The collected works of IUP sculpture professor Dr. James Nestor will be showcased in Kipp Gallery and Gallery C in Sprowls Hall.
The show is in celebration of Nestor's career and in honor of his upcoming retirement. The retrospective exhibition will be up from October 14 to November 19, 2010, with a free public reception with the artist on October 14 from 5:00 to 8:00 p.m. in Kipp Gallery. Light refreshments will be served.
Nestor will also present a lecture about his work November 11 at 5:00 p.m. in Sprowls Hall, Room 118A.
There is no charge for admission to the gallery or the opening reception or lecture. All are open to the community. Kipp Gallery and Gallery C are open Tuesday through Friday from noon to 4:00 p.m., or by appointment.
The exhibition, titled “elapsed, works from 1970–2010,” will feature large-scale free standing sculpture, installation works, and projected video of past performance pieces by Nestor from 1970 to 2010.
“The collected works of James Nestor from 1970 to 2010 parallel a time of radical changes in contemporary art and education in the United States,” Patricia Villalobos Echeverría, a former faculty member in the Art Department, said. “Artistic practices shifted in perspective from individualized traditions and monocular systems to pan-ocular systems of view that required a more political and contextual engagement. It was loud, impolite, messy and absolutely real.”
Nestor began teaching at IUP in 1985. During the course of his career, he has been an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh and Mount Aloysius College, a technical advisor at Kent State University, as well as a visiting professor at universities in Slovenia, China, Poland, Croatia, and Nicaragua. His work has taken him around the world and earned him awards including a Fulbright Senior Specialist Fellowship, IUP Senate Research Grant, and a Howard Heinz Endowment.
“Dr. James Nestor has made an indelible mark on the Department of Art and the College of Fine Arts at IUP,” Michael Hood, dean of the college, said. “In addition to the frequently acknowledged excellence of his students' work in regional and national venues, he is himself an artist of great talent and vision.”
Nestor will retire from his position at IUP in 2011.
“I was truly impressed by the honesty and courage of the works in Nestor's lecture at Millersville University recently,” Line Bruntse, Millersville University of Pennsylvania assistant professor and a former student of Nestor, said.
“I was struck by the realization of the significant shared history of a random group of people who found their place in the basement of Sprowls Art Building, working with Dr. Nestor between 1990 and 1995, when I was enrolled in the sculpture class. I am proud to have accomplished many of the things I have undertaken since then. Who knows where I would be today had it not been for the start I found in the sculpture studios at IUP.”