Spotlight Artist

Steven Mannheimer

Midwest
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Featured in New American Paintings

Artist Statement

 This body of work was born slowly, evolving from the existential rupture (perhaps rapture) of leaving a twenty-five-year career as an art professor and freelance newspaper columnist to work in technology concept development at Thomson (RCA, if you prefer). Returning to the university, but now to informatics, I spent the next twenty years researching acoustic cognition and pedagogical strategies for the blind. These abrupt and diametric transitions—from sight to blindness, art to science—were freeing. Aesthetic dynamics I once assumed to be fundamental I rediscovered as fungible and only flexibly, provisionally true. Today I am intoxicated by a sense of art-making as endless collage and improvisation. This circus, this half-choreographed avalanche of odds and ends glued to each other and pinned to the wall, can dance forever: on and on and out the window.

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