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Gallery Talk with Honnie and Art Wagner on March 2nd
Wed Feb 25, 2015


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 25, 2015

For More Information:
Glenville State College
Public Relations Department
(304) 462-4115

GLENVILLE, WV – You are invited to join artists Honnie and Art Wagner in a Gallery Talk on Monday, March 2nd from 10:00-11:00 a.m. in the Spears Gallery in the Glenville State College Fine Arts Center.

The pair will talk about the works of three generations within one immigrant family of realist painters and their visual journey as a metaphor for the multigenerational immigrant experience in West Virginia. These works are currently on display in the gallery show, ‘Three Generations of Asturian-American Painters.’

The exhibit includes pieces by Art, his mother Honnie Wagner, and his grandfather Emilio Fernández Alvarez for a dynamic show that encompasses around 100 years of culture and history in West Virginia’s Asturian communities that got their start in the early 1900s.

Emilio Fernández Alvarez, Honnie A. Wagner, and Art Z. Wagner

Honnie is a retired school teacher who enjoys painting picturesque Spanish scenes. She learned clay and molded sculpture from her father as a child and majored in art at West Virginia University, but suspended her artistic activity when she became a mother. In 1977 she visited her family in Asturias for the first time, meeting cousins, aunts, and uncles she had never known. She was charmed and fascinated by the traditional urban and rural lifestyles of her family in Asturias. Her paintings reflect images captured on film during visits to her ancestral home.

Art is a clinical social worker. As a child, Art played with his mother and grandfather’s art supplies, explored their books, and absorbed their art, which was displayed in the home. As a young studio artist, Art lived in Spain for two years, visiting his mother’s Asturian family on holidays. He later studied Asturian culture for three summers in the Asturian capital, Oviedo, in order to learn more about the culture his maternal grandparents left behind. These childhood and adult experiences led to his focus on the psychological, relational, and spiritual aspects of añoranza, or longing, through images of the human figure and landscape.

The show is open to the public and will run until Friday, March 6th. The gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. until 2:00 p.m. and one hour before all GSC Fine Arts events.

For more information, contact Brenner at Liza.Brenner@glenville.edu or (304) 462-6346.

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