In the City: Works on Paper

Ken Price is best known as a ceramicist and sculptor, a product of a West Coast ceramics revolution that unfolded in the mid 1950s. Price was particularly influenced by ceramic artists Peter Voulkos, who taught Price at what is now Otis College of Art and Design.

But in more than 50 years—decades that carried him to Alfred University, to Japan, to Eastern Massachusetts and back again to his native California—Price has exhibited plenty of works on paper and canvas, as well, including Heat Wave (1995) (this week’s cover illustration), a silkscreen currently on display at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery as part of a show titled In the City.

The show, curated by Holly E. Hughes, is entirely works on paper, includes works on paper from the gallery’s permanent collection, by artists including Charles Burchfield, Phillip Evergood, Jacob Lawrence, John Marin, Gifford Beal, Joseph Stella and Louis Orr. The works, as indicated by the title of the show, are all evocations of city dwellers, industry, infrastructure, architecture, commerce, pollution—all the contributors to the complicated sociology of urban life. “At the end of the nineteenth century, artists began to explore aspects of the city that had an impact on the lives of the people who inhabit it,” Hughes writes. “During the early twentieth century, the city is portrayed as intangible, exciting, and fresh in man’s attempt to domesticate the urban beast. As the years progress, however, the city increasingly becomes a beacon of history that expands further into the grit and novelty of industry, skylines, steel, and skyscrapers.”

The show provides a sharp, quiet contrast to the Panza Collection, with its pure focus on color and light, also on exhibit at the AKAG.