Exhibitions 2021: Eric Lintala: Question of Balance

June 30- September 5, 2021

Professor emeritus Eric Lintala was the faculty supervisor of graduate student-run Gallery 244 from its inception at the Swain School of Design in 1983 until his retirement. This summer, Gallery 244 hosts sculpture and photographs representing Lintala’s 45 years of research into the prehistoric rock art of the American Southwest.

Professor Lintala has traveled extensively throughout the United States and abroad researching prehistoric rock art, a broad term for prehistoric human-made markings found on natural surfaces, including petroglyphs and pictographs. These travels, most concentrated in the American southwest, have had a profound influence on his work. In 1994, Lintala made a major discovery of a rock art panel not yet recorded in Salt Creek Canyon, located in South Central Utah.

Professor Lintala has received numerous awards, grants, and commissions including the Holocaust Memorial for Buttonwood Park in New Bedford, the 9/11 Memorial in Acushnet Massachusetts, the 9/11 Memorial in Westport Massachusetts, the Silver Medal for sculpture at the International Art Competition LA Summer Olympics 1984, a Sculpture Fellowship from the Artist Foundation in Boston, and several research grants from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.

This exhibition is open concurrently with Marc St. Pierre: Black & White at the University Art Gallery, celebrating the rich cultural heritage of the Swain School of Design in New Bedford. Both Eric Lintala and the late Marc St. Pierre were originally hired as professors at Swain and taught alongside one another throughout its evolutions, as it was absorbed by Southeastern Massachusetts University in 1988 which later became the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Gallery 244, like many elements of the current College of Visual and Performing Arts, originated from Swain where it was founded by alum Don Wilkinson.