Three Exhibitions Close May 13 at UW Art Museum

Three exhibitions will close Saturday, May 13, at the University of Wyoming Art Museum.

Closing are “Appalachia: Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams, 1989-2009”; “Places and Spaces: Works Progress Administration Artworks from the Collection”; and the Pat Guthrie Special Exhibitions Teaching Gallery.

“Appalachia: Photographs by Shelby Lee Adams, 1989-2009” features work by native Kentucky photographer Shelby Lee Adams. Returning to the same Kentucky hollers year after year, his work is biographical and autobiographical, exploring generations of families -- births, deaths and marriages -- and the changing culture and place of Eastern Kentucky’s mountain people as the modern world encroaches. Adams works with a 4-by-5 view camera, a wide-angle lens and lighting effects to create monochromatic photographs that reveal details in striking clarity in compositions that are complex and direct, simple and poetic.

“Places and Spaces: Works Progress Administration Artworks from the Collection,” drawn from the Art Museum’s permanent collection, features artwork by American artists produced under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which includes scenes that were familiar to both working and unemployed people: quiet streets, residential neighborhoods, factories, parks, industrial landscapes and farms.

From 1935 to 1939, the WPA’s Federal Project Number One put artists to work documenting the American experience during the Great Depression. The WPA was a work relief program, but it also embraced broad cultural goals: to bolster achievement in the fine arts and to promote a cultural democracy in which art existed for and about the people.

The Pat Guthrie Special Exhibitions Teaching Gallery model integrates original art into coursework curriculum and presents exhibitions available to students and the public throughout the semester. Working closely with faculty, courses this semester are: “Energy Resource Management and Development 2500 -- Writing Across Topics in Energy”; “History 1221 -- US Since 1865”; “Art 3002 -- Mesoamerican Art & Architecture”; and “English 4640 -- Democracy in the Americas.”

For more information about the Art Museum, call (307) 766-6622, visit the website at www.uwyo.edu/artmuseum, or follow the museum on Facebook.

Through its “Museum as Classroom” approach, the UW Art Museum places art at the center of learning for all ages. Located in the Centennial Complex at 2111 Willett Drive in Laramie, the museum is open Mondays through Saturdays from 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday hours are extended to 7 p.m. February through April and September through November. Admission is free.