The Room Chapel to be exhibited at the Allentown Art Museum

Stephen Antonakos’s Architectural Installation Opens May 6

Allentown, PA – For the first time in more than 20 years, The Room Chapel by pioneering sculptor of light Stephen Antonakos will be on display. Originally built in 1996, this architectural installation featuring the artist’s Neon Panels will be specially recreated in the Allentown Art Museum’s Butz Gallery. The installation opens Sunday, May 6.

This work not only represents the realization of formal, geometric and spatial concerns explored throughout the artist’s career but also recalls his early years in a small mountain village in Greece, where tiny chapels served the spiritual needs of people throughout the country.

Antonakos said of this piece, “I am hoping to provide a space that visually and spatially may help us remember or rediscover our inner selves, our own individual thoughts, feelings and spirits.”

Antonakos’s work with neon since 1960 has lent the medium new perceptual and formal meanings in hundreds of gallery and museum exhibitions, first in New York and then internationally. His use of spare, complete and incomplete geometric neon forms has ranged from drawings, collages, Neon Canvases and Walls to Neon Panels, Public Works and his Rooms and Chapels.

The Room Chapel at the Allentown Art Museum is supported through the generosity and expertise of Duggan & Marcon Inc. Additional support has come from Roberson Butz Architects and Mitten Engineering Group.

The exhibition program at the Museum is supported through the generosity of the Harry C. Trexler Trust, Julius and Katheryn Hommer Foundation, The Century Fund, Bernard and Audrey Berman Foundation, Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment, Martin Guitar Charitable Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Friends of the Museum.

Allentown Art Museum is open Wednesday-Saturday 11am-4pm, on Sundays from noon-4pm and until 8pm on the third Thursday of each month. Museum admission and programs are free on Sundays.

For more information about the Allentown Art Museum events, programs, the Museum Shop and the Café, check our website or Facebook or follow us on Twitter. If you have a question about our programming email us at askus@allentownartmuseum.org.

Information and image provided to TVL by:
Angela Zanelli
VP Development and Communications
Allentown Art Museum