Dike Blair With Steel Stillman
By Steel Stillman 9/18/09
Dike Blair is having a good year: in April he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in the visual arts, and this month a major exhibition of his work, “Now and Again,” opens at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, in Greensboro, N.C. The show, Blair’s first museum solo, is organized by Weatherspoon curator Xandra Eden and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Eden and writer Gary Indiana.
Dike Blair working on a sculpture outside his studio, 2009.; Untitled, 2009, gouache and pencil on paper, 18 by 24 inches.;
Born in 1952, Blair grew up in western Pennsylvania. He earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977, and also attended the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Since landing in New York in the mid-’70s, Blair has charted a singular path, making work that ranges from early paintings on glass to installations inspired by Disney World’s Epcot Center. In the mid-’80s, Blair began to make modestly scaled gouaches, and has continued the practice ever since. Over the years these paintings have focused on a succession of thematic pairings: travel scenes and still lifes, windows and flowers, and more recently, eyes and nocturnes with parking lots or footsteps in snow.
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