Dwight Pogue’s Flowering Stars
By Olivia J. Kiers
Smith College Museum of Art’s Flowering Stars: Prints by Dwight Pogue presents the artist and Smith College professor’s printmaking career with succinct visual impact—unusual for a retrospective. With its focused subject matter and bright colors, Flowering Stars seems curated to attract attention, which is does. Yet, when curator Aprile Gallant revealed that this exhibition comprises approximately a third of Pogue’s creative output over his four-decade career, it became clear that Flowering Stars is about much more than just visual impact. Pogue’s fixations—flowers, dynamic compositions, experimentation with printmaking techniques—produced a body of work marked by the kind of artistic growth based on depth rather than breadth. The result offers younger artists, such as the students at Smith, insight into a career-long evolution that resists stagnation without abandoning its central muse.
Scanning the gallery, one is immediately struck by the apt exhibition title. Even in his early abstract work like Tickled Pink (which Gallant explains was inspired by the sculpture of Louise Nevelson), Pogue’s concerns are distinctly organic. The sharp-edged lines of Tickled Pink are slightly varied, as if a soft breeze runs through them. His fearlessly colored, transitional works from the early ‘80s, like Dragon Arume (1984), are compositionally scattered, yet they mark a focused leap toward the botanical subject matter that has been Pogue’s dominant concern ever since.
Whatever preconceptions one has about floral art, Pogue’s prints from the mid-‘80s up to today are sure to subvert them. Pogue does not care for shrinking violets. His flowers are flashy, with increasingly hard-edged petals bursting upon kinetic backgrounds. In fact, Pogue thinks of his flowers as active players—superheroes even—in a battle for this planet’s environment. This is evident in the most recent titles: Break in the Battle, Beauty Queen in Trouble, Final Assault.
Like stars in the cosmos, Pogue’s flowers are situated within an energetic space that appears to escape the realm of human control. The abstract backgrounds may be constructed, yet they suggest neither indoor spaces nor arrangement—and they are far too dynamic to be “still lives.” They are pure energy, crashing into or emanating from the supersized blossoms.
As the years progress, and patterns grow tighter and more antic, Pogue’s medium veers from screen-printing to lithography to copper-plate etching. His investigation into safer, non-toxic printmaking substances is outlined in the exhibition’s catalog. This technical inventiveness has been an important part of the printmaking community historically, and it’s noteworthy in Pogue’s practice. He is a printmaker’s printmaker. Yet Flowering Stars is not an exhibition that will be remembered for technique, masterful as Pogue’s is. The works tap into theatrics and grand statements in a way that appeals to a broad audience, while maintaining the complexity of the artist’s intentions.
These flowers shout out loud, like something from science fiction or fantasy. They seduce, too, drawing us in with color and mesmerizing with intricate detail. In short, Flowering Stars is an exhibition that may change the way you see the next flower.
Flowering Stars: Prints by Dwight Pogue is on view at Smith College Museum of Art through August 19, 2018.