January 9, 2007
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
For more information, please contact:
Barbara Hollander, SAMA-Altoona Coordinator

(814) 946-4464

Travis Mearns, Public Relations Coordinator

(724) 238-6015

NEW YORK ARTIST TO EXHIBIT AT SAMA-ALTOONA 

            Altoona – The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art at Altoona is pleased to announce the opening of an exhibition of works by famed New York artist, Marina Stern. On view at the Museum from January 19 through April 22, Perception and the Cultural Environment: The Paintings of Marina Stern will feature 24 works created over the last 30-plus years.

            Stern is a uniquely synthetic realist painter who has made a successful transition from her early “talking” pop paintings into a photo-realism heavily mediated by minimalism. Her work is hard to characterize, as without looking pop, realist or minimalist, it achieves an impressive intersection of all three. Through the places and paths of the social environment, both urban and rural, and in the cathedrals of 20^th century industry, Stern’s contemporary messages are constituted through the icons of cultural memories, the nostalgia for progress, and the history of habitation and inhabitation of the earth.

            “A show of this magnitude does not come around often,” said SAMA-Altoona Coordinator Barbara Hollander. “These two-dimensional works are clean, sharp, architectural wonders. The Altoona Museum is the perfect venue to showcase these paintings that are neither ‘abstract’ nor wholly ‘representational.’ Marina Stern combines various approaches to the perfect degree that the viewer will find totally appealing.”

            Stern has had five one-woman exhibitions at the Forum Gallery, New York, as well as numerous solo shows in Boston, Chicago and Santa Fe, N.M. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions at The Staten Island Museum, New York; Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass.; Finch College Museum, New York; University Gallery, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and National Academy of Design, New York.

            Her work is included in the permanent collections of several prestigious institutions, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; and Port Authority of New York.

            The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art at Altoona is located in the Brett Building at 1210 Eleventh Avenue. Hours of operation are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1 to 5 p.m. weekends. The Museum is a handicapped-accessible facility and is open to the public free of charge. Parking is available in the garage across the street or in metered spots in the lot at the rear of the building. For more information, please call the Museum at (814) 946-4464 or visit www.sama-art.org.