Lonesome Traveler
About the Exhibition
Twentieth century America embraced modern art and praised its luminaries for their ambitious representations of line, form, and color. Among the revered was Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), an artist who challenged style and subject matter in his own way. As an artist, author, activist, and adventurer, Kent aimed to reconcile the traditionalistideals he admired with the growing industrial world in which he lived. Lonesome Traveler explores Kent’s observations about man’s conscious power within nature. The featured seventeen prints invigorate Transcendentalist ideals of solitary adventure, exploration, and contemplation with modernist visual styles. We as viewers join Kent’s solitary figures in their sublime contemplation, invoking our own odysseys of self-reflection and engagement with nature.
Kent embraces the visual effect of different printmaking styles to create his art using both lithography and wood engraving. Many of the prints on display were originally used as illustrations for magazines, advertisement, and literature, media intended for large audiences and widespread circulation. As an artist, he offered a serene escape from the cacophony of everyday life for viewers, in turn challenging each to think bigger and deeper thoughts about themselves and the world around them.
FREE & OPEN TO ALL
Tuesday-Friday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. | Saturday Noon-5 p.m.
Related Programming
NOTE: Gallery hours are extended during any program held after 5 p.m.
Exhibition Talk
Rockwell Kent: The Art of Storytelling
Tues, Oct 9, 5:30 p.m.
Pepper Stetler, Associate Professor, Art history and Associate Director, The Humanities Center
Rockwell Kent’s prints tell stories on their own or as illustrations of American literature. Dr. Stetler’s talk will explore Kent’s particular way of storytelling in the context of early twentieth-century modernity, when comic strips and photographically illustrated magazines were establishing new techniques and strategies of visual narration.
Exhibition Talk
Retracing Rockwell Kent
Wed, Oct 24, 5:30 p.m.
Frederick Lewis, Associate Professor, School of Media Arts & Studies, Ohio University
Using selected clips from his definitive documentary on Rockwell Kent, filmmaker Frederick Lewis will discuss the epic life of this artist, illustrator, adventurer and social activist once known as the “stormy petrel of American art.”
Exhibition Film
A Documentary Film: Rockwell Kent
Thurs, Nov 29 | 7:30 p.m. (172 minutes)
Painter, illustrator, and author. Socialist, activist, and adventurer. One can easily apply all of those descriptors to the great 20th-century artist Rockwell Kent and still neglect the full measure of his character and accomplishments. No biographical portrait of the soulful, New York-born iconoclast has ever matched the depth of his spirituality, versatility, and wanderlust—until now. Thirteen years in the making, this film examines the origins, development, and fruition of Kent’s art while tracing his globe-spanning journey through almost nine decades of vibrant living.
All Programs are FREE & OPEN TO ALL and held at the Art Museum (unless noted otherwise).
Richard and Carole Cocks Art Museum
