West of the Imagination: Art Exhibit

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Few things loom larger in the landscape of American cultural identity than ‘cowboys’—the itinerant, horse-riding cattle herders mythologized since the nineteenth-century by popular culture, and ‘Indians’, the indigenous peoples pushed from their lands by American expansionism, alternately demonized and then romanticized in mainstream American popular art and film.

Now in “West of the Imagination,” a sabbatical show of large format oil paintings in the Calvin College Center Art Gallery, Franklin D. Speyers explores the iconic landscape of these figures, celebrating the beauty of the West and questioning the romanticized representations of Western life.

Speyers, who teaches painting and communication design at Calvin, invokes the huge skies and earthy motifs of Jacob van Ruisdael, the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape artist, in a series of distinctly contemporary realistic paintings.

Opening Reception

Saturday, October 28, 2017
7 p.m. – 9 p.m.

Gallery Hours

Monday – Tuesday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Wednesday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 9 p.m.
Saturday, 10 a.m. – 4 p.m.

Phone: (616) 526-6271
calvin.edu/centerartgallery

Please note: the gallery will be closed Thanksgiving weekend, November 23-25.

Artwork: Detail from “In Between” by Franklin D. Speyers.

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