Roxanne Sexauer
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Biography
David Rodes, Curator for the Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts
recently wrote the following about the prints of Roxanne Sexauer:
"Shakespeare, for instance, not only took advantage of a rapidly
expanding English vernacular (which itself mirrored a rapidly expanding,
changing society), but he also enriched it by adding over 2000 words
of his own invention and tested its syntax to an elasticity and
capability that still challenges and inspires us to do likewise.
In this spirit, Roxanne Sexauer pays sophisticated homage to Albrecht
Dürer, the versatile god at the top of the pantheon of printmakers,
in woodcut, lithograph, and screenprint."
Sexauer, who was born in the Bronx, New York, has both BFA and MFA
degrees in Printmaking. The former was granted by The University
of Iowa, where she studied with Mauricio Lasansky and the latter
from The State University of New York at Purchase, where she worked
with Antonio Frasconi. She has been awarded residencies at The Plains
Museum of Art, Fargo, North Dakota; Palenville Interarts, Palenville,
New York; The Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences,
Rabun Gap, GA; and Dorland Mountain, Temecula, CA. She has been
on the faculty at CSULB since 1989, and in addition to being the
area head of the Printmaking Discipline, she teaches relief, etching,
and survey of printmaking classes. She also teaches drawing and
the history of prints and drawings.
There is a fetishism of the organic in her recent prints. Among
Sexauer's influences are earlier prints made to depict various branches
of both the animal and plant kingdoms. Among those would figure
the early woodcuts of Conrad Gessner (Sea Monsters, Crabs and Porcupines
from his Icones Animalium, 1560), and Ernst Haeckel's lithographic
prints of medusae from 1887, and other early graphics of microscopic
animals. The use primarily of woodcuts to forward this theme is
particularly apt, as there is a chain that links the earth, the
tree, the timber and finally, the paper the image is printed upon.
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