solo shows at The African-American Museum in Dallas, ArtPace in San Antonio, and the University of Michigan.

Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, the Community Artists' Collective and the Firehouse Gallery in Houston. She has appeared in many group exhibitions including, the 1997 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the first and eleventh rounds of installations at Project Row Houses, Houston; The Texas Collection, Modern - Postmodern, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Gender: Fact or Fiction at the Laguna Gloria Museum of Art in Austin; and Finders Keepers, at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston.

Annette Lawrence has served as an artist-in-residence through the Texas Commission on the Arts and at the Fordsburg Artists’ Studios in Johannesburg South Africa. She has received prestigious fellowships, including the Core Fellowship from the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston as well as Camille Hanks Cosby Fellowship for African-American Artists from The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Furthermore, Lawrence has received grants from the Cultural Arts Council of Houston, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Art Matters, Incorporated. Originally from New York, Annette Lawrence is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing in the School of Visual Arts at The University of North Texas in Denton, Texas.

Annette Lawrence will be present at the opening reception on Thursday, September 7 from 6:00 until 8:00 p.m. at Dunn and Brown Contemporary. She will give an artist talk at the gallery on Saturday, September 9 at 2:00 p.m.. The gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday from 11:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. and by appointment.

Images are available upon request.

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