Wright State sculptor’s work to be featured at Town and Country

In addition to sculpture he has worked in the visual art forms of drawing, printing, multiples, photography, video, visual performance, site-specific environmental installation and outdoor environment.

Long-time Wright State University sculpture professor Thomas Macaulay plans to retire this summer, but there’s still time to view some of his life’s work. This month at the Town & Country Fine Art Center at the Town & Country Shopping Center in Kettering, Macaulay’s exhibition Thomas Macaulay: Selected Objects Retrospective will be the featured gallery.

Macaulay’s works will be in the Visiting Artist Window Gallery from February 1 through 29, as well on walls near the sales desk during that same period, and in the front window of the Main Gallery from February 1 through 12.  The works on exhibition will be for sale.

After 38 years of teaching sculpture at Wright State, Macaulay will be retiring in June. He came to Wright State in 1973 from the University of Iowa, where received an M.F.A. degree and taught for several years. One of the first Dayton exhibitions that he participated in was the 1974 All Ohio Painting and Sculpture Invitational at the Dayton Art Institute. A version of Breadboard, the work selected for that show will be included in his February Town & Country Fine Arts Center exhibitions.

The earliest work to be shown is a version of Macaulay’s 1967 Feel Free. Three wall works will represent it, each made of nine 2′ square painted panels. Originally each set of nine squares formed the sides of a cube, and nine cubes comprised the complete work.  As a whole, the works in these exhibitions reflect Macaulay’s career-long interest in geometric form and appropriated objects, which most recently came together again in his ‘box’ series of site-specific, environmental installations. In these ‘box works’ Macaulay uses large corrugated cardboard containers, both in brown and white, as a sculptural material. The cubes are used to construct monumental sculptures that encourage viewing participants to move through, as well as around, the forms.  http://westonartgallery.com/ex.php?exDate=2009-04

During the past 45 years, Macaulay has exhibited extensively throughout the United States. In addition to sculpture he has worked in the visual art forms of drawing, printing, multiples, photography, video, visual performance, site-specific environmental installation and outdoor environment. One-person exhibitions of his work have been hosted by alternative galleries, including Artemisia in Chicago and P.S.1 in NYC; commercial galleries, such as OK Harris and Twining, both in NYC; university galleries, including The University of Delaware and Harvard University; and museums, such as The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu and The Southern Ohio Museum.

Macaulay’s works have been included in many group exhibitions like Reality of Illusion, organized by the Denver Art Museum and the University of Southern California, and Aspects of Perception, organized by Virginia Commonwealth University and Bard College. In 1986 the Dayton Art Institute held an early-career retrospective exhibition, with Pam Houk as curator, in the second floor Changing Exhibitions Galleries. A selection of the objects from that exhibition will be included in the arts center February exhibition.

Beginning in the early 1970s, then exclusively from the early 1980s to the early 1990s Macaulay combined elements of visual art and interior architecture into a form termed ‘site-specific, environmental installation’—that is, a work designed for a particular, existing space, that physically invites a viewer to enter, and is temporary. Also beginning in the early 1970s, then exclusively from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, he integrated aspects of visual art and landscape architecture into outdoor, site-based, altered and enhanced environments.

Throughout his teaching career, Macaulay traveled widely to study art and architecture from ancient periods to contemporary works. Some of these trips included stays in China, Egypt, England, France, Greece, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain and Turkey. He received four Individual Artist Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council (OAC), and fellowships from OAC/National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) as well as NEA/Midwest Arts. In addition, The Asian Cultural Council, the Fulbright Commission, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the OAC awarded him foreign travel and artist residency opportunities.

Event Title: Thomas Macaulay: Selected Objects Retrospective

Venue: Town & Country Fine Art Center, Town & Country Shopping Center, Kettering

Dates: February 1­–29

Reception Date/Time: February 9, 6–8 p.m.

Description: This exhibition celebrates Macaulay’s career as an artist and WSU sculpture professor, featuring works that highlight his long interest in geometric form and appropriated objects.