Susan Opie: Big Bronze Bugs at Allentown Art Museum

Tuesday, 18 July 2006 12:45

Allentown, PA - Sculptor Susan Opie is impacted by the forces of nature.  She has worked with horses for years, owned a succession of house pets, and has rehabilitated wild animals and birds for re-release into their habitat.  As long as she can remember, Opie has expressed in her work this profound feeling for animals and nature.  Although formally trained as a painter and printmaker, showing early promise in portraiture, once Opie discovered sculpture in graduate school, she never turned back.  She has sculpted in clay, plaster, plastic, wax, wood, and metal, making her first mold-making oven for metal casting at age 23, progressing to a home foundry later in life, a remarkable undertaking for any sculptor.

Opie’s monumental bronze sculptures of garden insects run riot in the Museum’s sculpture garden.  The display of Big Bronze Bugs consists of a variety of winged, legged whimsical bronze bugs, including a grasshopper, dragonfly, mayfly, wasp, and cricket.  The sculptor has worked quietly on a Pleasant Valley farm for more than thirty years, in a remarkably productive career.  Opie’s is the second exhibition in the Allentown Art Museum’s new outdoor sculpture gallery.  The exhibition is organized by Christine I. Oaklander, former Director of Collections and Exhibitions.

Visit the Allentown Art Museum at : http://www.allentownartmuseum.org/