Amy Toscani & Renee Danz Opening Reception

Description

Nemeth Art Center, a beacon for contemporary art located in Park Rapids, Minnesota, is hosting an exhibit by Amy Toscani & Renee Danz, from May 1st & July 11th, 2015. All are invited to the opening reception and artist talks on June 20th from 5:30 to 7 pm.

Amy Toscani is well-known across the Midwest for her monumental-scale sculptures in places like the University of Minnesota Minneapolis campus, Western Sculpture Park in St. Paul, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

These sculptures exhibit a rugged style and optimistic buoyancy that viewers love, and that Toscani once humorously described as “a weird mix of fantasy and 4-H.” She has taken that proposition several steps further in recent years, making a shift to working on a human scale and producing new sculptures that are colorful, multi-layered, and wittily reflective of American consumer society. Toscani works with an eclectic mix of found thrift-store objects, fabric, multi-colored plastic, asphalt, and other materials as they present themselves. Welding plastic pieces together, seamlessly combining manufactured objects with hand-made components, and the use of popular imagery are all techniques that she employs to create “pitch-perfect songs of contemporary Americana” (Mary Abbe, Mpls. Star Tribune, 5/15/14).

Amy Toscani, the recipient of many grants and awards from the Jerome, McKnight, and Bush Foundations, has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in Minnesota and the Midwest. The artist completed both her undergraduate and graduate studio art degrees at Ohio University.

Paired with the Toscani sculptural exhibit, the Nemeth Art Center is proud to host Fargo, North Dakota artist Renee Danz. Renee, a long time business owner of Zandbroz in downtown Fargo, will share a large group of her intricate assemblages with the public for the first time. Renee Danz’s assemblage sculptures combine modernist and folk traditions to create a group of figures that resemble a lovingly dysfunctional family.

Admission is always free to the Nemeth Art Center which is located in the upstairs of the Historic Hubbard County Courthouse at 301 Court Ave in Park Rapids. For more information about the Nemeth Art Center visit www.nemethartcenter.org.

This exhibit is made possible by the generous business sponsors and members of the Nemeth Art Center.