"Tigers of Wrath" by Walton coming to SAMA, Oct.27th

SAMA Welcomes Tigers of Wrath:
Watercolors by Walton Ford
October 27th through January 6, 2008
Cowden Gallery, San Antonio Museum of Art

San Antonio–The San Antonio Museum of Art announces Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford opening to the public October 27th. The exhibition will feature 31 large-scale works on paper, most completed after 2000, in the Museum’s Cowden Gallery.

These watercolor images of birds, animal and fauna are meticulously executed in a style influenced by John James Audubon’s Birds of America, but one that also contains veins of political and social discourse of past and present. By using the non-human world as a mirror for our own, Ford employs his skill as an artist and observer of people to communicate his subtle but subjective commentary on contemporary society. Although his work offers interpretations of a myriad of socially relevant issues, Ford’s images can also be appreciated solely for their humor or for their sheer seductiveness.

Ford regularly offers images and text exhuming realms of history: the history of natural science and zoology; exploration and colonization; the history of images. Remarkably, he completes his powerful compositions in watercolor, usually one of the more intimate mediums in modern and contemporary painting. Each of his meticulously painted animal portraits doubles as a complex, symbolic system which he layers with clues, jokes and lessons in colonial literature and folktales.

His paintings often satirize the history of colonialism and the impact of various forms of political oppression on today’s social and environmental landscape. He provides a satirical look at today’s social landscape in a playful yet poignant manner.

Walton Ford was born in New York in 1960 and he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1982. He currently works and resides with his family in upstate New York . Ford is the recipient of several national awards and honors including a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1992 and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991.

His work can be found in the permanent collections of several American museums including the Whitney Museum of American Art ( New York ), the New Britain Museum of American Art ( Connecticut ), the Princeton Art Museum ( New Jersey ), and the Spencer Museum of Art. ( Kansas)

The exhibition Tigers of Wrath:
Watercolors by Walton Ford has been organized by the Brooklyn Museum under the direction of Marilyn Kushner, the museum’s former Department Chair and curator of Prints and Drawings. In San Antonio the exhibition is made possible by generous support from the Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, with additional support from the Weston Centre.

On Sunday, October 28 at 3 pm, David S. Rubin, The Brown Foundation Curator of Contemporary Art at SAMA will conduct “A Conversation with Walton Ford” in the SAMA Auditorium.

For a complete calendar listing of public exhibitions, lectures and other special events open to the public, visit SAMA’s Web site at www.samuseum.org.

Walton Ford, His Chaplain, watercolor, gouache, graphite and ink on paper, 2003
Collection of Barbara and Duncan Chapman

Leigh Baldwin
Public Relations and Marketing
San Antonio Museum of Art
200 West Jones Avenue
San Antonio, TX 78215