Timothy Harding (b. 1983) makes sculptural paintings and installations that meld traditional painting and drawing practices with technology. Harding’s artistic practice begins on the computer creating individual lines, squiggles, and shapes. Using these digitally created forms, he creates vinyl stencils that are strategically transferred onto a canvas and utilized to create layers and layers of paint until a fully realized pattern emerges.

Harding’s works merge the gestural nature of Abstract Expressionism with the flatness of Minimalist painting to explore how a traditionally two-dimensional object can visually and physically occupy a three-dimensional space. He purposefully stretches his finished paintings across ill-fitting supports or builds a substructure under the canvas to make the surface fold, buckle, or protrude, “sculpting” the painting into a unique shape. Harding disrupts our understanding of painting—as he makes the once two-dimensional canvas into a three-dimensional object. In this way, Harding creates a new type of medium, as he combines sculpture with painting.

Timothy Harding lives and works in Fort Worth, Texas. He is currently an Associate Professor of Art at Tarleton State University. Harding received his Master of Fine Arts degree from Texas Christian University, and his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Texas Woman’s University. In 2018, Harding was a visiting artist at the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art. He has received grants from the Nasher Sculpture Center and the Dallas Museum of Art. Harding has curated four exhibitions, and he was also involved in an artist collective titled Homecoming! Committee. He held residencies at 77Art, the Wassaic Project, and the Vermont Studio Center. Harding has exhibited nationally in Texas, New York, Vermont, and more.

Generously sponsored by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, McGinnis Family Fund of Communities Foundation of Texas, and Kathy Webster in memory of Charles H. Webster, with additional support from Jay & Barbra Clack, Joe & Susie Clack, Jenny & Rob Dupree, and Dr. Larry Wolz

OJAC presents over 75 works by Dickson Reeder in the Texas Moderns series. The series provides insight into creative mid-twentieth century visual artists whose works were often inventive or experimental, yet not fully accepted by the general population in Texas more accustomed to traditional forms or styles of art.

Dickson Reeder (1912-1970) was born in Fort Worth, Texas and graduated from Fort Worth Central (later Pascal) High School in 1930. It was then his talent in portraiture became apparent. To further his skills, he relocated to New York City to study with several artists known for their work in the genre. By 1934 he had established his own portrait studio back in his hometown. In 1936, the artist Sallie Gillespie urged him to travel to Europe where he eventually settled in Paris and worked with the Russian theatrical designer Alexandra Exter. Exter made use of non-objective abstract forms for her innovative sets and costumes. It was while working with Exter that Reeder met artist, and future spouse, Flora Blanc. Flora introduced him to the English artist and master printmaker Stanley William Hayter. At Hayter’s Atelier 17 print studio, Reeder discovered his passion for experimental printmaking, creating non-objective abstract prints that were unlike his more formal and traditional approaches to portraiture. Yet, from that point, he developed work in abstraction alongside his more formal and traditional portraiture pursuits.

Dickson and Flora Blanc Reeder married in 1937 in New York City, returning to Fort Worth in 1940 where they became active in the contemporary art community through the Fort Worth Art Association. Eventually, both became associated with a core group of like-minded artists—the Fort Worth Circle. Reeder continued to pursue portrait commissions with many of these works being included in numerous exhibitions and awarded prizes which elevated his reputation as a visual artist. After World War II, Dickson and Flora established the Reeder Children’s School of Theatre and Design in Fort Worth, recruiting artists and musicians to collaborate and assist in producing the school’s plays. For the next 12 years of the school’s existence, Reeder designed all the stage sets, along with hundreds of costumes, masks, headdresses, and props.

Reeder returned to Paris to study with Stanley William Hayter in 1959. During this period, he was developing and creating new work for his 1960 retrospective at the Fort Worth Art Center that would demonstrate the diversity of his artistic skills and interests. He continued to work and exhibit his work throughout the US and Europe until his death in 1970.

(Bio information derived from Intimate Modernism: Fort Worth Circle in the 1940s, by Scott Grant Barker and Jane Myers.)

Generously supported by The Charles E. Jacobs Foundation, Doris Miller & Don Fitzgibbons, Scott Chase & Debra Witter, John & Ginger Dudley, and Margaret & Jim Dudley

On loan from the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas, the OJAC presents a series of short films by multi-media artists Liliana Porter and Lenka Clayton. Though their approaches to making films are far from similar, both utilize what’s at hand to make truly curious works that incite a gamut of emotions for viewers—ranging from angst to joy.

Argentinian artist Liliana Porter has often explored the use of everyday objects in her prints, paintings, and conceptual installations. Over time, Porter began to favor readymades with a toy-like appearance, which she represented isolated or in groups in the midst of the empty, undefined background that has characterized much of her work. Porter’s photographs and assemblages shift from still-life arrangements to miniature portraits that endow the depicted figurines, knick-knacks, and vintage toys with a sense of inner life. Through straight-forward stop-action animation, this cast of recurrent characters comes to life in videos such as Solo de tambor, where they perform in humorous, absurd, and sometimes moving vignettes.

In 2013, British artist Lenka Clayton attempted to objectively measure the furthest distance she could be from her toddler son in three environments: a city park, the alley behind their Pittsburgh home, and the aisles of a local supermarket. The trio of videos humorously underlines the challenging judgment calls that parents make about how much autonomy to give their children. Clayton produced these videos as part of a larger project, An Artistic Residency in Motherhood (ARiM), a grant-funded residency she created out of her own home “to explore the…upheaval that parenthood brings and allow it to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work ‘despite it.’”

Stills from:

LILIANA PORTER, Drum Solo [Solo de Tambor], (still), 2000, edition 53 of 100, 16 mm film transferred to digital video, 19 minutes, 6 seconds. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Archer M. Huntington Museum Fund, 2003.106

LENKA CLAYTON, The Distance I Can Be From My Son, (still), 2013, edition 2 of 5, digitized single channel video, 4 minutes, 35 seconds. Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, Gift of Lora Reynolds and Quincy Lee, 2018.40