L-R: Buster Graybill, Burden of the Beast, 2016; Pío Galbis, Shot, 2017- 2021.
Pío Galbis and Buster Graybill
Organized by Jesus Benavente
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 19; 6:00PM–9:00PM
Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture and the Skowhegan Alumni Alliance are excited to announce CONFERENCE CALL: a series of five 2-person exhibitions featuring the work of Skowhegan alumni that will run from May through November 2022.
Established in 1946, Skowhegan is an intensive summer residency program for artists which takes place annually in Madison, Maine. The exhibition series will take place at Skowhegan's New York space in Chelsea, and will open on May 18, 2022 with the first exhibition featuring the work of Pío Galbis (A '82, '21) and Buster Graybill (A '07) organized by Alliance member and alum, Jesus Benavente (A '12).
For this show, artworks by Pío Galbis and Buster Graybill will pay equal respect to formal art conventions and informal materials, fully utilizing the unusual backdrop of Skowhegan's office space. Pío presents a range of complex paintings and drawings that span the last seven years to this past summer (when he returned to Skowhegan for a rare second time as part of the special alumni residencies in 2021) to the present. Buster, working both 2- and 3-dimensionally, makes use of Skowhegan's space, inside and out. R.MUTT (Renegade Modernist Utility Travel Trailer), his handmade survival trailer/mobile art studio sculpture, is being driven from Texas to New York for the exhibition. R.MUTT will be parked in front of Skowhegan's space and on view until Saturday, May 21, 2022.
About Pío Galbis
Pío Galbis is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn. He has exhibited at White Columns, the Everson Museum of Art and The New Museum. He has been awarded grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bronx Museum AIM fellowship, and a MacDowell residency. Pío was also a participant at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture twice.
About Buster Graybill
Buster Graybill is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the Department of Art and Art History. He utilizes sculpture, installation, video, and photography to traverse cultural boundaries and reconnect with often overlooked objects, materials, and places found in the rural landscape. Graybill has exhibited throughout Texas, as well as in Boston, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, Salt Lake City, and Guanajuato, Mexico. Glasstire, an online contemporary art journal, ranks Buster Graybill as one of the top ten artists living in Texas. He is an alumnus of the Skowhegan Artist Residency and the Artpace International Artist-in-Residence program, as well as a recipient of grants from the San Antonio Artist Foundation and the Idea Fund, a program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
CONFERENCE CALL | Exhibition Series 2022 aims to place work by artists from different Skowhegan cohorts in conversation with each other, and with the labor of operating a residency. It will feature the works of Skowhegan alumni: Pío Galbis (A '82, '21) and Buster Graybill (A '07); Gwendolyn Kerber (A '79) and Rocío Olivares (A '18); Baxter Koziol (A '17) and Molly Springfield (A '06); Pallavi Singh (A '15) and Jing (Ellen) Xu (A '16); Hetty Baiz (A '69) and Jordan Seaberry (A '15).
Each pairing is curated by one or two members of the Alumni Alliance: Jesus Benavente (A '12), Rebecca Shippee (A '18) and Annette Cyr (A '76, '21), Michael Scoggins (A '03), Danny Greenberg (A '18) and Eleanor Kipping (A '18), and Paige Laino (Alumni & Archives Coordinator). Additional information about upcoming exhibitions in this series is forthcoming.
The Skowhegan Alumni Alliance is a group of alumni who generate off-campus programming for the international alumni community.