Rider Art Gallery Hosts Art by Ellen K. Levy: Decoding Metaphors for the 21st Century

Rider University will host an exhibit of paintings by artist Ellen K. Levy entitled Decoding Metaphors for the 21st Century from March 12 to April 19 in the Rider University Art Gallery, located on Rider’s Lawrenceville campus at 2083 Lawrenceville Road. The exhibit will open with a reception on Thursday, March 12, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Art Gallery, and Levy will again meet patrons for a Gallery Talk on Thursday, March 26, at 7 p.m.

Levy, who holds a bachelor’s degree in zoology, has long blended the realms of science and art in her works. “The visual arts have never seemed to me divorced from the sciences,” explained Levy, who also earned a diploma in painting on a Mary O.H. Longstrath Scholarship from the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts. “One need only look at Leonardo da Vinci, after all, in addition to more contemporary artists like Robert Smithson and Buckminster Fuller.”

After art school, Levy initially focused on medical illustration, but came to believe that such work combined the least creative parts of science and art.

“Since the advent of the computer, data visualization and data flow in real time have opened up new, productive areas, and the fields of imaging and image studies now hold the promise of real creativity,” Levy said. “However, my own artistic interests lie in capturing the sensual dimensions of science and its generative process, as well as some of its drastic ramifications for nature.”

Levy’s paintings are filled with an abundance of complex visual images that seem to force the viewer to confront or question opposing ideas: reality and invention, the plausible and implausible, and the abstract and realistic.

“My works on paper since 2001 often consist of paint that I apply over prints. Like others, I love to layer images and textures,” said Levy, who served as the president of the College Art Association from 2004 to 2006. “For me, juxtaposing paintings with new media helps force a confrontation of two worldviews that some consider irreconcilable.”

Levy was the Distinguished Visiting Fellow in Arts and Sciences at Skidmore College, funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, during the spring 1999 semester. She was the recipient of the Emerging Artist award by the Association Internationale des Critiques D’Art for 1995-96, and was commissioned by NASA to create work based on the November 1985 launch of the space shuttle Atlantis.

Levy has been a visiting scholar at New York University, taught at Brooklyn College, the School of Visual Arts and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She has been a guest lecturer at Williams College, the University of Hartford, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Drew University, the Brooklyn Museum School and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Ellen K. Levy: Decoding Metaphors for the 21st Century is funded in part by a grant from the Mercer County Cultural and Heritage Commission, New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Department of State.

The Rider University Art Gallery, located on the second floor of Rider’s Bart Luedeke Center, is open Tuesday to Thursday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., and on Sunday from noon to 4 p.m.

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