Five-Minute Tours: David McManaway at The Grace Museum, Abilene

A McManaway Jomo Board

Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. This will continue while the coronavirus situation hinders public access to exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.

See other Five-Minute Tours here.

David McManaway: Cult of the Commonplace at The Grace Museum, Abilene. Dates: March 7 – August 15, 2020.

Via The Grace:

“The art of David McManaway (1927-2010) has an underground, cult following. This exhibition presents a long overdue review of important work from his prodigious 50-year career to reexamine his role as a major artist and influencer in Texas and beyond. Originally a painter, McManaway moved to Dallas in 1959 and abandoned painting in favor of assemblage art. Today, McManaway is best known for wall reliefs he called Jomo Boards: compositions of juxtaposed found objects such as plastic toys, stuffed animals, trash and other commonplace objects arranged in a seemingly stream-of-conscious fashion. Look closely and you will see that McManaway altered and manipulated the selected found objects in order to generate another level of meaning through placement and telling juxtapositions resulting in clever double entendres ripe with humorous commentary on contemporary life in the late 20th century. The mass-produced, proudly useless, late-20th-century cultural discards stand as markers of memory transformed into an artist’s private response to the absurdities and comforts of the familiar.”