Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
With artistic intent
Delta Exhibition award winners use animals and hashtags — among other things — to conceptualize their expressions
Bold patterns, a figure’s mysteriously obscured face, snakes and a cat giving the viewer the stink eye. There is a lot of visual information in Lisa Krannichfeld’s New Skin, the Little Rock artist’s mixed-media piece that won the Grand Award and $2,500 last month at the Arkansas Arts Center’s 60th annual Delta Exhibition.
Juror Brian K. Young, director of the the University of Central Arkansas’ Baum Gallery, says the work shows Krannichfeld’s skill and confidence. Young, along with fellow jurors Les Christensen, director of Arkansas State University’s Bradbury Art Museum, and conceptual artist Shea Hembrey of Hickory Grove, waded through 1,424 submissions to the exhibit.
“She’s got so much going on in terms of pattern, collaging and mixed media and contrasting reds,” Young says. “By all accounts, it should be a mess. But somehow, she imagined all these different patterns and colors and media coming together in a cohesive way.”
Krannichfeld has entered the Delta six times, but has only gotten in once before, in 2015, when she won a Delta Award for Shirt (in gold) dressed series. Along with New Skin, she has another mixed media piece, Hackles Up II, in this year’s exhibit.
Krannichfeld grew up in Little Rock, graduated from Parkview Arts and Science High School and studied art at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She has been creating art “for as long as I can remember.”
Her recent work is made with materials such as Chinese ink, watercolor, acrylic, colorful patterns that would be perfectly at home in the closet of a member of hip-hop trio Migos, and toned cyanotype on resin-covered board. They have a visual impact that at first recalls Kehinde Wiley’s
work, but is clearly her own style.
Her current pieces often feature figures with only the lower part of their faces visible.
“I started with portraiture,” the 34-year-old says. “That was the way I liked to express emotion. After a while, I got bored and thought about how I could do that without using the face.”
The works now evoke feelings through body language and animals, like the cat, snakes and, in Hackles Up II, wolves covering the jacket worn by the figure.
“A lot of the pieces have feral animals hidden somewhere, and that led me to painting domesticated animals, but in an undomesticated stance or expression. Often they are very angry and knocking things over. It’s a way to infuse more emotion and confrontation in the piece.”
Young says Krannichfeld’s inclusion of the cat, an animal that’s become associated with funny Internet memes, in New Skin was a bold move.
“You put a cat in there, you’re taking a risk. You risk trivializing the work. She took risk after risk, and it didn’t fall apart. I thought that was the most amazing thing.”
For Christensen, Krannichfeld’s use of materials, the power of her subject matter and the piece’s concept came together perfectly.
“I think it’s visually exciting,” she says. “All three of us spent a lot of time looking at it and thinking about that piece.”
PLAYING WITH WOLVES
This year’s Delta Awards went to Anais Dasse for Sticks and Stones, an energetic and striking black-and-white oil, ink, charcoal and pencil image of children fighting (or playing?) among snarling wolves; and Louis Watts, for his meticulous graphite-on-paper piece Carbon Alphabets, (The Ship Minerva Series), a three-yearsin-the-making project of thousands of tiny hashtags aligned to form one big hashtag. Dasse and Watts each received $750.
The $250 Contemporaries Award, chosen by an Arts Center auxiliary membership group, went to Ray Allen Parker for Post Punk, his large oil on canvas.
Honorable mentions were given to Aaron Calvert for Always Facing South Bear, made of glazed stoneware and covered in popular symbols and patterns, Tim Hursley’s photograph Pine Bluff Mortuary and James Matthews’ Eviction Quilt #3 (Green Medallion), a handtied quilt made from clothes recovered after an eviction.
Dasse, who was born 29 years ago in Bayonne, France, didn’t pursue her own art until moving to Little Rock in 2014.
“Before that, I was doing graphic design, but not fine art,” she says. Her desire to create for herself “really started to sparkle here with all the wildlife and the incredible outdoors.”
She was in the Delta exhibit two years ago, but Sticks and Stones, which shows children in hooded, onesie-type outfits cavorting with wolves in a scene from something like Maurice Sendak meets Lord of the Flies, was actually rejected for the 59th Delta by last year’s juror.
“In all of my works, I’m trying to create a dystopian future with only children living there,” she says, adding that she was inspired by parents in the South letting their children play with little supervision.
“That’s something that if you did it in Paris, everyone would cry, ‘Stranger danger,’” she says. “Here, kids can do whatever they want. I was very surprised.”
Christensen says all three of the judges were struck by the image.
“It’s a very powerful piece. We were really taken by that. It is well crafted and has a lot of content that we felt was so powerful.”
Watts, 33, a former Contemporaries Award winner who was born in Little Rock and now lives in Burlington, N.C., started laboring over Carbon Alphabets, (The Ship Minerva Series) in 2015.
“It was a lot of work. I just finished it before it was time for the Delta,” he says. “I would just chip away at it over the years.”
The name is a reference to Jasper Johns’ series The Gray Alphabets, Watts says. While Johns used repetitive images of numbers and letters, Watts is using tiny marks of social media symbols like the hashtag.
Young says the image works as a combination of minimalism and maximalism.
“Because of the number of marks he made, his minimalist is also maximalist. There’s an intense amount of effort where the end product becomes minimalistic. I thought that contradiction was fantastic.”
BATTLING HILLBILLIES
The Delta exhibit started in 1958 to highlight contemporary art from Arkansas and its border states and features artists who live here, were born here or in surrounding states.
This year’s exhibit, with 56 works by 46 artists, holds true to the Delta’s commitment to contemporary works. There are abstract and representational pieces, landscapes, installations, and art made from wood, faux fur, clothing, photography and video.
The figure and portraiture are common in this exhibit, with large paintings such as Parker’s 60-inch-by-48-inch Post Punk; Jason McCann’s loose, vibrant watercolor and pastel The American Student: Montre with Two Lamps; LaToya Hobbs’ woodcut Nzinghalisa, Aj Smith’s graphite pencil on paper Faces of the Delta: Geraldine; Neal Harrington’s Southern Gothic woodcut of battling hillbillies called Favorite Daughter and Rival Sons Diptych and David Bailin’s mixed media Forgotten.
“There was a tremendous amount of figurative work submitted,” Christensen says.
There are whimsical pieces like Dusty Mitchell’s interactive Pressure, a checkerboard assembly of working digital scales that viewers are invited to step on, and the social commentary of Donna Pinckley’s photographs of mixed-race straight and gay couples accompanied by nasty comments the couples have received.
Melissa Cowper-Smith’s Unremember is the sole video-based item in the exhibit and shows intriguing, jerky, interspersed images on a continuous loop.
Landscapes get a view from above in the grids of John Allison’s oil, cold wax and mixed media on canvas Diptych — Bike Ride South and Hannah Moll’s laser etched acrylic on panel Agriculture Horizon.
At 60 years young, the Delta continues to display high-level work of artists from this part of the world, Christensen says.
“I was happy to see that there is a lot of good work out there. It wasn’t surprising to me. I don’t believe that the only great work happening is in major cities. I know there is a lot of quality work in our region and this really verifies that.”
And being a juror for this special anniversary year carried its own weight.
“The No. 1 priority is to give a good exhibition to the institution,” Young says, “but also for the people in the past and people applying in the future. You want them to know that this is a good show to get into.”