Seattle-based artist Jeffry Mitchell will be the next PSU MFA Monday Night Lecture series guest. Mitchell's decorative ceramics and delicate drawings revel in the cute and the kitsch and his solo show at Pulliam Deffenbaugh last March showed off his ongoing fascination with the high/low dialectic.

A brief bio from the press release:

Jeffry Mitchell has had solo shows at the Henry Gallery, University of Washington, Diverseworks, Houston, TX, White Columns, NYC, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, NYC and the Seattle Art Museum. His works are in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University, the Philadelphia Art Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Seattle Art Museum among others.

Sculptor, printmaker, painter and conceptual artist, Jeffry Mitchell references a wide spectrum of art history and decorative arts. "Historically the decorative arts have emphasized high craft, refined materials and absence of content. Mitchell, on the other hand, develops his high concept ideas in low-brow materials. His approach to crafting is spontaneous, expressionistic and purposefully non-technical. The result is a new direction in decorative arts that looks like an awfully cool place to go, an engaging path that challenges our most closely held assumptions about craft and the legitmacy of decoration in art." Tina Oldknow

Next in the series: Vanessa Renwick on Oct 30th

Lecture · Monday, October 23rd · 8:15 p
PSU 5th Avenue Cinema · 510 SW Hall St. Room 92 (on the corner of 5th & Hall)
Funded in part by PICA, PNCA, Reed College, Lewis & Clark College and The Affair at the Jupiter Hotel

Mitchell's work is so seductive and has a clumsy sensuality to all of it. Who knew the baroque could be on the verge of being cute?

And why are we still having this high/low dialectic? Granted I think Mitchell confronts the subject very well, but it seems like this discussion really should have ended quite some time ago. Then again, that is somewhat like saying, "well, someone has already painted a portrait before, no sense in ever painting one again." Then that brings to mind, does the world need another portrait? Oh, life is such a vicious cycle.