Illuminate the work of Stephen Antonakos at lecture with curator Marshall Price
Learn about the life and work of internationally renowned artist Stephen Antonakos with curator Marshall Price. Celebrating the exhibition Four, Once More, which pays homage to the first SCAD Museum of Art Jewel Box installation, this lecture will expound on the ways Antonakos used color, light, form, and space to create works that moved beyond the strict formal concerns of Minimalism to highlight the spiritual potential of his chosen medium. Price, who guest curated the late artist’s exhibition Darkness and Light in SCAD’s Pei Ling Chan Gallery in 2008, will speak on his working relationship with Antonakos and the continuing legacy of his artistic practice.
This event is free and open to the public.
About the artist
Stephen Antonakos’ (b. 1926, Agios Nikolaos, Greece; d. 2013, New York) work with neon since 1960 lent the medium new perceptual and formal meaning — first in New York then internationally. His use of spare, complete, and incomplete geometric neon forms ranged from direct 3D installations to painted canvases, chapels, walls, and his renowned backlit panels featuring painted or gold surfaces. Starting in the 1970s he installed more than 55 architecturally scaled permanent public works in the U.S., Europe, Israel, and Japan. He conceived work in relation to site, scale, proportion, and character — and to the space it shares with viewers. He referred to his art as “real things in real spaces,” intending the works to be seen without reference to anything outside the immediate visual and kinetic experience. In addition to neon, major aspects of Antonakos’ practice also included color pencil drawings on paper and vellum, collage work, conceptual packages, small-edition artist’s books, silver and white reliefs, prints, and — since 2011 — series of framed 3D gold works. The artist moved to New York with his family in 1930. In the late 1940s, after returning from the U.S. Army, he established his first studio in New York’s fur district. From the early 1960s until his passing in 2013, he worked in New York’s SoHo neighborhood.
About the speaker
With a curatorial practice rooted in critical inquiry and social justice, Marshall N. Price has organized numerous exhibitions and programs that engage both global and local contemporary art. He is Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, N.C. Price received his Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining the Nasher Museum in 2014, he held curatorial positions at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and spent more than a decade as curator of modern and contemporary art at the National Academy Museum in New York. His wide-ranging practice has provided a platform for artists’ voices and illuminated understudied areas of art and culture. His projects include Second Nature: Photography in the Age of the Anthropocene; Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948–1960; Reckoning and Resilience: North Carolina Art Now; Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush; Jeffrey Gibson: Said the Pigeon to the Squirrel; John Cage: The Sight of Silence, and many others.