Ledger Drawings + Richard Nonas
16 November - 22 December, 2017
PRESS RELEASE
The Hill Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of the exhibition, Ledger Drawings + Richard Nonas. This extraordinary museum quality collection of Native American Ledger Drawings is paired with a sited sculptural installation by the artist Richard Nonas.
Please join us for a rare evening of interaction with Richard Nonas and Donald Ellis at the Hill Gallery on November 16th from 5 – 8pm located at 407 W. Brown St. Birmingham, MI 48009.
Donald Ellis, is an internationally pre-eminent dealer in the field of historical Native American art, has been servicing private collectors, corporations and museums since 1976. The Donald Ellis Gallery maintains a particular emphasis on the art of the Inuit, Yup’ik, Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands cultures and Plains Ledger Drawings.
“In the second half of the nineteenth century, artists from the Plains Indian peoples (Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho and others dwelling in the Western United States and Canada) created an extraordinarily rich and distinctive body of drawings chronicling battles, rituals, and winsome if sometimes jarring events of everyday life. They are known as Ledger Drawings, as they were made on the pages of commercially produced account books. These striking images, many bearing pictographic signatures, are executed in ink, graphite, colored pencil and watercolor. What all share is their makers’ acute powers of observation and memory, to record and describe specific people, places, things and events, recording history as it transpired.”
Linda Wolk-Simon, Author
Richard Nonas lives and works in New York City. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Michigan, Layfayette College, Columbia University and the University of North Carolina. Inspired by Margaret Mead, he found his calling in the study of social anthropology. After his education, Richard spent 10 years working as a field anthropologist, living among Native American Indians in Northern Ontario, Northern New Mexico, and Southern Arizona. In the mid 1960’s he turned to sculpture to express space and place, using wood, iron and stone, affecting the people who pass near and through the changed physical environment. With a poetry of minimalism, Nonas creates a body of work that engages the mind and body. Richard Nonas is an internationally recognized sculptor with installations in Paris, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Chicago Art Institute. He has permanent outdoor installations in the sculpture garden of the Detroit Institute of Arts and on the grounds of Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Ledger Drawings + Richard Nonas will be on view from November 16th – December 22nd 2017.
For more information or press inquiries please contact the gallery at 248-540-9288 or by email at info@hillgallery.com