Press Release

November 8, 2006
Contact Vicki Brodnax at 407-646-2526

CONTEMPORARY ART 'CROSSES THE LINE' AT CORNELL

Winter Park, FL – Rollins College’s Cornell Fine Arts Museum opens the 2007 Winter/Spring exhibition season on Friday, January 19th with Crossing the Line: African American Artists in the Jacqueline Bradley and Clarence Otis, Jr. Collection. Sponsored by TIAA-CREF Financial Services for the greater good, this exhibition is on view January 19 - May 20. A private preview reception for the media, artists, and museum members, will be held on Thursday, January 18, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM.

Luanne McKinnon, Acting Director, has organized this nationally acclaimed central Florida art collection which features mid-century abstraction and late twentieth-century contemporary photographs, painting and mixed media by more than 40 artists. Included in the exhibition are works by Renee Cox, Sam Gilliam, Kehinde Wiley, Romare Bearden, Bob Thompson, Carrie Mae Weems, Lyle Ashton Harris, Whitfield Lovell and Raymond Saunders. Many pieces in the Bradley Otis Collection address issues of identity, gender, and race, such as Fred Wilson’s The Unnatural Movement of Blackness, 2006.  Mr. Wilson represented the United States in the 2003 Venice Biennale.

In conjunction with Crossing the Line, the Cornell Museum will host an important cultural/visual arts symposium from 10 AM to 4 PM on Friday, January 19.  Presentations will be given by notable artists and art historians including: Keynote speaker Lowery Stokes Sims, adjunct curator for the permanent collection at the Studio Museum in Harlem, contemporary artists Fred Wilson and Lyle Ashton Harris, and critic Franklin Sirmans, curator for Modern and Contemporary Art at The Menil Collection, Houston.  All are invited, open to the public.