The Stewart Gallery

10/06/2025

Atmospheric!
PHOTOGRAPHS BY
Tom Baril & Mark Cornelison

Participating gallery in the Louisville Photo Biennial​​

Contemporary American photographer Tom Baril (b. 1952) is based in New York City. His photographs are meticulously captured, moody, and evocative. These poetic images, created using wet plate collodion negatives and Polaroid negatives, are imbued with a quiet, lyrical sensibility. The printer for famed photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Baril honed important techniques that influence his own work. Baril’s photographs are held in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the LA County Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston among others. The images in this exhibit are drawn from the Paul Paletti Gallery Collection.

A photojournalist for over 25 years, Lexington photographer Mark Cornelison has developed a passion and an expertise in tintype portraiture. Tintypes are also based on the wet-plate collodion process, which dates to the 1850’s and was popularized during the Civil War. Each tintype is a unique image created by light and silver on a blackened metal plate. Known for its detail and dark, rich tonality, Cornelison’s images are ethereal, haunting and unpredictable.

10/10/2024

Grand Gallery opening reception J Daniel Graham exhibit.

10/09/2024

Daniel Graham of Georgetown College uses non-traditional objects to finish his instruments, alongside traditional materials.

09/25/2024

The Grand Gallery is pleased to present BRIDGES, an exhibition of musical instruments created by Georgetown College art professor and luthier J. DANIEL GRAHAM.

Biography

Daniel was raised in a military family and moved every two years for most of his life. He comes from a family of storytellers who love investigation and creativity. Introduced and encouraged into creative outlets at an early age Daniel has never forgotten the lessons of craft from his mother (a basket maker and calligrapher) and the lessons of engineering and risk from his father. His training in the Arts comes from an Undergraduate Degree at the University of Florida in Printmaking and a Masters Degree from the University of Georgia with the same emphasis. Between the two programs of formal education Daniel lived in downtown Washington DC and trained as a furniture maker under woodworker Dennis Sitka. Currently Daniel is a Professor of Art at Georgetown College in Georgetown Kentucky where he teaches a variety of courses including Sculpture, Printmaking, 3D Design, Ceramics and Luthiery. He lives in Georgetown with his wife Holly, his daughter Olive, his son Thatcher, and their dog Cricket.

Instrument Statement

I have never really found myself attached to a place. Growing up in a military family, home was never really found in a specific location. I never stayed anywhere long enough to understand or soak in the history of that area. After living in Kentucky for the last fifteen years I have learned what it means to really be part of a community and what it means to take part of a story bigger than ourselves.

Kentucky has a rich history of old time music and I found myself drawn to learning the banjo. Not having a banjo, I decided to make one. I was no stranger to woodworking but I was definitely a stranger to this world of Appalachian music. I learned how to play and I soon found my imagination alive with ideas for so many types and styles of banjos. From there, I apprenticed to learn how to make dulcimers and violins. I see instruments as a unique place where my art practice can collide with my craft processes to create something completely new.

I am drawn to developing instruments that both play well and function as art objects. I want each instrument to be unique for it’s particular owner. I find great pleasure in striving for the highest level of craftsmanship and precision in every detail. The instruments I make are a collection of these elements sewn together to create an object that is worth passing down through generations.

Show Statement

Instrument makers almost always find themselves collaborating with the past. No matter the approach one recognizes that they are part of a connective tissue, a continuing thread that reaches backward, while simultaneously moving forward. This exhibition is documenting a crossover in that connective thread of past and future history.

I approach my instrument making practice from a divergent perspective while sharing in the tradition of traditional craft. I champion an exploratory curiosity, pushing the context of traditional materials while still staying connected to the form and story of the past, all the while driving the purpose and concept of the instrument into the aesthetics of a functional Art object.

06/14/2024

https://conta.cc/3xskxHb

You don't want to miss this. The Grand Gallery is proud to present LOST AND FOUND, an exhibition from award-winning artist RAYMOND PAPKE of art employing abstraction, assemblage, repurposed materials

06/06/2024

The Grand Gallery is proud to present LOST AND FOUND, an exhibition from award-winning artist RAYMOND PAPKA of art employing abstraction, assemblage, repurposed materials for transformations that captivate the mind’s imagination, on now through September 20.

Papka's artwork employs a wide variety of imagery and found objects; his objects are often remnants of items gathered from flea markets, yard sales, books, antique shops, trash dumps, or sometimes literally found on the ground. These objects are then repurposed to fit with a story that is found in each art piece. He draws inspiration from history, science & astronomy, mysticism, art history, Victorian ephemera, books/text, and industrial decay (i.e. just about anything old and rusty). His work blends elements of the everyday with the extraordinary, and each piece invites the viewer into its own world.

Papka was born in Thermopolis Wyoming in 1945. Having grown up in a remote, rural small town, he spent a lot of time at the local library where he developed a fascination with books. He also became attracted to various small objects that were often discarded and then found by the eye of an object admirer, such as old utensils, buttons, coins, arrowheads and rusty metal remnants. Books and found objects came together through Papka’s education with undergraduate studies in zoology and chemistry, graduate studies in anatomy and neuroscience, and long career as a research scientist.

Papka is a self-taught artist, although he had abundant experience in photography, composition, printing, etc., as part of his research, and woodworking as a life-long hobby. Prior to his retirement from academics, he began to experiment with encaustic painting (beeswax resin) and assemblage using books, shadow boxes, and wood panels as substrates coupled with found objects that are often repurposed in order to tell stories with his art. He has won numerous prizes at art festivals across many states and has had exhibitions in libraries, museums, and art centers. His work has been exhibited in galleries from California to Tennessee and locally in Kentucky. He lives on a small farm near Versailles and Midway, KY where he has studios in his home and a woodworking shop in his barn.

This installation was designed by Ashley Johnson, an intern with Broadstone Media LLC, in conjunction with the artist.