Walton Ford's 'Wild Things' are coming to The Norton Museum

Written by Katy Lockwood Tuesday, 13 March 2012 22:45

West Palm Beach – The Norton Museum of Art will display more than thirty of Walton Ford’s meticulously rendered watercolors of vividly imagined birds, snakes, monkeys, and tigers from June 16 to September 2, 2007.  Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford, is comprised of large-scale watercolors created between 1990 and the present exploring such themes as colonialism, the naturalist tradition, and the extinction of species.  Using the animal kingdom as a mirror of the human world, Ford employs his skill as an artist and observer to communicate his views on society.

Ford drew his early inspiration from the work of nineteenth-century artist and naturalist John James Audubon—particularly his prodigious Birds of America series—as well as from visits to the American Museum of Natural History. Other influences include J.J. Grandville and Sir John Tenniel, the French artists whose caricatures of part-human, part-animal subjects satirized nineteenth-century French and British society; Edward Lear, an artist and writer known for his nonsensical poetry and limericks; George Catlin, a self-taught painter of Native Americans; and Francisco Goya, the Spanish artist working at the turn of the nineteenth-century.

Included in the exhibition is The Sensorium, 2003, in which a monkey represents the nineteenth-century naturalist Richard Burton, who employed primates in his house to learn their language.  Each monkey was named for someone in Burton’s life; his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and his wife.  His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them where they all sat down on chairs at mealtimes and the servants waited on them and each had its bowl and plate with the food and drink proper for them, while Burton sat at the head of the table.  In Boca Grande, 2003, a heron, based on Aesop's fable The Frog King, eats the very frogs who asked for a king.  Ford says, “We have more kings like that in the world today than we need."

Born in Larchmont, New York, in 1960, Walton Ford is a 1982 graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design.  He is the recipient of several national awards and honors including fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

This exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Museum and made possible in part through the generosity of the R.H. Norton Trust and the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Media support is provided by New Times.

The Norton Museum of Art is open Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. (Closed Mondays from May through October and on major holidays.) General admission is $8 for adults, $3 for visitors ages 13-21, and free for Members and children under 13.  West Palm Beach residents receive free admission to the Museum Collection every Saturday, with proof of residency.  An additional charge may apply for special exhibitions.  For general information, please call (561) 832-5196 or visit www.norton.org.