Opens September 26, 1999
Continues to November 14, 1999

Opening Reception:
Sunday, September 26, 5–7 P.M.

ALBANY—The University Art Museum at the University at Albany, State University of New York is proud to announce the upcoming exhibition of work by internationally acclaimed printmaker and book artist, William Bernard Schade. The artist is also a graduate of the University at Albany. The exhibition highlights work that spans 25 years of his prolific career and includes prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and hand-made books. A special feature of the exhibit will be The Happy Room, a recreation of an actual room in Shade's house in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Complete with countless flea market finds, art objects, colored lights, seashells, and hand-crafted furniture; The Happy Room is a raucous celebration of throwaway culture and is typical of Shade's idiosyncratic approach to art and life.

Schade's books, prints, and mixed-media installations are filled with fanciful animals that come to life against a ground of gold leaf scrawled with incongruous spellings (a product of Schade's dyslexia). Schade's exquisite attention to detail, his strong command of printmaking technique, and his sometimes edifying, but usually, satirical text form a contemporary response to an art historical tradition that extends from medieval illuminated manuscripts to Krazy Kat comics. Schade is best known for his menagerie of hens, crows and other feathered creatures, but in one of his most rollicking series (based on Noah's ark) dozens of prints and hand-made paper objects are dedicated to beasts throughout the animal kingdom. Schade's Noha series is a mixed-media morality tale in which the humblest of animals are invested with penetrating human characteristics. Here, as in all his efforts, Schade demonstrates his penchant for locating common humanity in the most unlikely subjects.

In an essay for the exhibition catalog, James Kettlewell (faculty emereti from the art history department at Skidmore College) writes, "By simply doing what comes naturally to him, William Schade has created an art which is in fact quite radical. It is like nothing encountered in the museums, or in the galleries of New York. Even more risky than his caricatured animal subject matter, is the utterly unserious nature of his very serious art, an art to which he dedicates his life."

Schade's extensive exhibition history includes recent one-person exhibitions at Mt. Holyoke College, South Hadley, Massachusetts (1997) and Mareau Galleries, St. Marys College, Notre Dame, Indianna (1997). National and international group exhibitions include Beautiful Beasts, Center for Book Arts, New York, New York (1997), I.A.C.K., Kyoto, Japan (1995), and American Artist Books, Studio Galleria, Budapest, Hungary (1992).

A full-color catalog with essays by Linda Weintraub (author of Art on the Edge and Over) and by James Kettlewell (faculty emereti from the art history department at Skidmore College) will accompany the exhibit.

For further information, including photographs and artist interviews, call or e-mail Corinna Ripps Schaming at (518) 442-4038 or [email protected].

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT:  Corinna Ripps Schaming (518) 442-4035