NEWS RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2008 FOR USE: Immediate CONTACT: Steve Quakenbush

MERCER GALLERY EXHIBITION FEATURES WORK BY SCULPTOR OF STEEL

Kansas-New York artist Don Osborn one-time professor of Gallery Director David Kinder

Mercer Gallery will open a new exhibition April 6, featuring a collection of steel sculptural pieces created by an accomplished Kansas artist whose work is displayed at indoor and outdoor sites across the nation.

The Don Osborn Exhibition will remain open through April 23, with free public viewing hours of noon to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, plus 2 to 5 p.m. Sundays.

Mercer Gallery is located in the west wing of the Pauline Joyce Fine Arts Building at Garden City Community College, and admission is free.

PERSONAL AND PUBLIC SCALE

Osborn, who retired from the State University of New York at Plattsburgh in 2004, is a Kansas native who works in welded steel, creating forms on what he terms “both a personal and public scale.”

His earlier sculptures were conceived primarily as abstract statements, he explained, but his work today involves allusion and metaphor.

“I attempt to lead the viewer to reflect on the history of objects and of art,” Osborn said. “I believe the architectural visions in my recent works provide an ideal form to embody the lyrical inspiration of my work.”

The pieces have been described as “soundly fabricated volumetric forms, with interior space and surface qualities that express a sense of human scale and experience,” according to David Kinder, gallery director.

“The work demands a direct and honest confrontation with questions of social interaction and cohesion,” Osborn said.

The artist, now connected to the Lindsborg community and area, completed a master of fine arts degree at Wichita State University and earned a regional artist residency grant in 1969 from the National Endowment for the Arts. He attained his bachelor of arts degree at Northeastern Oklahoma State University, Tahlequah, in 1965.

After concluding the grant funded residency, he served on the art faculty at Bethany College, Lindsborg, until 1980, and later taught five years at Arkansas State University. He joined the SUNY art faculty in the mid 1980s.

During his tenure at Bethany, Osborn was one of Kinder’s professors.

OUTDOOR IMAGES

Osborn began fabricating outdoor steel sculptures of monument scale during the 1990s, and his creations were chosen for a number of urban installations, such as Chicago’s Navy Pier Sculpture Walk, Western Sculpture Park in St. Paul, Minn., and the OMI International Artists Workshop and Sculpture Park in Ghent, NY.

His creations are also displayed at Franconia Sculpture Park, Franconia, Minn., and in approximately eight other permanent locations in Arkansas, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas and Maryland.

While teaching at SUNY he also collaborated with the Plattsburgh State Art Museum in developing a campus sculpture park, which is maintained there with an endowment established in his name at the time of his retirement.

His work has appeared in 40 to 50 major exhibitions across the U.S. since 1990, and some of his recent displays have included a show this year at the Wichita Art Museum, and an exhibition in 2007 at Manhattan’s Strecker-Nelson Gallery. He was selected in 2005 for the two-year Western Michigan University Sculpture Tour.

Other Osborn creations have been exhibited or chosen for collections in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, DC, as well as locations in Canada.

MERCER GALLERY SELECTIONS

Among three-dimensional works in the Mercer Gallery exhibition, all of fabricated steel, are pieces with titles such as Ghost Poet’s Chamber, Awaiting Dawn’s Early Light, Divining Rod, Crucible, Prisoner of Time and Legend. The pieces, created from 1998 through 2004, range in size from 12-inches by 12-inches by 17 inches to 32 inches by 20 inches by six inches.

Osborn said he’s also hoping to show photographs depicting a few of his large scale monuments, including installations in Trenton, New Jersey; Marquette, Mich.; and Chicago.

Mercer Gallery, which opened in 1989, features a different art display each month of the academic year. The Don Osborn Exhibition is taking place in addition to a student art show in the walk-though gallery at GCCC’s Beth Tedrow Student Center.

The student center display, open April 4-27, includes two- and three-dimensional works by Kate Dibbern, an art major from York, Neb.

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