Harlan Hubbard: Ripple Effect
Opening Reception, Sunday, April 13, 2-4 p.m.
In the exhibit Driftwood: The Life of Harlan Hubbard, the themes that informed Mr. Hubbard's writing, his painting, his printmaking and his way of life are celebrated in the images, words and artifacts are on display.
Those themes include simplicity in how life is lived ─ always asking what is essential, what is not? They include beauty in the natural world and in the human capacity to make art, whether in song or words or images. They include his pioneering views on sustainability and the rejection of the modern ethic to use something and then dispose of it.
In Harlan Hubbard: Ripple Effect you will find another of Harlan Hubbard's legacies: His influence on countless writers and artists. This exhibit's contributors are from our region, Northern Kentucky and Cincinnati. Included are essayists, poets, novelists, painters, a songwriter and photographers. Had we extended our reach beyond our region, the rooms would not be large enough to hold the collected works. Such is Harlan Hubbard's influence.
A longer list would have to begin with Wendell Berry, who lives on a farm by the Kentucky River, which empties into Mr. Hubbard's beloved Ohio River. The two men knew one another well, and Mr. Berry's extensive works are informed by that friendship and by a common love of their respective homesteads, Mr. Berry’s in Henry County and Mr. Hubbard's in neighboring Trimble County.
Mr. Berry wrote about his friend and described his art as a sort of metaphorical system in which Harlan's work, in which all shapes ─ of water, earth, sky, and light ─ are analogues of one another, all fluid, all in motion. Harlan's profoundest calling was to see in these transient shapes some enduring clarity of form and relationship, to trace out the lineaments of a timelessness in time and of the heavenly here on earth.” (The Woodcuts of Harlan Hubbard, from the foreword by Wendell Berry, 1994).
The artists in this exhibit are guided in their work by this same calling.
The exhibit is curated by Ron Ellis and Mark Neikirk and is included with regular museum admission. For more information, call (859) 491-4003 or emailThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
Behringer-Crawford Museum is supported in part by our members, the City of Covington, Kenton County Fiscal Court, ArtsWave, Kentucky Arts Council and the Northern Kentucky Sports Hall of Fame.
