Geraldine Kiefer

Geraldine Wojno Kiefer (Gerry) creates drawings, paintings, collages, and assemblages. She works in mixed drawing media on watercolor paper and in colored pencil over photographs. (For the latter work she collaborates with her husband, art photographer Bruce Kiefer.) Recent exhibition venues include The Shenandoah Arts Council Gallery, Winchester, VA (November 2005, January 2004); Shenandoah University Library, Winchester, VA (September-October 2005); the Blandy Experimental Farm Gallery, Boyce, VA (January-February 2005); St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Gallery, Akron, OH (June 2002); BerryCollege, Mt. Berry, GA (March 2002); Notre Dame College of Ohio, Cleveland (August 2001); Gallery732, Akron, OH (April-May 2001); the Baycrafters Emerald Necklace juried show, Bay Village, OH (May2000); and the Avon Lake Public Library, Avon Lake, OH (April 2000).

With current residences in Virginia and Ohio, Gerry has also lived in Kauai, Hawaii. In Hanalei she has painted and drawn the wild mountain landscape, fertile valleys and moist taro fields, focusing on transient effects of color, wind and rain. In Haena she has worked with the exquisite, exotic flowers of the National Tropical Botanical Garden and, from Tunnels beach, the sharp ridges of Makana. In Poipu she has explored the ridges and craters of the Koloa volcanic plain and the cacti of the Moir Garden. In the Shenandoah Valley she has explored green pastures, peaceful woodlands and bubbling springs. For Gerry, the Hawaiian volcanic and Virginia upland landscapes convey primary and primal founts of life.

Gerry is an assistant professor of art history at Shenandoah University. An art historian with a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University, she teaches drawing, modern art, history of photography, American Art, contemporary art theory and criticism, and art appreciation. She has curated four art exhibitions, including an eighty-photograph survey of the early, Cleveland work of Margaret Bourke-White (1927-29). Gerry is currently working on a book on the Cleveland photographs of Bourke-White for Kent State University Press. Her future projects include an exhibition and publication on the imagery of the Shenandoah Valley from 1830 to 1930.