If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson said in his Essays, “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind,” then the new exhibit at the Woodbury Art Museum could inspire enough marches to inspire entire albums full of theme music.
Now open, and running until Dec. 17, “Art Through the Cultural Revolution” features the art of the Chinese collective known as the Cave Artists Group, a group of painters, woodcutters and artists of other mediums that worked and studied under Jin Zhilin, a former student at the Beijing Academy of Fine Arts. During Mao’s revolution, the artists learned from impoverished peasants in order to work in unique, albeit common, mediums, as opposed to the elsewhere-common oil painting, considering how difficult and impractical oil painting was in the Chinese countryside.
The exhibit not only features original work from some of these artists, including Jin himself, but also exhibits two documentary films, as well as photographs from the time period of the art’s creation. The collection, owned by filmmaker and military history lecturer Dodge Billingsly, was put together over the course of nine years and various trips to China.
For more information about both the exhibit and the museum, call 801.863.4200, visit www.UVU.edu/museum or visit the museum on the second floor of University Mall in Orem.
