ART THEORY AND PRACTICE

Welcome to the Department of Art Theory & Practice (AT&P) at the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, Northwestern University. The department has both an undergraduate program, offering a baccalaureate degree, and a graduate program, offering a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

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faculty

Pamela Bannos
Dan Devening
Jeanne Dunning
Kelly Kaczynski
Judy Ledgerwood
Marlena Novak
Michael Rakowitz
Steve Reinke
Lane Relyea
James Valerio

 Judy Ledgerwood

Ledgerwood is a 1984 graduate of The School of the Art Institute and, from 2003-2006, Chair of the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University where she has been teaching since 1995. She lives and works in Chicago. In her abstract paintings, Ledgerwood reveals a debt to modernist ideology, while jettisoning the authoritarian rhetoric that surrounds it. Her paintings are presented within the specialized language of abstract painting building on vernacular decorative motifs. These paintings may initially be experienced as immediate or even graphic due to their strong physical presence but first-person viewing reveals a fragile and mysterious quality, resulting from optically active color, or subtle shifts in the way light is reflected or absorbed by the surface of the painting itself or as revealed by ambient light or changes in viewer position. Her paintings both demand and reward direct engagement with the act of looking. Recent one-person exhibitions in New York include Hard Jam at Tracy Williams Ltd January-February 2007, preceded Ugly Beauty at 1301 PE in Los Angeles, Spring Fever at Tracy Williams Ltd and Get Up at Hausler Contemporary in Munich 2004-2005. Her winter themed work, Cold Days was the focus of an exhibition at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago in 1999. Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago presented new paintings 1301 PE in Los Angeles, Sunny Days in 2003.

Her work has been shown at MoCA, Los Angeles, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her work in the post-hypnotic exhibition traveled extensively in the United States from 1998-2001. In 2000 she was awarded a University research grant by Northwestern University, for Morocco: Architecture, Pattern, and Light, and in 1998 the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in the Arts Grant, produced a series of works designed for mass reproduction technology for the catalogue for the COLD DAYS exhibition at the Renaissance Society in Chicago. She was awarded an Artadia Award in 2004, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award in 1997 and in 1993 a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Upcoming exhibitions include a project for Gallery 2.5 at University Galleries Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois and inclusion in a three-part exhibition to celebrate the 30-year anniversary of Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, followed by a solo exhibition in Los Angeles and inclusion in a survey of abstract painting at Artspace in Auckland New Zealand.

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Associate Professor
office: 3-129 Crowe
jcl482@northwestern.edu