Projects
Museum Acquisitions
The DeLand Museum Acquires John A. O’Connor’s “Butterfly” as part of the permanent collection.
Find out more on John’s Art page.
For further information about the Museum Acquisitions Project
Download this PDF
Rivers A Journey Beneath The Surface
Curated by Mallory O’Connor
EXHIBITION: SEPTEMBER 26, TO DEC. 12, 2021
OPENING WEEKEND: SEPTEMBER 24-25:
CHAMPAGNE RECEPTION FRIDAY FROM 5:30-7:30 (BY TICKET);
OPENING FROM 11 A.M.-4 P.M. SATURDAY (FREE).
Tickets available at womenwritingjacksonville.org/events/
Join us as we lift the voices and vision of diverse women of our region calling attention to the incredible and undervalued asset of rivers, and water, and the feminine in our community.
The Blackboard Variations
The Blackboard Variations, an exhibition of paintings by artist John A. O’Connor, on display at the News-Journal Center, Daytona Beach, Florida, June 15-September 2, 2015
The News-Journal Center hosted a summer-long exhibit of paintings by Gainesville artist John A. O’Connor. A University of Florida faculty member for thirty-six years before his retirement in 2005, O’Connor has had thirty-six solo exhibitions of his work, has been included in over 200 group shows and is represented in public and private collections nationally and internationally. The exhibit is sponsored by the Mike Curb College of Music, Entertainment and Art, Daytona State College, and by the Gary R. Libby Charitable Trust.
Since 1985, the Blackboard paintings have been the predominant form of John O’Connor’s art. Working in a style that the artist calls “Conceptual Realism,” O’Connor explores the nature of reality and the “virtual reality” of illusion. Using acrylic paint on Sintra, O’Connor creates blackboard images as a means of conveying information on a variety of subjects from the mundane to the absurd to the transcendent.
The News-Journal Center exhibition was comprised of seventeen paintings that explore music, dance, theatre and film. In contrast to the visual arts, which consist of objects that are intended to endure unchanged through time, the performing arts are transitory, alive in the moment and then gone. Even when recorded, they can be re-experienced only in a different format. O’Connor’s blackboards capture both the permanence of the image and the ephemeral nature of the performance. The title of the exhibition, The Blackboard Variations, is a play of words based on the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Goldberg Variations.
In 2005, New York Times art critic William Zimmer wrote of O’Connor’s paintings: “The power of trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) is that it presents its ephemera as lasting for eternity, while blackboards are erased leaving palimpsests. They can hold any kind of content even the absurd kind, as they implicitly state that they are records of the transient nature of thought and ideas.”
“In The Blackboard Variations,” says O’Connor, “I invite the viewer to enter an environment of palimpsests: ghosts of gestures, the residue of images and words linking thoughts and concepts. Like music, theatre, dance and film, these blackboards ask the viewer to question both the concept of time, and the nature of reality itself.”