The Belger Collection
The John and Maxine Belger family created a 501C3 foundation to educate the public regarding the work of artists including, but not exclusive to William Christenberry, Terry Winters, Robert Stackhouse, William T. Wiley, Terry Allen, Renee Stout, and Jasper Johns. The Collection spans their careers allowing study of their work and their creative processes. The Collections are available for loan to art institutions and museums throughout this country and abroad.
William Christenberry
William Christenberry (1936-2016) was one of the definitive artists of contemporary American art, in content and form. Starting his career in abstract painting, Christenberry later became known as a photographer, and his subsequent works have incorporated printmaking, sculpture, bookmaking and assemblage, all wielded with equal confidence as their discrete forms became necessary to his vision.
Terry Winters
Terry Winters (b. 1949) is a contemporary American painter and printmaker represented in depth in the Belger Collection. A native New Yorker, Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971, focusing on painting. Through the 1970s, while studying nature, especially molecular-level life forms, Winters honed his craft as a drawer and a painter until he was ready for his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. Later that same year he began his first foray into printmaking at Universal Limited Art Editions on Long Island.
Robert Stackhouse
Robert Stackhouse builds his sculptures using common materials: sturdy wooden beams and delicate slats he cuts, nails, and bolts into curving wails, sinuous A-frames and boat-like artifacts. These familiar materials and images turn richly ambiguous as he explores affinities between architecture and biological anatomy.
William T. Wiley
Over the course of his career, William T. Wiley (1937-2021) maintained an eclectic practice that has been associated with the Funk Art movement. He pursued artistic expression in almost every conceivable medium: watercolor, painting, collage, found object construction, sculpture, printmaking, music, performance art, theater, and film. His paintings act as an aggregate and are composed of a wide range of obsessive marks, materials, and mediums, frequently layered on top of a map or other information-coded images.
Terry Allen
Allen is an independent artist and has been described as a Renaissance man working since 1966 in a wide variety of media including musical and theatrical performances, sculpture, painting, drawing and video, and installations which incorporate any and all of these media. Allen is also considered an innovator of the alt-country scene, a musician and songwriter whose songs have been covered by bands like Little Feat, Sturgill Simpson and David Byrne.
renee stout
An American artist, Stout looks to Africa and the experiences of African-originating peoples in the New World to inform her found-object sculptures and mixed media assemblages. She draws on African-American traditions and from her own individual history to make sculptures, paintings and prints, her images relying heavily on contemporary African-American social concerns blending with forms and visual traditions of her African heritage.
jasper johns
Jasper Johns Prints covers 40 years of printmaking from one of America's most revered artists. All the works in this exhibition are from the John and Maxine Belger Family Foundation collection, which is housed at the Belger Arts Center. These prints, collected over a span of 40 years, have been shown throughout the United States in recent years.