Date: January - April, 2009
Locations: Cincinnati Art Museum, Gallery 101 & the Banner & Ross Gallery

"Matisse - color. Picasso - form. The two great pointers toward one great goal." - Wassily Kandinsky In the catalog for the 2002 Tate Modern exhibit Interpreting Matisse and Picasso, Elizabeth Cowling writes: "Whatever its limitations at the strictly personal level, at the artistic level, the relationship [between Matisse and Picasso] was of sustained - and one is tempted to say - limitless importance..."

This "limitless importance" includes the way Picasso and Matisse, who had a prickly relationship in the beginning that eventually transformed into one of mutual admiration, used one another's art and lives as touchstones on the way to improving what they made and how they made it. Picasso said of Matisse, "Matisse knows that it is impossible for me not to think of him. Between him and me there is our common work for painting, and when all is said and done that unites us."

Visionaries & Voices' artists work on a variety of projects throughout the year, including collaborating with other artists and concentrating on solo projects. "Matisse & Picasso: a Visionary Exploration" is an experiment in art-making, learning, and growing. Matisse and Picasso, and their fifty-year relationship, are wonderful role models for this exploration, and the artists at V&V have learned about both about the lives and works of these two icons, using this process to push what they do to new heights.

V&V has two studios in the Greater Cincinnati area, serving seventy artists a week. Like Matisse, some of these artists are full-fledged Fauvists in the making; others, like Picasso, stretch the boundaries not just of painting, but of art itself. The connection of these two spheres, what Kandinsky labeled "Matisse, color" and "Picasso, form," is where new ways of seeing and making art evolve and flourish.

Matisse, Picasso and a plethora of Modern artists were influenced by a vast array of objects and people as they set about radicalizing not only their own personal styles, but 20th Century art itself. In fact, some of Matisse and Picasso's most intense inspiration came from non-traditional artists, including artists living in "insane asylums" and sculptors from Africa. Visionaries & Voices artists are non-traditional artists working in the 21st Century, collaborating with others to create a place and consciousness for their art. There is a sort of poetic justice, of course, when V&V-ers appropriate and use the art of famous artists as inspiration and beginning points, to reinvent notions of what "art" is, and who "artists" are. In doing this they show us that art is a complex cycle of borrowing and reinventing no matter what century, and no matter who is doing the work.

Matisse and Picasso, extraordinary borrowers and re-inventors, inspire yet another reinvention now.

Developed and written by Keith Banner and Bill Ross, V&V co-founders