RAIR | 2004-05

Clayton merrell | pittsburgh, Pa

Clayton Merrell is a professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University.  He earned an MFA from Yale, and has received awards and grants from the Fulbright Foundation; ProArts; Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Skowhegan; the Millay Colony for the Arts, Blue Mountain Center and the Vermont Studio Center. His work is collected and exhibited widely, including at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum;

Concept Gallery, Pittsburgh; A+D Gallery, Chicago; the Westmoreland Museum of Art; the American Embassy in Belmopan, Belize and the Chautauqua Institution. The Pittsburgh International Airport recently installed a 69,000 square foot terrazzo floor based on his design.

"Ideal landscapes are a variation of a certain relationship to the external world, that is, each one depicts the world in its entirety and not just a segment of it."

— Stephan Oetterman, The Panorama

"An insignificant amount of starlight has fallen into our eyes and our instruments ... but from that signal we extrapolate a cosmos."

— George Johnson, Fire in the Mind

"There is something about the desert that the human sensibility cannot assimilate."

— Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Roswell Museum and Art Center

Rair exhibition •  Clayton Merrell “pieces of the desert" • April 9 - May 29, 2005