BO BARTLETT
Wheaton
August 4 – 26, 2023
Like yin and yang, realist painter Bo Bartlett and abstract painter Betsy Eby are opposites working in perfect harmony. But the dualism extends beyond their art, to the two paradoxical locations they choose to practice it — Bartlett’s native Columbus, Georgia, in winter, and, in summer, a tiny island 23 miles off the coast of Port Clyde, in Maine.
The Bo Bartlett Center is set to open on January 18th, 2018 with two exhibitions; Bo Bartlett Retrospective and Peers & Influences. The first will include large-scale works of the artist, some of which have never been exhibited before. The second is a group exhibition of works by artists including Jamie Wyeth, Wolf Kahn, Odd Nerdrum and others, co-curated by Bartlett and Eby.
David Houston, Director of the Bo Bartlett Center, states, "I look forward to the opening of this unique cultural institution in the College of the Arts at CSU. We will work to add to the many unwritten chapters of the history of American Art while continuing to develop our deep commitment to innovative community service."
Bo Bartlett has received the prestigious 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern Art from the Society 1858 of the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The prize is awarded to an artist whose work contributes to a new understanding of art in the South. It recognizes the highest level of artistic achievement. Bartlett is acclaimed for his large-scale paintings that explore American life and cultural heritage. His exhibition at Dowling Walsh runs for the month of August.
Gallery artist Bo Bartlett and his wife, artist Betsy Eby, are directing and producing a feature-length film titled “Things Don’t Stay Fixed.” The film is being shot in Columbus, Georgia, Bartlett’s hometown. Bartlett says of the filmmaking process, “Because I have painted for so long, I can sit there and put a little touch of red on the canvas and step back and look at it for five minutes. I can say, ‘Do I like that? Maybe I do; maybe I don’t,’” Bartlett said. “That is a luxury and you can’t do that here. You have to make a decision and go with it.”
Bo Bartlett’s studio on Wheaton Island was featured in the article, Island Life by Polly Saltonstall in Maine Boats, Homes and Harbors. Bartlett and his wife, Betsy Eby each have studios on the island, giving them beautiful spaces to make work while facing the ocean. “It’s beyond our wildest expectations,” said Bartlett.
Bo Bartlett’s current museum exhibition Bo Bartlett: American Artist at the Mennello Museum of American Art was reviewed by Hind Berji in Artborne Magazine. “Bartlett’s work-in all its anticipation and apprehension-is still nostalgic; it somehow reminds us of the thoroughly American childhood some of us never had, like the pile of leaves we never jumped into or the calm summer days we never truly enjoyed. It reminds us of optimism that is embedded in our cultural fabric and the sadness that accompanies it.”
The Mennello Museum of American Art is presenting an exhibition of Bartlett’s work titled, Bo Bartlett: American Artist. The exhibition opens January 27, 2017 and will be open through May 7, 2017. “The exhibition present large-scale oil paintings that are figurative, psychologically imbued, beautifully rendered, and wonderfully sublime by one of the most significant Realist painters of his generation.” In conjunction with this exhibition, the Orlando Museum of Art will present four additional major paintings by the artist.
In early 1991, art critic Roberta Smith looked over Bo Bartlett’s painting God—a sweeping image of a black man, poised in front of a sweeping coastal horizon, wrapped in a quilt—and came slightly unglued. In her New York Times review of the exhibition she later wrote of the piece: “As consciousness raising, this is fairly simple-minded. As history painting, it’s idiotic.” In the same column, Smith also dings Bartlett for his “conservative” artistic style (realism), dismissing his paintings as being “more trendy than timeless.” Smith’s comments, which generated a domino effect of subsequent negative reviews—by Peter Schjeldahl, Michael Kimmelman and others—re-shaped the arc of Bartlett’s career.
JOIN US FOR AN EVENING WITH BO BARTLETT and learn about the exciting plans, vision and mission of The Bo Bartlett Center in Columbus, Georgia, from Bo Bartlett and the Center’s Executive Director and Board Members.
Bo Bartlett was interviewed in the Columbus Ledger Inquirer with an online video accompanying the article.
‘If I don’t have one big painting going, I feel like I am not sure why I am alive.’
The "Summer of '14" is now a work of art. It is also a work in progress by Columbus artist Bo Bartlett. In the painting, two teenage girls are riding a bike oblivious to the cloud of smoke behind them. It was that kind of summer for Bartlett, who worked on the painting in his second-floor studio in the old Swift textile mill on Sixth Avenue. Things seemed to be going well, but he says he sensed impending doom. It struck when his 27-year-old son, Eliot, died suddenly. Recently, Bartlett sat down with Ledger-Enquirer reporter Chuck Williams to discuss his life, his work and his difficult summer.
Artists Bo Bartlett and Betsy Eby set off to make a film about seeing. They travel the country stumbling upon art sites, characters and luminaries. But then the unexpected happens sending their adventure into unforeseen territory. And the clear becomes unclear. The visible world, a strain to see. A moving meditation, SEE, delivers the beauty of America through the eyes of two artists determined to see art in the everyday. The movie invites us to open our eyes anew and see the beauty and wonder in the world around us.
“You have said that: “True artists seek the truth at all costs.” What kinds of truths are you seeking in your most recent works?
I want to make paintings like I’ve never seen before. The current show in Maine has two distinct bodies of work. Both represent fields that I feel are somewhat unexplored. The figure paintings, many of my wife, painter Betsy Eby, posing with her friends, are intimate portraits. I know what I’m doing. And I’m well aware that they are dancing on an edge. They could easily be considered decadent, lewd and immoral from the right side of the aisle and patriarchal, misogynistic and sexist from the left.
David Houston, director of curatorial at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, will be moving to Georgia to spearhead the opening of The Bo Bartlett Center at Columbus State University’s College of the Arts in downtown Columbus. University officials have been planning for this day since 2004, when Bo Bartlett, a PEW fellow and one of today’s foremost American painters, agreed to help Columbus State University establish, in his hometown, a permanent gallery and learning center with a focus on contemporary art. The Bo Bartlett Center will house the largest single holding of Bartlett’s paintings, including several grand scale works such as the iconic “Leviathan.”
The College of the Arts at Columbus State University is uniquely positioned to create a learning opportunity like none other in the country. American artist and Columbus native Bo Bartlett is donating his archives, artwork and many major iconic paintings to the University. These works, along with additional donated artwork from personal and private collections, constitute the core holdings of The Bo Bartlett Center.
Bo Bartlett is an American original. A realist painter with a deliciously surreal touch, the Columbus, Georgia-born artist was a protégé and life-long friend of Andrew Wyeth. His haunting and epic tableaus evoke a Hopper-like sense of longing and mystery combined with a Lynchian-cocktail of menace, beauty and stranger-then-fiction reality. A natural traveler with an entire planet of subject matter to pick from, it might surprise some to learn that Bartlett chooses to spend several months each year painting in the modest Columbus, Georgia, home he grew up in -- in fact to paint in the very bedroom that was his as a child.
BO BARTLETT (b. 1955, Columbus, GA) Bo Bartlett paints grand human narratives and intimate private moments. Highly regarded as a painter of contemporary realism, his art is an act of discovery, a testament to living close to nature, and a record of the unsettled present. "The purpose of art is to wake us up," he says. A number of his recent paintings and pastel drawings depict figures poised on the edge between land and water, a liminal space of repose and unease, or at sea in an open boat voyaging to a destination not seen, reflecting on the uncertain nature of our time. Cinematic in scope and grounded in the figurative tradition, Bartlett's paintings speak to his training as a filmmaker and to the work of his mentor, Andrew Wyeth, and artistic forebears Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, John Singleton Copley, and Benjamin West.
Bartlett received his Certificate of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and a Certificate of Filmmaking from New York University. In 2023, he received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Art from the New York Academy of Art and an honorary Certificate from the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at MOCA Jacksonville, Jacksonville, FL; Lyme Academy of Fine Arts, Old Lyme, CT; The Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus, GA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY; Weber Fine Art, Greenwich, CT; The Florence Academy of Art, Jersey City, NJ; Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, MI; and the Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL. Additionally, it has been included in numerous group exhibitions at museums throughout the United States and in Linz, Austria. Bartlett's work is in the collections of the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA; Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR; Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, SC; Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC; La Salle University Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; Mennello Museum of American Art, Orlando, FL; Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA, among others. He lives and works in Columbus, GA, and Wheaton Island, ME.
"Bo Bartlett is very American. He’s fresh, he’s gifted, and he’s what we need in this country. Bo is one of the very few I feel this strongly about."
– Andrew Wyeth
"Bo Bartlett is an American realist with a modernist vision. His paintings are well within the tradition of American realism as defined by artists such as Thomas Eakins and Andrew Wyeth. Like these artists, Bartlett looks at America’s heart—its land and its people—and describes the beauty he finds in everyday life. His paintings celebrate the underlying epic nature of the commonplace and the personal significance of the extraordinary.
Bartlett was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where realist principles must be grasped before modernist ventures are encouraged. He pushes the boundaries of the realist tradition with his multilayered imagery. Life, death, passage, memory, and confrontation coexist easily in his world. Family and friends are the cast of characters that appear in his dreamlike narrative works. Although the scenes are set around his childhood home in Georgia, his island summer home in Maine, his home in Pennsylvania or the surroundings of his studio and residence in Washington state, they represent a deeper, mythical concept of the archetypal, universal home."
– Tom Butler, excerpt from the book Bo Bartlett, Heartland
