Division of Art Professor Honored With Major Fall Exhibition at Wright State University
Meadows art professor and alum Philip Van Keuren鈥檚 鈥淓legy鈥 will showcase decades of visionary work in the form of over 50 copperplate photogravures and silver gelatin prints.
The work of Philip Van Keuren, esteemed faculty member of Meadows’ Division of Art, will be on display in a major one-person exhibition in the Robert & Elaine Stein Galleries at Wright State University this fall. Opening August 21 and running through October 18, the exhibition—titled Elegy—will feature an array of 55 copperplate photogravures and silver gelatin prints and a video installation.
The heart of Elegy lies within Van Keuren’s decades-long photographic project Toward What Sun?, a body of work that has been in production for the last 30 years. In recent years many of his negatives have been made into copperplate photogravures, which will be on display in the exhibition. And although each work stands on its own, the entire body of images is considered one work of art.
“In these works I gather seemingly ordinary, but disparate, visual, cultural, and historical entities in order to illuminate and amplify their equivalent fictive, numinous, poetic, and emotional qualities,” explains Van Keuren. “In emphasizing an empirical observation of the world in much the same manner as the earliest photographers, my intention is to make new works emphatically of my time while remaining mindful of photography’s earliest thinking about itself as a medium of ordinary aspirations with magical results made by operators.”
One of Van Keuren's silver gelatin print works titled "Sconce (Roma)" (2023).
Every image contributes to a contemplative visual poem that explores the nature of time, memory, and place, and gestures toward universal themes of mortality and transcendence. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a 24-page publication, which includes an insightful essay by Harry Cooper, the Bunny Mellon Curator of Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art.
Van Keuren’s time as an educator in Meadows’ art department, where he specializes in printmaking and foundations, reflects his personal belief in a polyphonic approach to making works of art. And not only is he a professor at Meadows, he is also an alum.
Van Keuren received his B.F.A. (1974) and M.F.A. (1977) from the Meadows School of the Arts, before becoming a fellow in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in New York City and two stints in the MacDowell artist’s residency program in Peterborough, NH. In 2023, Van Keuren participated in the Visiting Artists and Scholars Residency at the American Academy in Rome (AAR) making the silver gelatin prints in Elegy.
Van Keuren will host an artist talk at Wright State University on September 4 while his exhibition is on display. For more information about the Robert and Elaine Stein Galleries, where Elegy will be displayed, .