Gallery Talk: Ravens: Spirits of the Sky

Curator Jack Rasmussen and Artist Joan Danziger along with a special guest Ori Soltes, will discuss the exhibition "Ravens: Spirits of the Sky", in a gallery talk scheduled for

Saturday, 2:00- 3:00pm

About the exhibition:

Joan Danziger, Artist
Jack Rasmussen, Curator

In Ravens: Spirits of the Sky, Joan Danziger’s sculpture occupies the museum with commanding intensity. Their exaggerated forms, iridescent surfaces, and suspended gestures place them somewhere between realism and abstraction, between sculpture and symbol. These are not the clever birds of natural history, but augurs, tricksters, familiars.

Their mythic resonance is heightened by scale and positioning, which invite viewers to encounter them not as static objects, but as enigmatic beings charged with meaning. Danziger offers no fixed narrative. Instead, the Ravens communicate through presence—looming, watching, waiting—compelling us to project our own associations onto their silent forms.

To paraphrase Claes Oldenburg, Danziger’s ravens do more than sit on their perch in the museum. They transform it. They inhabit the threshold between the known and the imagined. They defy conventional categories of craft, fine art, or natural history, and instead open a symbolic space where myth, memory, and material collide.

Joan Danziger’s work invites us to reimagine the animal world not as a subject to be observed, but as a mirror of our own inner landscapes. Her sculptures do not simply represent; they loom. They haunt, hunt, and hover, suspended between worlds. They call to us not with song but with silence and beckon us to follow.

This event will be held in-person at the museum.

Please direct any questions about this event to the museum's main contact for this event, Patricia Poku-Speight at [email protected].

Image: Joan Danziger, Ocean Sky Raven, 2022. Metal and glass, 25 x 41 x 29 inches.

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Host or Publisher American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center