Beth Shadur
As Gallery Director at Prairie State College since 2012, Beth Shadur curates five exhibitions yearly. She has curated a wide variety of exhibitions, from Narrative!,an exhibition featuring Eleanor Spiess-Ferris, John Pitman Weber and Gladys Nilsson, to The Discerning Eye, a photography exhibition featuring master photographers Dawoud Bey, Terry Evans and Joseph Jachna. The exhibitions have included artists from the Midwest, mostly the Chicago area, and embrace all media, including installation art, video, paintings, prints, photography, sculpture and graphic design. Highlights from various exhibitions are included here:
Beth Shadur has been an independent curator of exhibitions since 1994. Besides her renowned The Poetic Dialogue Project, begun in 2004, Shadur has been the Curator for several other national and international exhibitions. In 2005, she co-curated, with Scottish artist Miriam Vickers, an international exchange exhibition between the artists of ARC Gallery, Chicago, and those of Patriothall Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland. The exhibition in Edinburgh was a featured exhibition of the 2005 Edinburgh Festival. Among the other exhibitions Shadur has curated has been “Environmental Concerns,” at Artemisia Gallery, Chicago, IL, with works addressing issues of the environment and man’s impact on it; “East Meets West,” and “West Meets East,” two exhibitions featuring women artists from both coasts of Florida, for the Florida Women’s Caucus for Art.
In 1997, Shadur co-curated “Deep Water,” (with Inez Hollander) an exhibition of works in water-based media at the Sarasota Center for Visual Arts. This exhibition challenged perceptions of what is defined as watercolor. The exhibition featured works which takes watercolor beyond the common idea that it is a medium of beauty, to paint ‘pretty pictures,’ but instead as a medium to approach a contemporary image that can challenge. Included in this exhibition were works by such artists as Sondra Freckelton, Patricia Tobacco-Forrester, Miriam Karp, Lisa Englander, Helen Klebesadel, and Gladys Nilsson, all heavy-hitters known as masters of the medium. This exhibition was published in an article, “Deep Water”, in Watercolor Magazine in 1997.