MILWAUKEE, WIS.- Multidisciplinary artist Alfred Leslie’s The Killing Cycle, an exploration of non-linear narratives in single paintings, forms the centerpiece of the Haggerty Museum of Art’s fall exhibition, which opens August 20 and runs through December 23. The fall exhibition brings together works in different media to examine how art can be used to tell stories about personal journeys, community identities, and cultural and environmental transformations.

The exhibition includes The Killing Cycle’s very large oil paintings plus some preparatory drawings. In addition, it features a screening of The Last Clean Shirt, a collaboration between Leslie and American poet Frank O’Hara. (A fact sheet on the exhibition is attached)

Also on exhibit this fall are Yangtze – The Long River, a photographic chronicle by Nadav Kander of life and the costs of development along China’s Yangtze River, and an experimental student-faculty curated show, Clear Picture, Looking at Communities from an Art Museum.

Alfred Leslie, The Killing Cycle (August 20 through December 23, 2014)
The year 1966 was a turning point for painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie. That fall, a devastating fire destroyed Leslie’s studio-home and all of its contents. This personal loss, as well as the death only a few months earlier of his close friend and collaborator, poet Frank O’Hara, proved fertile ground for artistic inspiration. The Killing Cycle is a series of constructed narratives that synthesize fact and fiction to describe the beach scene car crash that ended O’Hara’s life. Leslie began the paintings as part personal testimony and part metaphor for loss. By the time he finished the cycle 14 years later, Leslie’s artistic goal had evolved to explore how to construct a non-linear narrative in a single work. These “painted stories,” which currently reside in disparate private collections and other museums, will be exhibited together for the first time in more than 20 years.

Nadav Kander, Yangtze – The Long River (August 20 through December 23, 2014)
Over a period of three years, Nadav Kander photographed scenes he encountered on the banks of China’s Yangtze River. More people live along the Yangtze, the third longest river in the world, than in the United States. Kander followed the Yangtze upstream more than 4,100 miles from its mouth at the coast, where there is a high-traffic shipping port, toward The Three Gorges Dam, the largest in the world, past Chongqing, a rapidly expanding urban and economic center, to the river’s source in the Himalayan mountains. As he traveled, Kander was struck by the human and environmental impact of China’s dizzying rate of development. His photographs of the people and landscapes he encountered explore themes of impermanence and displacement, and ultimately question the price of progress.

The large format photos examine the environmental and human impact of modernization.

Clear Picture, Looking at Communities from an Art Museum (August 20 through December 23, 2014 and January 17 through May 17, 2015)
Over the course of the fall 2014 and spring 2015 semesters, the Haggerty will present this exhibition featuring diverse works from the museum’s permanent collection. Clear Picture is a faculty-student pilot project led by two Marquette faculty members. The exhibition will serve as a multi-disciplinary textbook and laboratory for four undergraduate Journalism and Spanish courses. Works will be added to the exhibit throughout each semester as students explore ways of constructing narratives through the selection and display of art.

The Haggerty Museum of Art is free and open to the public.