StoryBook: Warrington Colescott’s Venice
Richard H. Axsom, MMoCA curator, will engage artist Warrington Colescott in a conversation about his creation of Death in Venice (1971), a portfolio of ten etchings inspired by Thomas Mann’s novella. To begin the project, Colescott traveled to Venice to make sketches of pivotal locations and to trace the protagonist’s steps through a city that attracted the artist for its richness, evil, and mystery—key elements in Mann’s story. Colescott will talk about his stay in Venice and how he wished to re-imagine Death in Venice according to his own personal read of it. A selection of prints from Colescott's Death in Venice portfolio is on view in StoryBook: Narrative in Contemporary Art.
Warrington Colescott is Professor Emeritus of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a printmaker with an international reputation for his innovative techniques and complex visual narratives. Colescott’s work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, and Victoria and Albert Museum, among many others. He lives and works in Hollandale, Wisconsin.
Rick Axsom
Richard H. Axsom is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, where he taught courses on modern and contemporary art for twenty-eight years, and a nationally recognized art writer who has published extensively in the area of the modern and contemporary print, including definitive texts on such artists as Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Terry Winters, and most recently, Ellsworth Kelly.