Large scale drawings by artist/educator Joan Linder are showing through April 8 at the Freedman Gallery of Albright College Center for the Arts. Titled “Operation Sunshine,” the exhibition relates realistic line renderings of toxic waste sites in upstate New York, along with meticulous drawings of numerous documents related to the contaminated properties and their pertinent headlines.
Linder is an associate professor in the Art Department at University at Buffalo. Her work has been shown throughout the United States as well as at locations in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan and South Korea.
Her medium of choice is pen and ink, applied with a quill or very fine Rapidograph, approaching this project as much a researcher as an artist. Her focus was the Love Canal neighborhood along the Niagara River, a well-publicized news item that made national headlines. Operation Sunshine, or Project Sunshine, was a series of research studies to ascertain the impact of radioactive fallout on the world’s population that was commissioned in the 1950s by the United States Atomic Energy Commission and U.S. Air Force Project Rand.
