Chuck Holtzman
Associate Professor
As far back as I can remember, engaging in the activity and wonder of building all sorts of things was truly exhilarating. Equally intriguing was dismantling those built objects, sometimes returning the elements back to the original configuration or reordering the elements in a reconfigured pattern. From this I learned that meaning was dependent on context and arrangement. Not long ago, I became aware that my proclivity toward employing this system of building, dismantling, rebuilding, reordering etc., had found its way into, and has now become the guiding principle behind the framework of my approach and methodology of drawing. What now serves as the essential framework/scaffolding radiates the power of ambiguity, a force that I believe is inherent in drawing. By engaging drawing as a place for discovery, the idea of exploring order and disorder in various measures tests various aspects of reason and unreason, giving way to precarious, and often times, contradictory visual episodes. This position enables me deeper access to explore the nature and poetics of ambiguity as an indeterminate force that activates concepts within illusionistic space giving contour and dynamism to the themes driving my work. My search is less about trying to solve mysteries and instead directed toward rearranging them.
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Chuck has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant for Drawing, The New England Foundation for the Arts Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant and others. His work has been acquired by numerous public and private collections, including The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY, The Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, The Worcester Art Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX ,The Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA and others.
