Amy Rahn
Amy Rahn is an art historian and gallery director at the University of Maine at Augusta.
When I first came across Wakoa’s work in 2021, I immediately saw echoes of Mitchell’s moving Sunflower paintings of the later sixties in Wakoa’s gestural florals that cascaded downward in their wilting.
Curated by renowned curator and scholar Jennifer R. Gross, whose research and propulsive writing build a strong current that seamlessly carries all the components of this complex show, the exhibition gathers a stunning variety of drawings, paintings, paper collages, and archival materials in its forceful argument that Loy was foremost, and in the current expansive meaning of the word, an artist.
Resurrection III (2022), the first painting in John Walker: New Work, is an almost entirely cobalt-blue and white canvas stretching seven feet high. A vertical primer-white passage cuts upward through the blue, with lateral extensions branching left and right.
