Conversation Versions

Co-curated by John O’Donnell & Breanne Trammell

Blue House Arts, Dayton, OH

February 10 – 28, 2018

“Conversation Versions” is an exhibition built around different notions of collecting and sharing of visual and written information. The exhibition is curated by Breanne Trammell, assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati and John O’Donnell, assistant professor at the University of Connecticut. The exhibition includes objects from Trammell’s collection of zines and alternative publications. Also featured are prints from the collection managed by O’Donnell of the University of Connecticut’s Counterproof Press. This exhibition looks at different approaches to collecting printed matter: the personal, the institutional, transactional and social. “Conversation Versions” aims to organize information and objects in a way that reveals how conversation and exchanges emerge in all types of different contexts. Works range from a broadside of a poem by Susan Stewart to a humorous Instagram account called @greasylithomemes.

Multiple impressions

Curated by John O’Donnell

Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT

February 18 – April 21, 2016

Artist-curator John O’Donnell has organized a massive print show in Hartford, Connecticut: “Multiple Impressions,” the Fifth Connecticut Printmakers Invitational, on view at Real Art

Ways in Hartford through April 21, 2016. The roster includes many luminaries from the Connecticut art and printmaking scene, O’Donnell selected 23 artists who use a variety of printmaking processes, from traditional–intaglio, relief, lithography, and screen printing–to experimental approaches that include textiles, sculpture, and installation. “Their works address a variety of topics concerning design, representation, and abstraction,” O’Donnell writes in his statement for the show. “Some artists in this exhibition are painters who make prints, while others are designers who use printmaking to execute their ideas.”

- Sharon Butler, Two Coats of Paint

https://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2016/02/invitation-multiple-impressons-real-ar.html

Smart Painting

Curated by John O’Donnell

Artspace, New Haven, CT

February 7 – march 22, 2014

The ten artists in “Smart Painting,” an upcoming exhibition at New Haven’s Artspace Gallery, are an inquisitive group, asking a range of questions, which, at their most basic level, include: What should a painting look like? How should I paint it? What should I paint it on? Beginning with simple questions like these, each of the artists believes (more than most painters) that how they paint is as important as the image they paint.

According to curator John O’Donnell:

“The works answer these questions in three ways, first by referencing the limitations of their structures (“the frame”), second by exploiting the physicality of their surfaces (“the canvas”) and third by employing painterly strategies that enter the arena of the aesthetic realm (“the concept or idea”). Breaking down a painting into its anatomical parts—“bones,” “flesh” and “brain,” the exhibition recasts these concrete terms more playfully.

https://www.twocoatsofpaint.com/2014/02/smart-painting-in-new-haven.html

https://www.newhavenindependent.org/index.php/archives/entry/art_openings_on_orange/