2010s Exhibitions

Open January 16 through February 11, 2018

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The 2018 Faculty Biennial presents work reflecting a diverse range of studio practices by 33 faculty and staff in the School of Art and the Program in Arts Technology. The artists in the exhibition represent the areas of Studio Art, Graphic Design, Art Education, and Arts Technology. Featuring painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, video, animation, ceramics, glass, wood, metals, sculpture, and graphic design, the exhibition will also include two faculty collaborations, a sound installation, and a multimedia window installation.

Members of the faculty have exhibited nationally and internationally, and have received support from such prestigious entities as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Cité Internationale des Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council.

This year’s participating artists are: Ladan Bahmani, Daniella Barroqueiro, Megan Kathol Bersett, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Briggs, Peter Bushell, Kristin Carlson, Tony Crowley, Derick Downey, Andreas Fischer, Nancy Fewkes, Brian Franklin, Laura Primozic George, Gary Justis, Alice Lee, Jin Lee, Tyler Lotz, James Mai, John Miller, Bill O'Donnell, Melissa Oresky, Aaron Paolucci, Morgan Price, Scott Rankin, Jason Reblando, Randy Reid, Nathania Rubin, Veda Rives Aukerman and Meda R. Rives, Archana Shekara, Sarah Smelser, Albion Stafford, Mike Wille.

Open February 23 through April 1, 2018

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They were… presents mixed-media works and a three-channel video by Ebony G. Patterson, an artist based in Kingston, Jamaica and Lexington, Kentucky. Patterson uses vibrant colors, elaborate patterns, and opulent materials to grab the viewer’s attention and prompt a closer look and deeper engagement with the underlying issues of violence and visibility. Patterson states that her work has to do with “witnessing, access, and social politics,” not only in Jamaica but across cultures.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Invisible Presence: Bling Memories, an installation of fifty coffin-shaped sculptures created for a performance during Jamaica’s Carnival celebration to address violence and socioeconomic divisions in the country. Citing the “exclusionary” and “commercially driven structure” of the event, for which costumes and permits are cost-prohibitive for most working- and middle-class members of the community, the artist says the works “seek to insert, assert, and interrupt the space of the visible with that of the invisible.” Made from an array of colorfully patterned fabrics, crocheted doilies, sparkling rhinestones, and fabric flowers, the sculptures comprising Invisible Presence: Bling Memories were inspired in part by “bling funerals,” extravagant ceremonies organized in Kingston’s working-class communities to ensure that the recently deceased, who may have been overlooked by society-at-large while living, are noticed and remembered in death.

Patterson collaborated with art students in Jamaica both to make the works and enact the performance. After trying unsuccessfully to secure permission from a private entity (the organizer of Jamaica’s Carnival) to parade down on a public street, seventy students and collaborators marched with Patterson for more than an hour in a guerilla-style performance, complete with their own band. Patterson’s accompanying video, made in collaboration with Michelle Serioux, presents a nearly ten-minute version of the day’s events. We see a group of people working together to fabricate the “coffins” and load them into a truck. They then unload and distribute them along the processional route through the streets of Kingston. Among bystanders, law enforcement officers, marching bands, and costumed dancers, the participants in Patterson’s performance carry the sculptures as symbols of protest, hoisting them above their heads with fringe and tassels blowing in the breeze. At times, they turn them sideways and dance with them. All the while, the St. Michael’s Marching Band plays popular funerary hymns.

Also included in the exhibition are Root & Shrub and Root & Shrubz, two large-scale floor-based tapestries that address visibility and violence.The photo-based fabric works are hand-embellished with lace, cotton, plastic, glass, and rhinestones. Beneath the alluring materials lie the images of prostrate bodies. Patterson was inspired to make these works after reading about the murder of a toddler in a housing complex. She said that passersby took photographs of the child’s body and posted them on social media sites in an effort to raise awareness about brutal conditions. The artist, however, fears that such repetition of online sharing removes us from an individual’s humanity, instead rendering the deceased as simply an image to be scrolled past. The paradox lies in the fact that many of these individuals would be relatively overlooked or forgotten if not for web-based sharing. Patterson writes, “The seeing is what happens in social media, but the looking is what I’m asking you to do. The looking requires thought, it requires engagement, it requires awareness, it requires presence.” Through her elaborate, multilayered works, Patterson urges us to bear witness.

Ebony G. Patterson’s work has been exhibited at National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Arts and Design, New York; DuSable Museum of African American History, Chicago; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California; Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa; and The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto, Canada; among many others. In 2018, she was awarded a prestigious $50,000 grant from United States Artists. She has also received grants and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, University of Kentucky, and the National Gallery of Jamaica. In 2017, Patterson served on the Artistic Director’s Council for Prospect.4 in New Orleans. Her work is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Seattle Art Museum; Nasher Museum at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art, Pont-Aven, France. In fall 2018, she will have solo exhibitions at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; and Pérez Art Museum, Miami. Patterson is Associate Professor of Painting at University of Kentucky. She is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Ebony G. Patterson: they were… is organized by University Galleries’ Senior Curator Kendra Paitz and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The opening reception is sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington/Normal.

Press

• WGLT: Artist Shares Serious Message Beneath The Bling

Open February 23 through April 1, 2018

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Titled after Terttu Uibopuu’s most recent series of photographs, E.S.E. (East South East) is the largest solo exhibition of the New York-based artist’s work to date. The exhibition features twenty-five photographs taken throughout the United States and Estonia, each revealing in its human, natural, or architectural subjects a quiet fortitude amidst the adversity of ongoing recovery from political occupation, natural disaster, or recession. Uibopuu was born in Soviet-occupied Estonia, spending her formative years during the period of the fall of the Soviet Union, which dissolved in 1991. She developed an interest in photography, and upon receiving a photography award from Philip Morris as a teen in 2001, she used the funds to purchase a one-way plane ticket to the United States—ultimately ending up in a small city in northern Illinois before moving to Chicago and finally relocating to New York.

While on a road trip to Florida from Illinois, Uibopuu was struck by the unfamiliar landscape of the Southern U.S. On a subsequent visit to Estonia, she began to notice parallels between her post-Soviet home country and the post-Katrina American South. This realization prompted her to revisit Louisiana and Florida and consequently develop E.S.E. (East South East) in 2014, aiming to blur the geographical lines between these two politically charged regions. Recently, she has expanded the range of her project to cover other areas of the U.S. she has a personal connection to, including, for example, a portrait of a working-class couple in the Great Recession-burdened city of Rockford, Illinois—an hour west of where she first lived in the U.S.—or an elderly immigrant couple stoically dancing at a Fourth of July party at a senior center she had worked at in the Bronx.

Anything that might distinguish the two countries represented in the series has faded far into the periphery of Uibopuu’s photographs. The artist explains, “As I feel at home both in America and in Estonia, I want to create my own photographic history, which combines these two disparate regions.” Uibopuu’s unusual life experiences and her own sense of fortitude grant her the unique ability to, as she states, “show the slow recovery from generational trauma of many contrasting places, and not how we are different, but perhaps, how we are all the same.”

On the surface, the images in the exhibition feature portraits that explore nuances of temperament, moments that illuminate routine life, and landscapes that reveal traces of human existence. Beneath this surface, however, lurks a conflict just out of view: a woman sunbathing in a green but craggy space as a reprieve from the cold Soviet-style block apartments just beyond the horizon; a flooded Estonian jail now used as a recreation spot; or a handsome young man exposing a tattoo of a bible verse on his bare chest in the Bayou of Louisiana. Uibopuu conveys these heightened moments of endurance, whether, as she states, “photographing a haunting nighttime image of a tree near the Mississippi delta that survived Hurricane Katrina a decade before, or directing a harsh flash upon the stoic face of a Russian boxer after losing a match.” Neither portraying stories of sympathy nor anecdotes of redemption, Uibopuu’s photographs capture the intricacies of people’s resilience that would otherwise be lost in the day’s routine.

A publication is forthcoming, with an essay by Estonian art historian Liisa Kaljula and a foreword by exhibition curator Jason Judd. Terttu Uibopuu: E.S.E. (East South East) will travel to the Rockford Art Museum in Rockford, Illinois, where it will be on view from July 27 through November 11, 2018.

Terttu Uibopuu (b. 1984) is an Estonian photographer currently living and working in New York City. She had a solo exhibition at Soloway gallery in New York City in 2017 and was featured in Vice magazine in 2016. Uibopuu’s work has also been exhibited at Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York; Nicole Klagsbrun, New York; Schneider Gallery, Chicago; Co-Prosperity Sphere, Chicago; and Society of Korean Photography, Seoul, Korea. She has received the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship at Yale University and The Tierney Fellowship in New York City. She has also participated in panels and lectures in the U.S. and Estonia including the Yale University School of Art; City College, New York; Estonian Art Academy, Tallinn, Estonia; Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts; Estonian Art Academy (Eesti Kunstiakadeemia), Tallinn, Estonia, among others. Uibopuu was a resident at the Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) program, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, New York, and is currently a resident in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Residency. Uibopuu holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from Columbia College Chicago, and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Yale University School of Art. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Terttu Uibopuu’s exhibition is organized by University Galleries’ Curator Jason Judd and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The artist reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal.

Resources

• Terttu Uibopuu
• Purchase Publication

Press

• WGLT: Photos Reveal Quiet Fortitude Against Adversity

• Pantagraph: Looking Between the Lines of Life
• Sixty Inches From Center: In Conversation with Terttu Uibopuu
• Sight Specific: Terttu Uibopuu: E.S.E. (East South East) at University Galleries

Open February 23 through April 1, 2018

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The Rug’s Topography presents selected photographs from Lincoln, Nebraska-based artist Rana Young’s 2015–2017 series of the same name. Young refers to the photographs as “blended self-portraits” of herself and her former partner of six years. They were made as she and her partner navigated both the dissolution of the romantic portion of their relationship and one partner’s decision to transition from male to female. According to Young, their visual collaboration “served as a catalyst for the reconciling of emotional intimacy in the midst of separation.” She explains, “Our individual identities within a romantic context stemmed from the commonality of both having witnessed predominantly cisgender roles during our formative years. Our performance of those expectations was perpetuated by inexperience and an impulse to adhere to, or in my case ‘correct,’ our potential family structure.”

The series, which includes portraiture, landscapes, and interiors, is not presented as chronological documentation but rather as a circular narrative. Although we never see Young depicted, we see her partner at various stages of displaying traits and attire that are traditionally more associated with either the masculine or feminine—from a bare-chested, stubble-faced portrait in a suit jacket to a barefoot dress-clad reverie in the grass. One particularly tender photograph shows only her partner’s feet and clean-shaven legs, which are crossed at the ankles against a plush charcoal rug. Subtle indentations indicate where a pair of socks recently pressed against the skin. Images alternate between those that are intentionally voyeuristic and those that reflect psychological states, whether an ominous tower of storm clouds, a vibrant rainbow caught on the wall, a wooden ladder protruding through dark geometric shadows, or a long hallway lit by a distant red lamp. Although the series stems from a particular relationship and set of circumstances, the works are open-ended. They question how intimacy can change over time, demonstrate the fluidity of gender, and celebrate empathy and understanding.

Rana Young’s work has been exhibited at Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee; Antenna Gallery, New Orleans; Center for Fine Art Photography, Fort Collins, Colorado; Midwest Center for Photography, Wichita; and Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography, Detroit. She has an upcoming exhibition at Filter Photo, Chicago. Her work has been reviewed in the British Journal of Photography, L’Oeil de la Photographie, Hyperallergic, Huffington Post, Progresso Fotografico, and LensCulture. In 2017, Young was selected as a winner of LensCulture’s Emerging Talent Award. Also in 2017, she and Alec Kaus co-founded Photo-Emphasis, a web-based platform for sharing photography made by emerging and established artists. Young received her MFA from University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and her BFA from Portland State University. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska, and is currently an instructor at Creighton University.

Rana Young: The Rug’s Topography is organized by University Galleries’ Senior Curator Kendra Paitz and is co-sponsored by MECCPAC, A Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The opening reception is sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal.

Resources

• Rana Young

Press

• Press Release
• WGLT: New Exhibition Explores Transitions

Open April 12 through May 13, 2018

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has showcased new artwork produced by students at Illinois State University. The juried exhibition, which features work in a variety of mediums and styles, offers many students the first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals outside the University. All Illinois State University students are eligible to submit entries.

The School of Art is pleased to present Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Awards to MFA student Josh Roach and BFA student Alissa Palmer. Both artists will be recognized for their achievements during the presentation of awards. To further honor their accomplishments, University Galleries will devote additional exhibition space to the presentation of new works by both artists.

This year’s awards are presented as scholarships ranging from $50 to the Best in Show award of $300. The awards include ten Irving S. Tick awards, the DeGeal Interactive Design Award, and the Richard D. Finch Undergraduate Drawing and Printmaking Award. Additional awards are presented by Randy Reid, Arts Technology, Normal Editions Workshop, and the following areas within the School of Art: Ceramics, Glass, and Graphic Design. The School of Art sponsors the Best in Show award.

The awards ceremony at 6 pm will also include the presentation of several academic scholarships for School of Art students.

This year’s studio jurors are Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson, who both teach at University of Illinois at Springfield and are former Co-Directors of DEMO Project, an artist-run contemporary art gallery in Springfield, Illinois. Lacher and Robinson began their collaboration in 2015 and have continued to co-produce exhibitions at Museum Blue, St. Louis; Roman Susan, Chicago; Outhaus, Champaign, Illinois; The Ski Club, Milwaukee; and University Galleries of Illinois State University. Lacher received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Indiana University, Bloomington. Along with an independent curatorial practice, Lacher is the Visual Arts Gallery Manager and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield. Robinson holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Illinois at Springfield, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Illinois State University. He is an Instructor of Art and the Director of the Visual Arts Gallery at The University of Illinois at Springfield.

This year’s design juror is Amir Berbić, an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago and Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the UIC College of Architecture, Design and the Arts. His work has been featured in publications, conferences, and exhibitions including Design Issues, Visual Communication, Print, Wallpaper, ICOGRADA World Design Congress, AIGA Design Educators Conference, TypeCon, Society of Typographic Arts, and Salone del Mobile in Milan. Berbić’s research and practice explore place, identity, three-dimensional typography and design pedagogy.

The 2018 Student Annual reception is sponsored by the College of Fine Arts, Friends of the Arts, Casey’s Garden Shop and Florist, and Jimmy John’s.

Open June 1 through July 29, 2018

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The inaugural Central Illinois High School Art Exhibition  presents 152 works by students at nine Central Illinois high schools. Art teachers submitted their students’ work in nine categories—drawing, painting, ceramics, sculpture, photography, design, time arts, printmaking, and mixed media—for consideration by jurors. Monetary prizes will be announced during the opening reception on June 1. Awards include Best in Show; 1st, 2nd, and 3rdplace; and honorable mention in each of the categories. 

Participating schools and educators are:

• Centennial High School, Champaign—Stacey Gross and Shannon Percoco
• Central High School, Champaign—Carol-Lynn Comparetto, Ravyn Rodgers, and Enrika
• Stulpinaite-Maldonado
• Dee-Mack High School, Deer Creek—Sam Ingram
• Henry-Senachwine High School, Henry—Frank Bush
• Lexington CUSD #7, Lexington—Emma Long
• Mahomet-Seymour High School, Mahomet—Bess Lanker
• Prairie Central High School, Fairbury—Casey McCullough
• Tri-Valley High School, Downs—Rachel Angus
• Washington Community High School, Washington—Jayme Banzhoff, Margaret
• Maldonado, and Darlene Pegg

The jurors are Kelly White and Matthew Boonstra. White is the Executive Director of 40 North | 88 West in Champaign County and the Project Coordinator for both Art & Sol and Sight Specific in downtown Champaign. She was previously the Assistant Curator and Collections Manager for the SCAD Museum of Art at Savannah College of Art and Design. Boonstra is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Eastern Illinois University. His work has been exhibited at International Sculpture Center, Hamilton, New Jersey; Reese Museum, New Johnson, Tennessee; and Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The exhibition is co-sponsored by the Illinois Art Education Association and the Illinois Art Education Association Central Council and hosted by University Galleries of Illinois State University. Illinois High School Art Exhibition is a not-for-profit organization created and run by full-time educators. Its mission is “to advance art education for young people by providing art exhibition and education opportunities that celebrate students’ artistic achievement, promote mastery and ingenuity in learning, and facilitate post-secondary opportunities.”

In conjunction with the exhibition, onegallery will feature works created by the art teachers at the participating schools.

Open August 16 through October 14, 2018

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kuntur: sacred geometries presents new and recent works by artist, writer, curator, and educator william cordova. Born in Lima, Peru, and now based in Miami, Lima, and New York, the artist engages with time, displacement, and the histories of places and objects. He cites his particular interest in “reframing history and making the invisible visible” as he interweaves evocative materials—such as gold leaf, feathers, Peruvian cacao, and paint chips reclaimed from a famous 1970s graffiti mural— into richly layered works. cordova describes this exhibition as a “synthesis of Andean and Western architecture, sacred geometries, and historical narratives.” Combining research, travel, writing, drawing, photography, and film, he creates an installation inspired, in part, by the Kuntur (The Condor) constellation. Kuntur was one of the Incan Empire’s “dark constellations,” found in areas of darkness within the Milky Way Galaxy. As the artist points out, “constellations give form to imaginary outlines shared by different cultures at different times and geographical locations.” The exhibition and programming are designed to connect cultures and build a stronger sense of community.

Although informed by other times and places, several of the works in the exhibition are directly linked to the history, architecture, and residents of Bloomington-Normal, Illinois: as source material for the works on view, as collaborators in constructing new sculptures, and as participants in programming. In Spring 2017, cordova spent four weeks as a visiting artist-in-residence in Illinois State University’s School of Art. While here, he began a new series of small coffee drawings on paper, which feature architectural structures in and near Normal, objects linked to his memories of those spaces, and signifiers of his personal interactions in the community. For example, some of the drawings feature: a lonely string of party lights projecting inexplicably from an upright broom, a woven geometric pattern created from the outlines of Watterson Towers’ projecting facades, a television antenna that alludes to a cross, words overheard on the bus, or items found on the ground during one of his walks. Twenty of these drawings are on view, as well as groupings of Polaroids the artist completed while in Bloomington-Normal. He is also collaborating with ISU students and members of the public to produce two new concrete sculptures that will be added to the exhibition as they are created.

Also included in the exhibition is sacred geometries (4T.A.) , a new collaborative 16mm film made by cordova and artists Luis Gispert, Edra Soto, and Barron Sherer, which they describe as a “static- movement portrait” of the late artist Terry Adkins (1953–2014). Adkins—a distinguished Illinois State University alumnus (M.S. 1977) whose work has been exhibited and honored internationally— was a close friend of cordova and Gispert. cordova and University Galleries’ Director and Chief Curator Kendra Paitz researched where Adkins lived while he was a graduate student at ISU and secured permission for Soto to temporarily hang and photograph one of his artworks from University Galleries’ Permanent Collection in the Normal, Illinois, apartment. Sherer filmed the resulting photographs with a Bolex 16mm film camera and Gispert created an accompanying soundtrack. The result is a subtle and poetic tribute to Adkins’ profound influence.

william cordova’s work has been exhibited at prestigious venues including the Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. His works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima, Peru; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Harvard University; and Yale University, among many others. cordova has published numerous essays and curated more than twenty-five exhibitions. He also volunteers as a visiting artist for various community colleges and mentors students in different cities throughout the United States. He received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Yale University. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York, and 80M2 Livia Benavides Gallery, Lima, Peru.

william cordova: kuntur: sacred geometries is organized by University Galleries’ Director and Chief Curator Kendra Paitz and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund, and a Town of Normal Harmon Arts grant. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Press

• Press Release
• WGLT: Interview with william cordova and Kendra Paitz
• WGLT: New Partnerships Inspires Creativity in Kids
• WGLT Radio Postcard: william cordova

Open August 16 through October 14, 2018

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In the Company of Black presents selected photographs from a recent series of the same name by artist and educator Cecil McDonald, Jr., as well as the premiere of a new video. Over the course of seven years, McDonald photographed people he describes as “extraordinarily ordinary.” He explains, “When it comes to Black people, America is fascinated with extreme poles: either showing victims of violence, pain, and poverty (Black misery) or famous athletes and entertainers, and icons of popular culture (Black exceptionalism). This false dichotomy denies Black people the individuality and full spectrum of humanity that is so readily offered to the white population in this country. The photographs I’ve been making ask the question: where are the people who make up the space in between. Here they are, they are important, they must be seen.” The imagery ranges from tender moments between, and with, his daughters, to informal portraits of friends and collaborators that are filled with references to music, art history, and popular culture—including an Artforum magazine featuring a painting by Barkley L. Hendricks on the cover; record albums by Marvin Gaye, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis, and Prince; an exhibition catalogue for Kerry James Marshall; and books about Malcolm X, Aaron Douglas, and the black male in contemporary art.

McDonald worked with Candor Arts, a Chicago-based independent art book publisher, to produce an In the Company of Black publication. The 144-page book, which includes poems by avery r. young and a text by Tempestt Hazel, was nominated for the 2017 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Award. Illinois State University’s Milner Library recently acquired a copy of the handmade first edition for its Special Collections area.

This exhibition will also premiere McDonald’s No One Ever Really Dies, a 2018 video featuring a projected image of the artist’s late father-in-law and a narration consisting of six voices reading the eulogy that American Civil Rights activist, historian, and writer W. E. B. DuBois (1868–1963) wrote for himself six years before his death. An excerpt from the moving address reads, “I have loved my work, I have loved people and my play, but always I have been uplifted by the thought that what I have done well will live long and justify my life. That what I have done ill or never finished can now be handed on to others for endless days to be finished perhaps better than I could have done. And that peace will be my applause.” The soundtrack was composed by McDonald's collaborator, Lional "Brother El" Freeman.

Cecil McDonald, Jr.’s work has been exhibited at Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Philadelphia African American Museum, Philadelphia; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans; Terrain Exhibitions, Oak Park, Illinois; and Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago. McDonald has received grants, fellowships, and residencies from 3Arts; Artadia; LightWork, Syracuse, New York; Latitude, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events, Chicago. In 2018, he received the MAKER Grant | Coney Family Fund Award, presented by Chicago Artists Coalition, OtherPeoplesPixels, and the Coney family to artists “who demonstrate a commitment to a socially conscious, progressive, and sustainable artist practice and career development.” McDonald’s work is included in the collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; Bank of America’s LaSalle Bank Photography Collection, Chicago; The Joyce Foundation, Chicago; Prairie Center for the Arts, Peoria, Illinois; and the Chicago Public Library, among others. He received a BA in fashion merchandising and an MFA in photography from Columbia College, Chicago, where he currently teaches photography.

Cecil McDonald Jr.: In the Company of Black is organized by University Galleries’ Director and Chief Curator Kendra Paitz, former University Galleries Curator Jason Judd, and University Galleries’ curatorial intern and School of Art graduate student Chrissy LaMaster. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Resources

• Cecil McDonald, Jr.

Press

• Press Release
• WGLT Feature: Cecil McDonald, Jr.

Open October 26 through December 16, 2018

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To Hypnotize Them With Forgetfulness presents six films, a photographic installation, and a newly commissioned text-based work by Egyptian artist Basim Magdy. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s process-based experiments with altering analog film and writing absurd storylines. Educated as a painter in Cairo, Magdy began to shift his focus more toward working with photographs and manipulating film in 2011. He explains that he could use film as “a tool to communicate ideas related to loss, destruction, confusion, and the apocalypse.” His endless transformations include “pickling” the film in household solutions; placing a kaleidoscope in front of the lens; and utilizing masks, light leaks, and double exposures. The resulting painterly distortions of image and color are vibrant, unexpected, and hypnotic. Magdy then composes improbable narratives—often about future aspirations, failure, and the repetition of history—which are added as both voiceovers and captions. Strangely haunting and darkly humorous, the works create, in the artist’s words, “a visually different version of reality” and a “narrative that has no beginning and no end.”

The exhibition’s title is quoted from The Dent (2014), a 19-minute Super 16mm film transferred to HD video that demonstrates the range of the artist’s poetic and ambiguous writing. Amidst imagery of dilapidated Modern infrastructure, Classical marble sculptures, a spectral marching band, and an all-seeing elephant, a story of collective failure unfolds in a fictional small town where the residents unrealistically dream of hosting the Olympics. Additional works include The Everyday Ritual of Solitude Hatching Monkeys, a 2014 film that was inspired by Magdy’s father’s short stories, and a related 2017 photographic work, We’re All Victims of Our Own Adopted Fantasies Here (reprise). Among the other selected films are: No Shooting Stars (2016); The Many Colors of the Sky Radiate Forgetfulness (2014); Crystal Ball (2013); and Thirteen Essential Rules for Understanding the World (2011).

Magdy will take over University Galleries’ Instagram account for a week during the course of the exhibition. He also invites visitors to take their own photographs and videos within the exhibition to “create their own narratives or parodies, tell love stories, express how the work makes them feel, or simply to add filters, stickers, or digital doodles.” Please share your creations with us on Instagram using #DearBasim and mentioning @universitygalleriesisu and @Basim.Magdy.

Magdy’s work has been exhibited at New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Beirut Art Center, Beirut; MAXXI National Museum of the 21st Century Arts, Rome; D-CAF Festival, Cairo; Arnolfini, Bristol, England; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Castello di Rivoli, Torino, Italy; and has been included in the Sharjah Biennial, Istanbul Biennial, Lubumbashi Biennial, and Seoul Biennial. His work is included in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris; Deutsche Bank Collection, Germany; National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa; Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates; Castello di Rivoli, Torino; and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, Qatar; among others. Magdy was the 2016 Deutsche Bank “Artist of the Year” and has been awarded the Abraaj Art Prize, Dubai, and the NEW:VISION award at the CPH:DOX Film Festival, Copenhagen. In 2012, he was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize at the Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev. Magdy lives and works in Basel, Switzerland. He is represented by artSümer, Istanbul; Gypsum Gallery, Cairo; and hunt kastner, Prague.

An 80-page exhibition catalogue featuring texts by film scholar Bruce Jenkins and exhibition curator Kendra Paitz will be published in 2019.

Basim Magdy: To Hypnotize Them With Forgetfulness is organized by University Galleries’ Director and Chief Curator Kendra Paitz and is sponsored in part by grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency and the Alice and Fannie Fell Trust.

All events are free and open to the public. Contact gallery@ilstu.edu or 309.438.5487 to schedule exhibition tours.

Resources

• Basim Magdy
• Purchase Publication
• View Sample Pages

Press

• Artist Experiments in Analog Film - WGLT
• Press Release

Open January 14 through February 12, 2017

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The 2017 MFA Biennial presents the work of seventeen students currently enrolled in the School of Art’s Master’s of Fine Arts program at Illinois State University. These artists are at various points in the three-year program that is dedicated to helping them “develop a mature body of work by exploring the relationship between active studio practice and rigorous intellectual inquiry.” Their artwork dynamically engages the mediums of painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, glass, ceramics, sound installation, sculpture, and performance.

This is the second MFA Biennial to be held at University Galleries’ new space at Uptown Station, providing the local community an excellent opportunity to experience the diverse and fresh talents of the MFA students in the vibrant center of the Town of Normal.

Exhibiting artists: George Barreca, Lexi Bragg, Felicia Cannon, Megan Coonelly, Catherine Davis, Mariko Brown Harkin, Kirsten Heteji, Rebecca Frank, Jeremy Langston, Jeremy Lampe, Emily Lehman, Molly Markow, Barry Moton, Ryan Paluczak, Josh Roach, Kale Stewart, Micah Zavacky.

Press

• WGLT: MFA Show Highlights Rising Artist
• Press Release

Open February 2, 2017

The Gold Web is Chicago’s art-glam monstrosity. Known for their highly theatrical stage shows, the group doses audiences with blissful grooves, dramatic songwri ting, and an outrageous visual performance. 

Brandishing 6-foot wings, glitter, feathers, and face paint, The Gold Web look like they flew out of David Lynch’s dream, or Lady Gaga’s nightmare. Musically things are a little clearer– and even more irresistible; the group’s self-titled debut album traffics a charismatic brand of forward thinking indie-pop marked by surreal synths, rump shaking beats, and futuristic guitar wizardry. 

Assembled out of a lineage of Chicago bands and visual artists, members of The Gold Web cut their teeth touring with acts like KISS and Smashing Pumpkins, while other members curated notable galleries and pushed the boundaries of performance art communities. The result is a dreamy freak world which raises more questions than it answers. Where are we going? Will we be safe once we get there? Will we ever want to leave?

Open February 21 through April 2, 2017

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With its seven framed-out wooden façades,­­ Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson’s Subdivision transforms two galleries into a faux neighborhood where, on a weekly basis, additional artists are invited to manipulate one of the home-like structures in any manner of their choosing. Glossy white sheets of acrylic are attached to the face of every façade, each bearing its own vinyl decal depicting a common household object such as a vent, light switch, or power outlet. The installation immerses visitors in a landscape that evokes a recession-stricken, partially developed subdivision that is strangely populated by utilitarian-looking, Mondrian-like sculptures surrounded by decals of picket fences.

Subdivision will continually evolve during its six-week duration as the artists selected by Lacher and Robinson incrementally build upon, alter, or reinvent one of the aforementioned sculptures “causing,” according to Robinson and Lacher, “the exhibition to develop in ways not entirely within anyone’s control.” As people gather for the exhibition’s opening on Tuesday, February 21, at 5pm, Andy Roche and Selina Trepp will be the first participating artists to respond to their assigned structure. Following suit on successive Fridays, artists Amanda Bowles and Erin Hayden, Alejandro T. Acierto, Thad Kellstadt, and collaborative duo Melissa Oresky and Zak Boerger, will “perform” their work with a free public event in the gallery. In the last week of the exhibition, the “subdivision” will have changed from a conglomeration of similar architectural forms to a mash-up of different aesthetics, styles, practices, materials, and tastes—from a series of houses to a community of neighbors.

Throughout this collaborative exhibition, Lacher and Robinson’s roles will have transformed from traditional artists to artist-curators, or from material-manipulators to exhibition-makers. This hybrid role offers creative freedoms not afforded to a “professional” curator, from disregarding clarity in favor of experimentation, to destabilizing conventional roles and critiquing institutions—sometimes at the very institutions in which they are creating. The artist-curator freely moves between labels, uninhibited by expectations other than producing the unexpected. Everything the artist-curator does can be deemed as a work of art, from materials and coordination to another artist’s artwork. For Lacher and Robinson, the exhibition itself is the true medium.

Artist events:

Selina Trepp
Tuesday, February 21, at 5 pm

Using home-made balls made from her studio scraps, Selina Trepp’s Neighbors invites all gallery attendees to join her in kicking and playing with the one-of-a-kind plastic-wrapped spheres. Inspired by instances of meeting new people from retrieving her children’s assortment of balls from neighbor’s yards, Trepp uses her spherical sculptures to promote accidental introductions.

Andy Roche
Tuesday, February 21, at 5 pm

Hanging from the wooden form, Andy Roche’s plastic tarp has a combination of airbrush painting and vinyl photo stickers that depicts bay windows where a gust of wind is blowing a stack of papers around the house and out the opposite window. Inside the form and among the turmoil of papers representing an actual novel he is working on, Roche will host a surprise performance for the opening of the exhibition.

Amanda Bowles
Friday, March 3, at 7 pm

Amanda Bowles’ site-specific installation includes a custom wall painting, blinking sculptures, and, most importantly, a wall-hung electronic tablet. During the scheduled gallery opening, Bowles will “inhabit” the tablet via Facetime, performing as a “live photo” portrait. The structure itself will be modified by the addition of a mirror that will aid in extending and contracting perceived space between the performer and the viewer.

Erin Hayden
Friday, March 3, at 7 pm

Erin Hayden will present Pretty Feelings, a performance event where poetry will be read aloud while Hayden interacts with willing participants, painting their nails and toes as well as her own. Her structure in Subdivision will act as a backdrop for this event—a home covered in images of sparkling toes. An accompanying video component  reveals friendships with attitudes and diaristic texts.

Alejandro T. Acierto
Friday, March 10, at 7 pm

Alejandro T. Acierto will activate the space through an experimental participatory project that considers the nature of political organizing in the era of Web 2.0. Using a real-time social media monitoring program as a backdrop to activate a set of megaphones within the installation, Acierto engages the structure as an open framework that student organizations and activists can inhabit. After a preliminary solo performance for megaphones and voice, the structure will offer various communities a temporary site to return to, work in, strategize, and recoup for the rest of the exhibition. Using open source technologies, Return, refresh, sustain attempts to embody and present a framework that enables collaborative interactions between organizers, communities, and the public.

Thad Kellstadt
Friday, March 24, at 7 pm

Thad Kellstadt will present Hiraeth, an installation exploring how we encapsulate ideas and feelings of “home” into a given location, time, and space. The Welsh word “Hiraeth” is used to describe yearning and nostalgia for a particular past which we may or may not have experienced. Using the provided structure as an anchor, Kellstadt aims to create an esoteric mapping of the factual and fabled ideas and feelings of what he considers to be “home”. 

Melissa Oresky and Zak Boerger
Friday, March 31, at 7 pm

Beginning Saturday, March 25, Melissa Oresky will transplant a section of her studio into the gallery to hold “Collage on Demand” events over the course of the week. This is a participatory process where she makes artwork for gallery visitors during a conversation. At the end of this six day period, the collages will have gradually grown to cover the structure she and musician collaborator Zak Boerger will “inhabit.”

Where Oresky is placing visual art within the literal framework of the structure, Boerger has created a four part sound piece, Practice for Life, consisting of conversations and impromptu performances with the pair’s young son. Designed around the idea of an ongoing, three way, or “triangular” conversation between the couple and their son, Boerger uses stereo placement as a means of reinforcing the positioning of the participants: listening in some cases, engaging in others. Continuing this theme of “practice,” the March 31 performance will consist of Boerger using the gallery space to prepare for an upcoming show; likewise, a cheap starter guitar and the first practice amp Boerger acquired will be left in the gallery space for visitors to play, “entering into” the family’s temporary domestic space as participants.

At the close of the exhibit, all “Collage on Demand” pieces will be given to the gallery visitors who commissioned them. Any donations in exchange for collages will be directed to human rights, healthcare, and environmental organizations; likewise, Boerger will donate all proceeds from record sales at the March 31 event to these organizations.

To schedule a “Collage on Demand” conversation with Oresky, please email jajudd@ilstu.edu

Allison Lacher and Jeff Robinson began their collaboration in 2015 with the exhibition A Kitchen Without a Knife is Not a Kitchen at Kitchen Space gallery in Chicago. For the next year-and-a half the duo continued to produce collaborative exhibitions at Museum Blue, St. Louis; Roman Susan, Chicago; Outhaus, Champaign, Illinois; and The Ski Club, Milwaukee. Lacher and Robinson are Co-Directors of DEMO Project, an artist-run contemporary art gallery in Springfield, Illinois. Individually, Lacher has exhibited nationally at venues such as E.TAY Gallery, New York; The Luminary, St. Louis; CAUC Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, Utah; and Illinois State Museum, Chicago and Springfield. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Edinboro University, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Indiana University, Bloomington. Along with a rigorous independent curatorial practice, Lacher is the Gallery Manager at the Visual Arts Gallery of University of Illinois at Springfield. Robinson’s work has been exhibited at the Chicago Industrial Arts and Design Center, Chicago; Northern Illinois University Art Museum, DeKalb, Illinois; (SCENE) Metrospace, East Lansing, Michigan; and University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal, among others. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from University of Illinois at Springfield, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Illinois State University. He works at the University of Illinois at Springfield as an Instructor of Art and as the Director of the Visual Arts Gallery.

Subdivision is organized by Curator Jason Judd. Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Resources

• Allison Lacher
• Jeff Robinson
• Show Handout

Press

• WUIS: The Scene With Artists/Curators Allison Lacher & Jeff Robinson
• WGLT: Subdivision' Has Open Door Policy For Artists
• Press Release

Open February 21 through April 4, 2017

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Edra Soto is a Chicago-based artist, educator, and curator who “aims to challenge the boundaries between audience, artist, and the work itself to amplify the democratic potential that art has to offer.” She uses both traditional and unconventional materials—including plastic chairs upholstered with beach towels or pineapple upside-down cake—to create sculptures, installations and architectural interventions that foster accessibility and encourage public participation. Soto, who often incorporates the visual culture of her native Puerto Rico, identifies issues of “class, race, cultural origins, hierarchies, and myth” as integral to her work.

The works on view in this exhibition evidence both the artistic process and the labor of the artworks’ making. During the opening reception on February 21, Soto will partner with Illinois State University students to make a new version of her 2016 Manual GRAFT performance. The artist and her collaborators will use metallic adhesive to create a geometric design in the windows of the east gallery based on the iron rejas (screens) she cites as ever-present in the architecture of post-war Puerto Rico due to their provision of security and cross ventilation. Soto points out that the screens also incorporate Spanish design elements. The work’s title alludes to multiple meanings of the word “graft”—transplanting something to another location or engaging in political corruption—to acknowledge both diasporic identity and the influence of colonialism on the island.

Soto will also create a new version of a 2015 work entitled Dominodomino, a table at which visitors are invited to sit and play dominoes. She will make clay seashells and attach them to the table and chairs as a nod to Caribbean souvenirs like shell-encrusted boxes. Visitors will be invited to make and add seashells to the furniture as well. Soto and her husband, Dan Sullivan, made the original wooden table after seeing a concrete domino table in a public plaza in Puerto Rico. With that piece, the two cited their interest in the power conveyed by “dominate,” a root word for “domino,” as well as in “various power plays embedded in ideas of collaboration,” and “the ambiguous nature of work versus leisure time.”

Through grafting the windows and shelling the domino table at University Galleries, Soto will temporarily fix her presence in the space. She also wants others’ hands to play a role. Visitors are invited to participate in the construction of the exhibition in a variety of ways—participating in the Manual GRAFT performance; playing dominoes and having conversations; creating air-dry clay seashells and gluing them to the table and chairs; and even making their own wall-hung pieces of artwork by attaching clay shells to their used refreshment plates at the opening reception, which will then become a part of the installation.

Soto’s work was recently featured in the 4th Poly/Graphic Triennial of San Juan and the Caribbean in Puerto Rico, and was also exhibited at Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, New York; Hunter East Harlem Gallery at Hunter College, New York; and The Arts Club of Chicago. Her work will soon be exhibited at Museo de la Universidad de Puerto Rico; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Pérez Art Museum Miami. Through a commission from the Chicago Transit Authority, GRAFT, her architectural intervention made in collaboration with Dan Sullivan, will be featured at the Blue Line Western Avenue stop on the train line to O’Hare Airport in 2018. Soto has been awarded residencies at Project Row Houses, Houston; Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito; and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida. She participated in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Program through a 3Arts Foundation Fellowship. In 2016, Soto received the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship. She was also featured in Newcity’s annual Art 50 issue. Soto is co-director of the THE FRANKLIN, an artist-run outdoor project space. With artist Josue Pellot, she recently co-curated Present Standard, a group exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center. Soto received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, Maine, and Beta-Local in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Soto's exhibition is organized by Senior Curator Kendra Paitz and is co-sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Resources

• Edra Soto
• Press Release

Open February 21 through April 2, 2017

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Deb Sokolow’s text-based drawings and collages are based on purposeful research and humorous conjecture about cultural icons and everyday people, mysterious moments and alternate histories, distant places and nearby spaces. Her drawings typically consist of multiple sheets of paper filled with blocky graphite lettering, Xeroxed photographic images, sketchy architectural renderings, and painted geometric shapes reminiscent of Minimalism. New works are prompted by something she has personally observed, such as the replacement of windows on the building across the street from her studio, or some far-fetched thing she has read about, such as the momentary “disappearance” of the Statue of Liberty by illusionist David Copperfield in 1983, or the fantastical San Jose, California, mansion built by heiress Sarah Winchester in a reported effort to appease angry ghosts. Rather than supplying linear narratives, Sokolow writes inventive storylines that incorporate the voice of a suspicious narrator who interjects with questions, suggestions and opinions. In The New York Times, Ken Johnson writes, “The eccentrically forensic style of Ms. Sokolow’s zany project reflects her effort to comprehend the facts and rumors, as if she herself were a justifiably paranoid character in a Thomas Pynchon novel.”

The four multipanel drawings included in this exhibition, ranging from six to twenty-seven feet wide, were made between 2012 and 2016. Each includes a reference to the art world cast in a strange or outright criminal context. Individually, these works: fantasize that an artist residency is a brainwashing station for an international ring of art thieves; speculate about the occupants of her studio building and the development of a cult in her neighborhood; touch upon an unfortunate entanglement between an artist and the CIA; and imagine a scenario in which the CIA planned to use a sculpture to assassinate a foreign leader. The exhibition’s title is derived from Sokolow’s 88-inch-wide drawing entitled A Case Study in Schematics, Surveillance and Murder, concerning the 1964 murder of abstract painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, a mistress of President John F. Kennedy and ex-wife of a CIA agent. Sokolow’s diversion from the sordid facts interweaves brief accounts of orgone boxes, painted rocks containing “bugs” planted by a CIA Counterintelligence chief, and painters in the Washington Color School, illustrated with an imaginary architectural plan of Ms. Pinchot Meyer’s house. Sokolow’s investigations are particularly salient given our current climate of fake news, conspiracy theories, and “alternative facts.”

Sokolow’s work has been included in the 4th Athens Biennial, as well as exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York; Van Abbemuseum, Netherlands; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Kemper Museum of Art, Kansas City. Her work is in the collections of Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Bloomington, Indiana; and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Sokolow has received an Artadia award, fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Illinois Arts Council, and residencies from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture, Art Omi, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. She received her Master of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The artist lives in Chicago and is represented by Western Exhibitions, Chicago. 

Resources

• Deb Sokolow

Press

• The Pantagraph: Alternative reality: Mood of our times tapped at ISU exhibit
• Press Release

Open April 12 through May 14, 2017

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has showcased new artwork produced by students at Illinois State University. The juried exhibition, which features work in a variety of mediums and styles, offers many students the first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals outside the University.

The School of Art is pleased to present Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Awards to MFA student Mariko Brown Harkin and BFA student Kayla Scott. Both artists will be recognized for their achievements during the presentation of awards. To further honor their accomplishments, University Galleries will devote additional exhibition space to the presentation of new works by both artists.

Awards totaling just under $3,000 are presented as scholarships, ranging from $50 to the Best in Show award of $300. Awards sponsors are: The School of Art; Douglas Blines Memorial; Arts Technology Program; Normal Editions Workshop; Randy Reid; The Silica Ceramics Club; The DeGeal Interactive Design Award; Irving S. Tick Award; Richard D. Finch Undergraduate Drawing and Printmaking Award; and the following areas within the School of Art-Glass and Graphic Design.

The awards ceremony at 6 pm will also include the presentation of School of Art student scholarships.

This year's studio juror is Claire Ashley, whose work explores feminism, motherhood, and abstract painting through absurd, DayGlo-colored pneumatic sculptures that can inflate to the size of entire rooms. Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Ashley currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions, site-specific installations, and performances.

Our design juror is Bud Rodecker, whose design explores the space between logical constraints and formal play, and balancing form with meaning. He is a principal designer at Thirst, Chicago, and an adjunct professor in design, graphics and animation at DePaul University. His work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Chicago Cultural Center, and Typeforce, and has been published in Graphis, Concept Magazine, IdN Magazine, SLANTED, and others.

The 2017 Student Annual reception is sponsored by The College of Fine Arts, Friends of the Arts, Casey's Garden Shop and Florist, and Jimmy John's.

Resources

• List of works with award winners

Open June 2 through August 9, 2017

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Marc Making: Artists of Marcfirst features a variety of artwork by creative individuals from Marcfirst, a local agency dedicated to supporting adults with developmental disabilities. During the past four months, University Galleries and Marcfirst’s “Marc Making” program have partnered to afford these artists an opportunity to create paintings, drawings, collages, and small sculptures through workshops held on Saturdays among the gallery’s rotating exhibitions. Though the individuals have varying experiences making art, the Marc Making program aims to, as Arts Coordinator Iga Puchalska states, “create an inclusive and creative environment of collaboration through supporting individuals’ self-expression while participating in the Bloomington-Normal fine arts community and beyond.”

The artists will continue the aforementioned Saturday workshops throughout their exhibition, resulting in two continually evolving walls: a spotlight of new artwork produced from the most recent workshop; and an abstract mural that will develop over time through collaboration between Marcfirst individuals and volunteers. Marc Making: Artists of Marcfirst is more than a celebration of artmaking—it is an active hub for creativity, inclusion, and collaboration between the artists of Marcfirst’s Marc Making program and the community of Bloomington-Normal.

Artwork from Marcfirst’s “Daily Training” program will also be on display to represent those individuals who were unable to attend the off-site workshops at the gallery.

The Marcfirst Choir, which includes many of the participating artists, will perform a number of songs at 6 p.m. during the exhibition reception on Friday, June 2.

Marc Making: Artists of Marcfirst is a result of a partnership between Marcfirst’s Marc Making program and University Galleries of Illinois State University. The exhibition is organized by Curator Jason Judd and art workshops are organized by Marc Making’s Art Coordinator Iga Puchalska. Marc Making’s workshops are partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation. Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Resources

• Marc Making: Artists of Marcfirst Video

Press

• WGLT Feature: 'Marc Making' Sparks Creativity Through Collaboration by Laura Kennedy

Open June 2 through August 9, 2017

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Their function as indoor lighting notwithstanding, Dennis French’s Illuminants might best be described as sculptures incorporating light. A subtle seduction is at play as we take in the dynamic lines, atmospheric nuances, and impeccable craftsmanship that characterize this alluring series. The works included in the exhibition range in scale and mode of presentation. The futuristic Frustum, one of several works on pedestal, emits both blue and white light from its missile-like structure, while the tall floor-standing Beacon appears to be a cross between lighthouse and transmission tower. Flight is suspended from the ceiling, its side wings seeming to keep it aloft, and Cloudscape, a large asymmetrical work mounted to the wall, is screen-like in both the traditional and technological sense, besides being, as its title implies, a skyscape.

As a designer, French has a longstanding fascination with lighting which manifested in an earlier series of Illuminants from the late 1980s to early 1990s, constructed from fabricated bronze, corian, glass, cast concrete, steel, low-voltage incandescent lamps, and other materials. Writer Peter F. Spooner called these works “structured gestures that illuminate themselves—objects that produce, carry, and disperse their own light.”  French’s desire to revisit his earlier exploration of light and formal structure was inspired in part by recent advances in cool running LED technology, particularly LED ribbons, whose relative weightlessness and even dispersion of light are reflected in the artist’s choice of lighter materials like poplar, bamboo, and painted MDF, plus the introduction of laminated shoji paper as diffusing “lens.”

Providing context for the evolution of this series, Moon Rise, a metal and glass Illuminant from 1989, will be on view in the concurrent Selections from the Permanent Collection exhibition.

Dennis French received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Arizona State University in 1977 and a Master of Fine Arts in jewelry design/metalsmithing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1980. He joined the School of Art faculty at Illinois State University in 1983 as head of the Jewelry and Metals Design Program and taught there until 2009. French was inspired to work in furniture and home accessories after a trip to Europe in the 1990s. In 2003, he spent a spring sabbatical researching the Vienna Secession arts movement in Vienna, Austria; artist/architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow, Scotland; and the Artists’ Colony at Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, Germany. The website Design 1900 provides a compendium of his historical research.

French’s recent solo exhibitions include: Time & Light, Madden Art Center, Decatur, Illinois (2017); Biedermeier Redux, Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Illinois (2011); and With an Eye to the East, McLean County Arts Center, Bloomington, Illinois (2005). His work is represented in many private collections throughout the U.S. French lives and works in Bloomington, Illinois. Further information is available at http://www.frenchdesignstudio.com/

Open June 2 through August 9, 2017

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Recent Acquisitions to the Permanent Collection presents a selection of artwork acquired by University Galleries over the past several years through donation or purchase. Featured are photographs, prints, paintings, drawings, sculptures, and mixed-media works by artists including: Ilse Bing, Nina Bovasso, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Adam Farcus, Larry Fink, John Fraser, Dennis French, Erin Hayden, Whitney Johnson, Venise Keys, Wonsook Kim, Leon Levinstein, Danny Lyon, Miller & Shellabarger, Jenny Peters, Beatrix Reinhardt, August Sander, Grace Sheese, Michael A. Smith, and Rob Swainston, Amanda Weygand among others.

University Galleries’ collection consists of over 2,700 works and is growing rapidly, particularly through generous gifts by artists and collectors. In addition to the current exhibition, hundreds of artworks from the collection are on view in hallways, offices, and conference rooms throughout campus, courtesy of the gallery’s Art on Campus program. Click to view Selected Highlights from the Permanent Collection. 

Resources

• Press Release

Open August 18 through October 8, 2017

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Paradise Wavering presents 17 new and recent works by Chicago-based photographer Alice Hargrave, including Biosphere, a wall-scale emerald-hued image of a tropical forest printed on fabric. The artist has long been interested in the ways color photography is linked to our memories, and this ongoing series, which began in 2014, is comprised of photographs made during her excursions near and far. Importantly, Paradise Wavering offers an ecologically-based point-of-view. Hargrave says this series is informed by, “the vulnerability of our planet’s biodiversity, the fragility and shrinking of natural habitats, and a desire to express the sublimity and wonder of the organic world.”

Paradise Wavering includes representations of a ruby-tinged lake surface, an indigo view of a mangrove forest, and an aqua image of bird carcasses littering a beach, among others. Hargrave thinks of these photographs as an exploration of the “relics of nature.” There is a renewed urgency to seeing these places, particularly in imaginative ways, as we face threats from climate change. A new work features imaging of the sound waves of the endangered Florida Grasshopper Sparrow’s calls, accompanied by an audio component made in collaboration with artist Walter Kitundu. Hargrave’s subtle but saturated landscapes remind us that these places are in constant flux, and that the photographs, videos, and memories we make, may be all that we have in the end. Hargrave also offers moments of hope and wonder at nature’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and even to elude us at times. For example, she photographed mangroves because of the trees’ inherent ability to cleanse water, and a chartreuse-tinged patch of mushrooms depicting a new species of chanterelle co-discovered by environmental writer Jill Riddell and colleagues at Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History.

Hargrave’s exhibition provides an opportunity to discuss ecological issues and learn about resources in our area. University Galleries has partnered with several non-profit organizations to develop public programming in conjunction with this exhibition. 

• Saturday, September 16, from 1-4pm: Exhibition tour and workshop presented in conjunction with the Children’s Discovery Museum. Participants (ages 8-12) will meet at the CDM, come to University Galleries for a curator-led tour and scavenger hunt, and return to the CDM for an art-making activity. To sign up for this free program, contact Rachel at rcarpenter@normal.org, (309) 433-3468 ext. 3449, or visit the Museum’s website, www.childrensdiscoverymuseum.net.
• A panel discussion about local conservation efforts will take place at University Galleries on Friday, September 22, at 12pm. Participants include: Guy Fraker, a founding member of the ParkLands Foundation; Krista Kirkham, Assistant Aquatic Ecologist at The Nature Conservancy; and Catherine O’Reilly, Associate Professor of Geology at Illinois State University. A member of the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, O'Reilly shares a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and other scientists.
• Saturday, September 23, from 9am-1pm: In collaboration with ParkLands Foundation and The Nature Conservancy, we will tour the Merwin Nature Preserve and the Franklin Research and Demonstration Farm. The Merwin Preserve, which is located in the Mackinaw Valley watershed, features 19 stations along its hiking trails. At the Franklin Farm in Lexington, Illinois, researchers from The Nature Conservancy and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are “testing a variety of conservation methods, including cover crops, constructed wetlands, and habitat restoration.” For more information, contact Kendra at 309.438.8191 or gallery@ilstu.edu.

All events are free and open to the public. Contact gallery@ilstu.edu or 309.438.5487 to schedule exhibition tours.

Hargrave’s work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, Minnesota; Newspace Center for Photography, Portland, Oregon; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and the Chicago Cultural Center. Her work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her first monograph, Paradise Wavering, was published by Daylight Books in 2016 and includes an interview by Kendra Paitz. Hargrave lives in Chicago, where she teaches at Columbia College and is a member of the all-female Stella Collective.

Alice Hargrave’s exhibition is organized by University Galleries’ Senior Curator Kendra Paitz and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The artist reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal.

Resources

• Alice Hargrave

Press

• WGLT: Fragile Ecology Highlights Artist's Work
• Press Release

Open August 18 through October 8, 2017

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Amy Cousins’ large-scale sculptures and installations are based on her research into rare protest ephemera, out-of-print feminist newspapers, and first-person accounts of radical queer histories. From the Lesbian Feminist Declaration of 1976 to the Gay Liberation Dances that emerged across the U.S. in the 1970s, Cousins reimagines these remarkable yet poorly documented events and reveals captivating examples of inventiveness in queer protest. Her sculptural reinterpretations are produced with a range of processes and materials: wall hung appliqué textile figures, text made from shag fabric, a ten-foot-tall papier-mâché puppet, and an off-kilter tufted patent leather vinyl vitrine—complete with kinky lavender fur—to name a few.

Cousins’ new artworks, such as the queer dance party she will stage at University Galleries, are inspired by more recent activism, including the  LGBTQIA+ activists’ public dance party outside of Vice President Mike Pence’s house, which inspired subsequent guerilla dance parties at the homes of Senator Mitch McConnell and Ivanka Trump, the Texas State Capitol in Austin, and the Loews Hotel in Philadelphia during the 2017 Republican Congressional Retreat. Cousins states that she is moved by the “decidedly queer ingenuity and playfulness in addressing such serious and heavy issues,” believing that “resurfacing and celebrating this history seems paramount to how we shape our contemporary political queer landscape today.”

Cousins’ artwork harks back to craft’s central role throughout the history of protest, from the enormous papier-mâché puppets of the politically radical Bread & Puppet Theater founded in New York City in the early 1960s to the multicolored and often political arpilleras created by groups of Chilean women in response to the 1973 military dictatorship. The phrase You Will Never Have the Comfort of Our Silence Again, spelled out in oversized orange-shag fabric, derives from a banner that activist group DYKETACTICS! used to protest the death of an equal rights amendment at Philadelphia’s City Hall in 1975. Accompanying the banner, activists also carried a giant witch puppet that cackled “I am the lesbian suppressed in every woman, I am the woman in every male crucified on the cross of manhood” while they clashed with riot police resulting in many of the women being badly beaten. This shameful incident is one example of how Cousins’ research transforms sparsely recorded events into unconventional queer monuments.

In conjunction with her exhibition, Cousins will collaborate with Illinois State University’s Normal Editions Workshop to produce a limited edition of prints, of which two impressions will become part of University Galleries’ permanent collection. In 2016, Cousins won the Curator’s Choice Award for Beyond the Norm: An International Juried Print Exhibition, which was organized by N.E.W. to celebrate their 40th anniversary and hosted by University Galleries.

Cousins’ work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Washington Printmaker’s Gallery, Silver Spring, Maryland; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Moore College of Art, Philadelphia; Visual Arts Center at Boise State University, Idaho; Peephole Cinema, San Francisco; and IS Projects, Fort Lauderdale. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, and a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, Philadelphia. Originally from Houston, Cousins currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where she is also an active member of the experimental animation collective, OOF. 

This event is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The artist reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal. The dance party is co-sponsored by Women's and Gender Studies.

Resources

• Amy Cousins

Press

• WGLT: Playful Art Delivers Powerful Message

Open August 18 through October 8, 2017

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Installed in the windows of University Galleries, Gina Hunt’s Stereo Vision is a project dedicated to the artist’s use of hand-dyed theatre scrim as a filter and mediator of natural light. The gauze-like scrim fabric, which Hunt notes, “has the magical ability to become either translucent or opaque, depending on the light source,” is hand-dyed red, green and blue by the artist, layered and stretched across frames, then placed over each window in the gallery. Not only are red, green and blue the additive primary colors of light, but they are also the colors that comprise the illuminated digital screens through which we receive most of our visual information.

The diffusion of daylight through this site-specific installation manifests in ever-changing waves of color. As Hunt describes, “in Stereo Vision, the layering of colored scrim creates interference (moiré) patterns which appear to flicker as the sunlight passes through and into the gallery, allowing for a completely unique experience each time the work is viewed. I am collaborating with the sunlight to create this work.”

Hunt’s experimentation with the play of light on surfaces began in 2012 with This-has-been, a series of cyanotypes (photographic blueprints) on rice paper, whose lightning-like white flashes disrupted blue color fields. Her optically-intense Chromascope paintings in 2014-15 were her earliest forays into the layering, twisting, and weaving of brilliantly colored canvas upon canvas, and are the forerunners of her current layering of painted or dyed translucent materials like scenery netting, screen mesh, PVC mesh, and theatre scrim. The wood-framed, four-sided Suncatcher for the Badlands, installed temporarily in Badlands National Park in 2016, with “windows” of stretched nylon, window screen mesh, and theatre scrim, is essentially an outdoors analog to Stereo Vision.

Gina Hunt received an MFA in Painting from Illinois State University in 2015, an MA in Painting from Minnesota State University in 2012, and a BFA in Painting, Printmaking, and Art History from Minnesota State University in 2009. She was the 2015-2016 Fellow at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where she was a practicing artist and instructor within the Painting and Printmaking Department and exhibited a solo exhibition of paintings and sculpture. Her most recent one-person exhibition was Transmitters, at 65GRAND in Chicago.  She has participated in recent group shows at DEMO Project, Springfield, Illinois; E. Tay Gallery, New York City; Hoffman LaChance Contemporary, St. Louis; Front Room Gallery, Brooklyn; and The Soap Factory, Minneapolis.

Hunt’s work has been featured in Gulf Times, Doha, Qatar; Salt Hill, Syracuse University; New American Paintings; and Studio Break, a contemporary art podcast. In 2016, Hunt was awarded residencies at Hinge Arts, Fergus Falls, Minnesota, and the Badlands National Park, South Dakota, where she created temporary, site-specific sculptural installations integrated within landscape and architecture. The artist lives and works in Chicago.

The artist’s lecture and installation are sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. The exhibition reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place Bloomington/Normal. 

Resources

• Gina Hunt

Press

• Studio Break: Interview with Gina Hunt

Open August 18 through October 8, 2017

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Keith and Nita Kattner began acquiring art in the 1990s and have since amassed an impressive collection of paintings and drawings by prominent 19th and 20th century American artists. Keith, an Illinois State University alumnus and former neurosurgeon now working as an artist, recalls being spellbound at the age of ten while viewing paintings by Grant Wood, Robert Henri, and other American artists at the Joselyn Museum of Art in Omaha, Nebraska. This experience, coupled with his passion for U.S. history, fueled his ongoing, intensive study of American painting and the couple’s desire to view it in an intimate domestic setting.

The eight works of art chosen for this exhibition exemplify several important movements and styles in American art between 1891 and 1945, including Impressionism, Symbolism, Regionalism, and the group known as “The Eight.” Among the genres included are landscape, still life, portraiture, the nude, and even figures at the shore, as in Reginald Marsh’s Coney Island Beach, in which a newspaper headline announcing Russia’s declaration of war against Japan provides a sobering edge to a sensuously charged scene of carefree bathers.

Robert Henri’s El Segoviano is a broadly brushed, evocative portrait of an elderly Spaniard who, according to the artist, sang with a cigarette in his mouth while posing. As if in response, with its two matchsticks poised precariously at the edge of a shelf, Still Life with Mug and Pipe by John Frederick Peto is a classic example of trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) still life painting. The spatial ambiguity in Robert Lewis Reid’s Impressionist painting The Screen creates the illusion that a female figure on a couch is part of the tropical scene painted on the screen behind her.

The view through backlit trees in Ralph Albert Blakelock’s Evening Silhouettes reveals the last vestiges of a jewel-like sunset, while George Inness’s crepuscular Tarpon Springs, Florida, suffuses land, sea and sky in a mystical golden light. Arthur B. Davies’s radiant Madonna of the Hills lends a symbolic quality to a landscape featuring a mother nursing a child. John Steuart Curry’s Storm over the Missouri River, a landscape by the renowned American Regionalist, pits the industrial—in the form of a steamer barely visible in the distance—against the forces of nature in a lushly painted rural scene.

American Masters from the Kattner Family Collection offers the local community an opportunity to view exceptional paintings by artists whose work can otherwise be seen only in museums in larger cities. University Galleries would like to thank the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee, for facilitating the loan of seven artworks currently housed in their museum.

Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The exhibition reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal.

Open October 21 through December 17, 2017

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Erin Washington: Light Touch features new and recent collages, paintings, drawings, and sculpture by the Chicago-based artist. From a silverpoint portrait of the Egyptian queen Nefertiti to a chalk drawing of the presumed shape of a wormhole, Washington’s multilayered works consist of a medley of ambiguous scientific diagrams, art historical references, Post-it notes, studio debris, mythological figures, and self-deprecating jokes. Washington utilizes her panels in a similar way chalkboards have been historically used: as a temporary surface to present a lesson, theory, or problem. Though this approach situates Washington as a sort of teacher and the viewer as a student, she undermines this assumed authority by revealing her process: attaching Post-it notes of ideas instead of rendering the final product, writing critical notations on better aesthetic choices instead of changing them, or taping images of what inspired the piece to the surface instead of claiming authorship. Washington notes, “I always held tightly to the process of things: the process of telling a good story or the process of baking bread. I’m fascinated by the attention required for a series of incremental steps to produce a thing (a joke, a loaf, or a painting). Especially if the result is temporal, all that is left for grasping is the experience.”

Through this particular focus on process, Washington consistently draws unexpected parallels between material and image, enabling her to approach timeless themes and dense subjects with a sense of wonder, wit, and wile. For example, the panel Light Touch (2017) consists of drawings and collages that reference visual perception, including: a drawn diagram of Descartes’ theory of vision; a hand-painted grey-scale value study; a fluorescent colored thread from a blanket in the artist’s studio; a variety of handwritten notes; and a ripped black postcard photo of artist Marina Abramovic’s stern face—embellished with googly eyes. Other works are produced as handmade chalkboards, which are first brushed with a porous acrylic pigment, upon which she laboriously draws, erases, and redraws images ranging from a broken-nosed head of Aphrodite to the layout of a Ouija board. In Washington’s four-foot-tall sculpture entitled Idiot Professor (2017), an actual sandwich-board-style chalkboard wears the artist’s shoes on its two forward facing legs. While the front panel features a chalk drawing of the goddess Athena over the handwritten phrase “Thinking causes complications,” the backside simply bears a taped “kick me” sign.

Washington will create her first large-scale geodesic dome for this exhibition. Visitors are invited to enter and experience the heat-trapping qualities and the semi-transparent golden tint of the space blankets covering the structure. Drawing inspiration from the ingenuity of architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller and from famous geodesic domes such as Biosphere 2, an Earth system science research facility in her home state of Arizona, Washington hopes to replicate an historical science-based structure that, as she states “is similar to my approach with my two-dimensional work.” Washington continues, “Until now I have not been able to create a structure that allows the viewer to experience not only being able to be surrounded by the material, but the ability to see through it.” She continues, “my hope is to create something beautiful and unusual—something that slows the viewer down, upsets reason/logic, and rewards existing within it.” 

Washington’s work has been exhibited at numerous venues throughout Chicago including Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Zolla Lieberman Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Roots & Culture, and The Franklin. She was selected as one of NewCity’s “Breakout Artists 2016” and has been featured in publications such as Sports Illustrated, New American Paintings, art ltd. Magazine, Chicago Magazine, and ART CRUSH. She received a Bachelor of Studio Arts from University of Colorado at Boulder, and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Washington lives in Chicago where she is currently a lecturer in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 

This exhibition is organized by University Galleries’ Curator Jason Judd and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The artist reception is co-sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal. 

Resources

• Erin Washington
• Exhibition takeaway

Press

• Press Release

Open October 21 through December 17, 2017

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IT TAKES TIME: Selected Works from 2009 through 2017 presents 55 works by Mexican-born, Chicago-based artist Dianna Frid. The exhibition title refers to the process of creating work, to the recursive cycles of life and death, and to the vast scale of geological time. Frid cites the cadences of reading, writing, sewing, breathing, and thinking as integral to her process. Her sculptures, collages, textiles, artist’s books, and installations are inspired by a range of sources—including poems by Lucretius, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Dylan Thomas, texts and textile designs by Anni Albers, and carved hair and garments from classical Greek and Roman sculpture. Frid says she has “come to recognize how texts are sensuous experiences that embrace syntax but also exceed it through substance, color, and form.” Although her work “intersects with and borrows from written language,” she continues, “it also wrestles with language and its limits across the less verbal aspects of art and life.”

The exhibition centers around twenty-five graphite and embroidery works from Frid’s ongoing Words from Obituaries series, begun in 2010. The artist sorts through her archive of New York Times obituaries, finding moments of language that both resonate with the life of the deceased and operate outside of their source as evocative fragments of text. For example, “ONLY ONE FROM EARTH,” is a snippet taken from the obituary for Lucia Pamela, a musician who claimed she had recorded an album on the moon, while “TO FIND IT HAD BEEN WRITTEN BY A WOMAN” comes from the obituary of Iranian poet and activist Simin Behbahani. Frid classifies her selection into a color-coded system, removes spaces and punctuation, and stitches the words into graphite-covered paper that is mounted on canvas, encouraging a slow reading and an appreciation for the material inclinations of language. The artist will create a new iteration of Evidence of the Material World especially for this exhibition. Referring to a text about the nature of the universe by Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, the work is comprised of thin sheets of graphite-covered paper installed in response to University Galleries’ architectural space. Frid will also debut two new sculptures, including The light emitted now will reach the observer in the future / The light emitted in the past could have reached the observer at any given time. Featuring an expanse of draped reflective foil-covered canvas, the work is a meditation on the correlation between time, distance, and our perception of starlight. The second sculpture, From before you had a name, features peacock ore, aragonite, obsidian, sand selenite rose, and fluorite—stones and minerals from the geographical region now known as Mexico.

University Galleries has partnered with Milner Library and the Children’s Discovery Museum to develop public programming in conjunction with this exhibition.

• October 21 through December 17: Hilo de Vías: Selected Artist’s Books will be on view at Illinois State University’s Milner Library (6th floor, near Special Collections). This presentation of eight artist’s books by Dianna Frid was co-organized by Milner Library’s Exhibitions Committee and University Galleries.
• Saturday, October 21 at 1pm: Exhibition tour and workshop presented in conjunction with the Children’s Discovery Museum. Participants will meet at the CDM, come to University Galleries for a curator-led tour, and return to the CDM for an art-making activity. To sign up for this free program, contact Rachel at rcarpenter@normal.org, (309) 433-3468 ext. 3449, or visit the Museum’s website, www.childrensdiscoverymuseum.net.
• Tuesday, October 24 at 10am: Dianna Frid will lead a tour of her exhibition of artist’s books at Milner Library.
• Dianna Frid will lead gallery walks on Tuesday, October 24 at 12pm and Saturday, November 4 at 12pm. The November 4 event is scheduled in conjunction with Illinois State University’s Family Weekend.

All events are free and open to the public. Contact gallery@ilstu.edu or 309.438.5487 to schedule exhibition tours.

Dianna Frid’s work has been exhibited at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, New York; Biblioteca Francisco de Burgoa, Oaxaca, Mexico; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; The Poetry Foundation, Chicago; Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Minneapolis; National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; the Center for Book Arts, New York; and Galleria Alberto Peola, Turin, Italy, among many others. She has received grants, fellowships, and awards from the MacArthur Foundation, Canada Council for the Arts, Alfredo Harp Helú Foundation, University of Illinois Chicago, Illinois Arts Council, and Artadia. Her work is included in the collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Clinic, Vassar College Special Collections Library, DePaul Art Museum, and Charles E. Young Research Library at University of California Los Angeles. Frid, who lives in Chicago, is an Associate Professor at University of Illinois Chicago.

Dianna Frid: IT TAKES TIME, Selected Works from 2009 through 2017 is organized by University Galleries’ Senior Curator Kendra Paitz and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. This exhibition is co-sponsored by MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative. Frid is pleased to acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Programs at University Galleries are sponsored in part by the Illinois Arts Council Agency. The opening reception is sponsored by Hyatt Place, Bloomington-Normal.

Resources

• Dianna Frid
• Exhibition poster featuring a conversation with Dianna Frid

Press

• Press Release

Open January 12 through February 14, 2016

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The 2016 Faculty Biennial presents work reflecting a diverse range of studio practices by 35 tenure- and non-tenure track faculty in the School of Art and the Program in Arts Technology. The individuals in the exhibition represent the areas of Studio Art, Graphic Design, Art Education, and Arts Technology. Collectively, they have exhibited at major international institutions and museums and have also received support from such prestigious entities as the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, Cité Internationale des Arts, and the Illinois Arts Council. 

This is the first Faculty Biennial to be held at University Galleries' new space at Uptown Station, providing a unique opportunity to showcase within the bustling Uptown area a variety of faculty artwork, including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, video, animation, installation, design, and interactive art. University Galleries is proud to highlight the talent of the faculty and offer students the chance to view the work of their professors.

The exhibition features works by: Daniella Barroqueiro, Megan Kathol Bersett, Jessica Benjamin, Judith Briggs, Peter Bushell, Ian Carey, Kristin Carlson, Tony Crowley, Andreas Fischer, Nancy Fewkes, Brian Franklin, Alfonso Gosálbez, Gary Justis, Jin Lee, Claire Lieberman, Tyler Lotz, James Mai, Jean MK Miller, John Miller, Bill O'Donnell, Melissa Oresky, Morgan Price, Laura Primozic, Iga Puchalska, Scott Rankin, Jason Reblando, Randy Reid, Veda M. and Meda R. Rives, Mike Wille, Archana Shekara, Sarah Smelser, Albion Stafford, and Marissa Webb Tonkovic, as well as a lecture by art historian Melissa Johnson.

Open February 24 through April 3, 2016

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Soldier Shepherd Prophet Martyr: Videos from 1998 - 2013, the first survey of videos by Terry Adkins (1953 - 2014), will feature twelve videos—some created to be standalone works and others developed for inclusion in his performances and multimedia "recital" installations—as well as documentation of the artist's 2013 performances at The Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition's title is derived from a phrase repeated throughout Apis Mellifera (1998 - 1999), the earliest video in the exhibition. Adkins combined these four powerful words—which resonate with historical, religious, and political tones—to reference abolitionist John Brown, the focus of the video, but they can also provide a poetic lens through which to view the other videos and the late artist himself, a fearless performer and dedicated educator who often cited his intense belief that "art can be a force for change."

Adkins, who received an M.S. degree in Printmaking from Illinois State University's School of Art, ingeniously united the improvisation of a jazz musician and the deep research of a conceptual artist in his seamless blending of performance, sound, sculpture, printmaking, photography, and video. He studied historical figures that he deemed "immortal"—including John Brown, Jimi Hendrix, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bessie Smith, Matthew Henson, and Ludwig van Beethoven, often focusing on moments and biographical facts that have escaped our collective memories and the dominant narratives of his subjects' lives. Saying that he was drawn to figures with "exceptional human stories" whose "legacies are still very alive," Adkins created commanding works about revolutionary spirits who triumphed over adversity and effected meaningful change. For example, his Synapse (from Black Beethoven)—in which a framed portrait of Beethoven slowly transitions from a traditional Caucasian depiction toward one that shows him with darker skin and hair as a tense instrumental soundtrack drones in the background—acknowledges questions about Beethoven's Moorish ancestry while also honoring that he composed his most influential works after suffering severe hearing loss. Adkins also founded the Lone Wolf Recital Corps, a collaborative group with rotating membership, with whom he performed dynamic combinations of spoken word, music, and song, within installations that included invented costumes, sculpture, and instruments such as his 18-foot long Akrhaphone horns.

The exhibition will present Adkins's videos together and independently from any related two- or three-dimensional works, offering the viewer the opportunity for a close examination of the strategies the artist used, from constructing multi-panel videos comprised of recorded and found footage, to animating archival stereoscopic images, to recording actions in real time. Although he made videos throughout his career, these remain lesser-known than performances and sculptures like Muffled Drums, a ceiling-scraping stack of silent but previously played bass drums, or Aviarium, a recent series that magnifies the wavelengths of various birds' songs and manifests them in silver-plated brass cymbals and trumpet mutes. Akin to the existing objects populating his sculptural works, several of Adkins' videos feature found footage or archival imagery. Rather than narrative accounts, they are vibrant combinations of (often abstract) visual references to the chosen figures that are activated through recitation, song, and even silence. Importantly, the heavy influence of music is evident not only in the soundtracks and Adkins' selection of musicians and composers as some of his subjects, but in the structure and composition of the videos—the rhythmic interactions between images in double- and triple-channel works, the cadence of interposed blank spaces, and the recurrent vibrating stereoscopic imagery that pulsates with life.

One gallery will feature all three of Adkins' John Brown-related videos and demonstrate three of the artist's approaches. In Apis Mellifera, the mouths of Adkins and another man are shown in close-up view as they repetitively chant the words "soldier, shepherd, prophet, martyr" while visual references to Brown's life and mission, including fleece, ringing bells, bees, and honey, fade into and out of the three panels on the screen. Behold Harper's Ferry is a silent video featuring stereoscopic images of Brown's Fort, his grave marker, and the railroad bridge and houses surrounding Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, the site of his infamous 1859 raid. In Roost, Adkins appears as the ghost of Brown on the banks of Lake Alice in Gainesville, Florida, where he imagined that Brown's group, if successful, could have declared their victory.

Another gallery will be devoted to Adkins's 41-minute video. Flumen Orationis (from The Principalities), in which Jimi Hendrix's protest song "Machine Gun" is overlaid with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam" speech. The powerful soundtrack is accompanied by black-and-white images of early manned flight-dirigibles, hot air balloons, and planes—to reference Hendrix's little-discussed time as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne. Additional works on view will include Glorioso(from Nenuphar), a silent digital video featuring stereoscopic images of memorial wreaths, bouquets, and markers, the aforementioned Synapse (from Black Beethoven), and Mute, a silent video featuring three views of Bessie Smith captured from a film including a tightly-cropped image of the groundbreaking "Empress of the Blues" rolling her head as she sings a heartfelt song we cannot hear. Miy Paluk 1866, Paradiso XXVII, and Nutjuitok II, three videos that celebrate Matthew Henson, the first African-American Arctic explorer, will be exhibited side-by-side.

Video documentation of At Osiris and Postlude (Corpus Specere), which Adkins and the Lone Wolf Recital Corps performed at The Studio Museum in Harlem during Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art, will also be featured in the exhibition. Adkins's videos Obelisks in Rome and Corpus Specere served as the backdrops for the performances and will be displayed nearby.

University Galleries will publish an accompanying catalogue in Summer 2016. The book will feature Senior Curator Kendra Paitz's interviews with Adkins' friends and colleagues: Lorna Simpson (Artist); Rick Lowe (Artist, Founder of Project Row Houses, Houston); Ian Berry (Dayton Director of The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York); Joshua Mosley (Artist, Professor and Chair of the Department of Fine Arts in the School of Design at University of Pennsylvania); Demetrius Oliver (Artist, Lecturer in Visual Arts at Princeton University); and Valerie Cassel Oliver (Senior Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston).

This exhibition is curated by University Galleries' Senior Curator Kendra Paitz. The exhibition and publication have been made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Additional Programming

High school classes are invited to participate in a free field trip program, which will include a curator-led exhibition tour and an art-making workshop led by graduate students in Illinois State University's Art Education Department. Exhibition tours are available from February 24 - April 1, and workshops are available on March 1 and March 29. Please register by calling 309.438.8191 or sending an email to gallery@IllinoisState.edu.

Adkins's video Synapse (from Black Beethoven) will also be on view at Illinois State University's Milner Library (third floor) from February 24 - April 3.

On Tuesday, March 15, University Galleries will host free screenings of "Facets: A Recital Compilation by Terry Adkins" from 12 - 2 p.m. and 6 - 8 p.m. "Facets: A Recital Compilation" is the documentation of a two-hour collaborative performance that Adkins developed and presented at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, in conjunction with his 2012 thirty-year retrospective.

Adkins was the speaker for Illinois State University’s 2013 College of Fine Arts commencement ceremony and was inducted into the College’s Hall of Fame. During his compelling address, he described the university as a “Midwestern oasis” that “sharpened [his] mind, honed [his] gifts, opened [his] eyes, and tuned [his] heart…” In association with the exhibition, the School of Art will announce the initiation of the Terry Adkins Memorial Scholarship for Diversity, which will provide financial assistance for underrepresented students majoring in Art. Information on making a gift to the scholarship fund will be available at the opening reception and on the School of Art’s website.

Adkins’ work was recently presented in the 2015 Venice Biennale, the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and the traveling exhibition Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art. His work has also been exhibited at Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; American Academy in Rome; Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, among many others. Adkins’s work is in the collections of the Tate Modern, London; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. He was awarded the Jesse Howard, Jr./Jacob H. Lazarus Metropolitan Museum of Art Rome Prize in 2009. Adkins was also awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He received his M.F.A. from University of Kentucky, Lexington, his M.S. from Illinois State University, Normal, and his B.S. from Fisk University, Nashville. Adkins was a professor in the Department of Fine Arts in the School of Art and Design at University of Pennsylvania and lived in Brooklyn, New York. His estate is represented by Salon 94, New York.

Resources

• Terry Adkins Salon 94
• WGLT Feature
• Purchase Publication
• View sample pages

Press

• Press Release

Open February 24 through March 22, 2016

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Berlin-based artist Monika Goetz creates videos and site-responsive installations that have been described by critic Annika Karpowski as referring "to spaces that are not graspable, that lie physically above us or exist only in our imagination." Although the artist typically visits a place in advance of developing a project, she has planned this exhibition for University Galleries' window gallery from afar through studying diagrams, looking at photographs, and having conversations. After hearing a curator describe the four-foot area between the gallery's 16-foot high sheetrock walls and the ceiling as "unusable space" (due to its thick coating of insulation and network of pipes and lighting fixtures), Goetz started to question what determines the quality of an interior space, why certain areas are perceived as uninteresting even though they are functionally necessary, and how she could change one's awareness of the room. She has decided to photographically investigate the ceiling and surrounding walls. The artist hopes that the resulting installation of images created on-site will "challenge the perception of our surroundings and question how we judge and evaluate our environment" with an ultimate goal of "uncovering the beauty of this unusable space."

Goetz is a resident in the School of Art's Visiting Artist Program from February 14 - March 4. While on campus, she will teach a weekly seminar, conduct studio visits with students, present a public lecture, and install her exhibition. The Visiting Artist Program was founded in 1996 "to bring diverse artistic practices and fresh voices to the School of Art."

Goetz's work has been exhibited at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York; MoMA P.S.1, Long Island City, New York; Kunstverein Tiergarten, Berlin; Kunstverein, Kassel, Germany; L.A.C.E., Los Angeles; and in the Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, South Korea. Her work is in the collections of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York; Museo de Arte y Diseo Contemporneo, San Jose, Costa Rica; Kunstverein Tiergarten / Galerie Nord, Berlin; and Fiduciary Trust Company International, New York, among others. She has been awarded grants and residencies by the School of Visual Arts, New York; the MacDowell Colony, Peterborough, New Hampshire; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; the Cultural Council of Germany; and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, among others. Goetz recently received a Design Award from the Public Design Commission for the City of New York. She holds degrees from the Art Academy in Kassel, Germany, and the University of Applied Sciences in Wurzburg, Germany. Goetz lives and works in Berlin and is represented by Schwarz Contemporary, Berlin.

Resources

• Monika Goetz

Open March 28 through April 3, 2016

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Since 2005, Lori Waxman has conducted a work of performance art about art criticism entitled the 60 wrd/min art critic. Through this ongoing performance she has provided brief written reviews to visual artists in various geographical locations, on a first-come, first-served basis.

For three days at University Galleries of Illinois State University, Waxman received artists seeking reviews of their work as part of 60 wrd/min art critic. Reviews, which were free of charge, were scheduled and written in twenty-five-minute increments during these hours: March 24 and March 25, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and March 26, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Reviews were signed, “published,” and ready for pick-up within the timeframe of the performance. Artist, artwork, critic, and review all existed in the same space simultaneously, thereby helping to demystify the art review process. The reviews were posted at the performance site and will remain on view through April 3. In addition, the reviews are published on the WGLT website. WGLT public radio is an NPR affiliate and a service of Illinois State University.

Appointments for Waxman’s reviews were requested by emailing critic@60wrdmin.org. Participants were notified via email about appointments and the details of the performance process.

Waxman describes the 60 wrd/min art critic as many things: “an exploration of short-form art writing, a work of performance art in and of itself, an experiment in role shifting between artist and critic, [and] a democratic gesture and a circumvention of the art review process.” She says that at a time when newspaper and magazine art columns are disappearing, the 60 wrd/min art critic “aims to get a community thinking about where the responsibility for art criticism resides…the project deals comically and literally with the idea that there are too many artists and galleries, and not enough critical venues to cover it all.”

Waxman has focused her project on regional arts communities in a wide variety of locations across America, including Detroit; Portland, Maine; and Kansas City, Missouri. In the summer of 2012, a 100-day version was included in dOCUMENTA (13), the major survey of international art held every five years in Kassel, Germany. An artist book of those reviews was later published by Onestar Press, Paris.

Waxman, who was born in Montreal, Canada, writes a biweekly column for the Chicago Tribune. She teaches art history and criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and holds a Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she wrote her dissertation about walking as a radical aesthetic art form. She is co-author of Girls! Girls! Girls! in contemporary art (2011) and Talking with Your Mouth Full: New Language for Socially Engaged Art (2008).

The 60 wrd/min art critic is a project of the Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant Program. More information on this national project can be found at www.60wrdmin.org. At University Galleries, this project is organized by Senior Curator Kendra Paitz and is sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund.

Resources

• Lori Waxman

Press

• WGLT: Lore Waxman: 60 Wrd/min art critic
• WGLT: A mashup of art and criticism

Open April 14 through May 8, 2016

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has showcased new artwork produced by students at Illinois State University. The juried exhibition, which features work in a variety of mediums and styles, offers many students the first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals outside the University.

The School of Art is pleased to present the 2016 Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award to MFA student Dylan Welch and BFA student Andrew Bybee. Both artists will be recognized for their achievements during the presentation of awards. To further honor their accomplishments, University Galleries will devote additional exhibition space to the presentation of new works by both artists.

The Student Annual awards include ten Irving S. Tick awards, the Nam Clark Drawing Award, the Glen Lapekas Scholarship, and the Richard D. Finch Undergraduate Drawing and Printmaking Award. Additional awards are presented by Randy Reid, Arts Technology, Normal Editions Workshop, and the following areas within the School of Art: Ceramics, Glass, and Graphic Design. The School of Art sponsors the "Best in Show" award.

The awards ceremony at 6:00 p.m. will include the presentation of many scholarships for School of Art students.

This year's studio juror is Karen Reimer, Lecturer in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Reimer's artwork explores the cross section between craft and conceptual art by recreating everyday ephemera, such as book pages or sugar packets, through embroidery and other needle-and-thread methods. She has had solo exhibitions at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; the Rochester Art Center, MN; the Riverside Arts Center, IL; Schopf Gallery, Chicago; and the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. Her work has been included in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Contemporary Craft Museum, Portland, Oregon; and Wallspace Gallery, New York, among others. She is also the recipient of an Artadia Individual Artist grant and a Richard A. Driehaus Individual Artist award. Reimer completed a BA at Bethel College, North Newton, KS, and an MFA at the University of Chicago and is currently represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

This year's design juror is Chad McKenzie, Creative Director and Partner of McKenzie Wagner Inc. McKenzie got his degree from Illinois State University and formed The Golden Mean in the early 1990s in Champaign-Urbana. Today McKenzie Wagner's clients are scattered across the nation, in Indianapolis, Chicago and Colorado, as well as the central Illinois area. One of McKenzie Wagner's most recent projects was a total redesign of the city of Urbana's website.

The reception for the 2016 Student Annual is sponsored by Casey's Garden Shop and Florist, Jimmy John's, the College of Fine Arts, and Friends of the Arts.

Resources

• List of Works
• Karen Reimer
• Chad McKenzie

Open May 21 through September 11, 2016

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Claire Ashley’s two-gallery installation immerses visitors in a multisensory landscape packed with DayGlo-colored pneumatic sculptures. It consists of wildly painted plastic-coated tarps whose billowing forms range from boulder-size up to floor-to-ceiling scale. Ashley subverts their heroic size, however, with a sense of the absurd: sewn patches, bruise-like colors, and creases, render the sculptures’ taut, membrane-like surfaces as bloated, cartoony organisms referencing motherhood and eroticism. These encapsulating environments are permeated in the larger space by Joshua Patterson's soundscape, and in the smaller space by ultraviolet lighting.

During the exhibition’s closing reception, five of Ashley’s sculptures will come alive in an outdoor performance at Uptown Normal’s scenic roundabout. Powered by student performers sealed inside, the colorful organ-like forms will transform the roundabout into a surreal dance floor as they frolic in response to a live audio piece played by Patterson.

Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Ashley currently lives in Oak Park, Illinois, and teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Department of Contemporary Practices. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions, site-specific installations, and performances at venues that include Cleve Carney Art Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, Illinois; Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Portland; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; The Tetley, Leeds, England; and Highland Institute for Contemporary Art, Inverness, Scotland. Ashley received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA from Gray’s School of Art at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland. She is represented by Galleri Urbane Marfa + Dallas, Texas.

This project is organized by University Galleries’ Curator Jason Judd.

Resources

• Claire Ashley
• Exhibition Brochure

Press

• Press Release
• Pantagraph: They Might Be Giants by Dan Craft
• Pantagraph: Giants to invade Uptown Circle!

Open June 4 through September 11, 2016

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We think we can draw a line between historic and contemporary events, but we really cannot. We think the image is fixed materially and historically, but it is not. Is it on the periphery of our vision and the margins of our speech that we are closer to knowing?

(Excerpted from artist’s statement, 2016)

Rob Swainston’s recent woodblock prints are dark and overpowering. Printed on oversized sheets of fabric or paper, their saturated, off-register layers of barely decipherable imagery penetrate the viewer’s consciousness like newsprint rubbing off on a reader’s fingers. Their overall effect speaks to our experience of a time in which fact easily passes as fiction, subterfuge is systemic, and the endless stream of simultaneous information we absorb never quite falls into line.

This is all the more interesting given the woodblock’s history as the earliest print form, from its decorative origins in 2nd century China to its pinnacle in mid-15th century Europe and its revival by the German Expressionists. Throughout Swainston’s two-room installation, this time-honored technology appears in uncommon, multilayered formats: framed backlit three-tiered images on semitransparent fabric rising from the floor like monoliths, a 16-foot-high print recalling Chinese scrolls, multicolored variations on a single image struck over digital prints, 55 woodcuts shingled together floor-to-ceiling in the shape of pyramid, and a ceiling-mounted reproduction of a woodcut enhanced by a video projection.

Swainston provokes the viewer to consider the commonalities and problematics of image-making technologies over the centuries—how moiré effects resulting from fabric placed against fabric predate holography, how the low resolution of early photography resembles that of prior hand-printed techniques, and how regardless of what we are looking at, the mind takes its best shot at filling in missing visual information. As beautiful as it is unsettling, Swainston’s work is evocative of some of the finest moments in art history: Han Dynasty printing on silk, early Renaissance military scenes, Hokusai’s waves, Clyfford Still’s dark-hued paintings, and, perhaps most markedly, Warhol’s exploitation of accidental image slippage in series such as the Disaster paintings. Swainston deftly weaves between the bucolic and the topical, offering a view that is lush but at the same time eerily reminiscent of night-vision optics.

Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania, Rob Swainston received a BA in Art and Political Science at Hampshire College, Amherst, and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. He is an alumnus of the Philadelphia art collective Vox Populi, and founder and master printer at Prints of Darkness, a collaborative printshop in Brooklyn. He has had solo exhibitions at Marginal Utility, Philadelphia; Neuwerk Kunsthalle, Konstanz, Germany; David Krut Projects, New York; and BravinLee Programs, New York. Group exhibitions and public projects include: The Bronx Museum of the Arts; NYC Parks; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; The Queens Museum; Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, Virginia; Provincetown Art Association and Museum; and Frederic Snitzer Gallery, Miami. His work has been featured in Art in Print, V-magazine, Printeresting, and Art21 blogs. Swainston is Assistant Professor of Art and Design in Printmaking at SUNY Purchase. He lives and works in Brooklyn and Queens, respectively.

Resources

• Rob Swainston

Press

• WGLT: Reality Slips In Printmaker's Show

Open September 20 through October 16, 2016

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Wonsook Kim: Lines of Enchantment is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Illinois State University since her MFA degree project in 1976 entitled Normal Expe rience. In the intervening decades, Wonsook Kim has developed an international following with more than 60 solo exhibitions throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

Whether articulating a fold in a garment, a frond in a forest, or a fork in a path, Wonsook Kim’s masterful drawing, as fluid and immediate as calligraphy, is at the heart of each of her compositions. Her work is manifest in recurrent archetypes: a shelter, a small craft on the water, a figure crossing a fallen tree trunk or a bridge—often seen in various combinations and states of transformation. These universal symbols of life’s journey and its attendant longing also reflect Kim’s experience as a Korean transplanted to the Midwest to attend art school, then to New York to live as an artist, and since that time shuttling between these three locations.

This exhibition presents the artist’s newest work together with her earliest. A selection of prints and drawings created at Illinois State University from 1973-76 accompanies three series completed over the past eight years: the alluring “Shadow Drawings” (2011-15), cast bronze outlines of figures appearing as though drawn on the wall with a cast shadow; off-white paintings (2012-14) whose images are inscribed into the blue underpainting with the butt end of the brush; and the “Forest Scenes” (2008-14) paintings in which people, animals, and angels commune in magical woods and waters illuminated by globes of light.

Lines of Enchantment coincides with the publication of Wonsook Kim: Innocence, covering work made during her student years from 1972-76. Several works on paper in the exhibition appear among the 112 reproductions in this elegant book, which also includes a foreword by the artist and an afterword by Barry Blinderman, curator of the exhibition.

The artist will sign books at the opening reception and after her lecture.

Wonsook Kim was born in Busan, Korea, in 1953 and arrived in the U.S. in 1972 to begin a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and later a Master of Fine Arts degree, at Illinois State University. She moved to New York City in 1976, and in 1980-81, was included in prominent exhibitions of new figurative art such as Episodes, at Grace Borgenicht Gallery, and Illustration and Allegory, at Brooke Alexander, Inc., where she also had her first solo exhibition in the U.S in 1982. She has since had one-person exhibitions in New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Hamburg, Paris, Seoul, Bologna, Sofia, Sao Paulo, and Tokyo, among other cities. Public collections include the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida; University Galleries of Illinois State University, Normal; National Museum of Women In the Arts, Washington, D.C.; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Vatican Collection, Vatican City. The artist divides her time between Bloomington, Indiana, and Manhattan, with frequent travels to Seoul.

Press

• WGLT: Artist Wonsook Kim Enchants As She Gives Back

Open September 20 through October 16, 2016

Placelessness video

Featuring interactive installations by an individual artist and a collaborative duo, Placelessness transforms two galleries into immersive environments in which the viewer experiences an oscillation between their sense of actual and virtual space. Visitors entering Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter’s bedroom-sized telecom shelter Dark Fiber witness a video projection depicting a cinematic montage of the two artists dressed as laborers, laying an unauthorized fiber optic cable from the Pacific Ocean across the Western landscape, through Chicago, and, strangely enough, into the very telecom structure in which the viewer is sitting.

With its wall-to-wall shag rug, an old swivel chair, a CRT television, and a virtual reality headset with sound, Sarah Rothberg’s installation is immersive to the point of disorientation. Wearing VR goggles, visitors are transported out of the family-room-furnished space into an encapsulating collage-like representation of the artist’s childhood home. Their ability to control their exploration through an unusual environment—created by compositing digital 3-D models with old family photographs and VHS home movies—affords viewers an experience not unlike a lucid dream.

Both installations invite visitors to sway in and out of real and perceived places, whether you believe you are connected to a cable stretching across an ocean or looking around a room that isn’t there.

Marissa Lee Benedict and David Rueter began their collaboration in 2015 with Dark Fiber, first exhibited at Chicago Artists Coalition, and then at Contemporary Art Brussels and EXPO Chicago. The artist team received a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 2015 for their collaborative project Gary Streetlights. Individually, Benedict has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, UK; the DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago; and Threewalls, Chicago. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, and a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Rueter’s work has been exhibited internationally at galleries and festivals, including the International Symposium on Electronic Art, and Northern Spark in Minneapolis. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Politics from Oberlin College, and a Master of Fine Arts in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is Assistant Professor in Art and Technology at the University of Oregon.

Sarah Rothberg lives and works in New York City, where she is the Virtual Reality Experience Director at the Samsung Accelerator and an adjunct faculty member at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in galleries such as Bitforms Gallery, New York; REVERSE Space, New York; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, New York; Babycastles, New York; and Grand Central Station. Rothberg received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master's degree in Professional Studies from New York University.

This project is organized by University Galleries’ Curator Jason Judd. 

Resources

• Marissa Lee Benedict
• Sarah Rothberg
• David Rueter
• Dark Fiber installation | extended exhibition wall text
• Memory/Place: My House installation | extended exhibition wall text

Open September 20 through October 16, 2016

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n celebration of Normal Editions Workshop’s 40th anniversary, University Galleries will present Beyond the Norm: An International Juried Print Exhibition organized by N.E.W. The exhibition features 54 artists from the United States and Canada who were selected from an international pool of applicants by juror Susan Tallman, a critic, author, and art historian who teaches at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition highlights contemporary printmaking practices, which include a range of mediums from lithography and intaglio to video and site-specific installation.

A Juror's Choice Award winner will collaborate with N.E.W. to produce an edition of prints, and a Curators' Choice Award winner will have a one-person exhibition in University Galleries' project space during the 2017-2018 academic year. Richard Finch (Professor Emeritus of Art and former Director of N.E.W.) and James Butler (Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art, Illinois State University) will select four Honorable Mention award winners, who will each receive a copy of Marks from the Matrix, a book published on the occasion of N.E.W.’s 30th anniversary. Juror Susan Tallman will also select six artists to receive $100 gift certificates from the following three sponsors: Hiromi Paper, Inc.; Renaissance Graphic Arts, Inc.; and Takach Press Corporation.

Beyond the Norm will run concurrently with four other local exhibitions—at the McLean County Arts Center, Jan Brandt Gallery, and Transpace Gallery—organized to celebrate N.E.W.'s anniversary. These exhibitions will feature prints from Illinois State University staff, students, and alumni, as well as prints produced at N.E.W.

Since 1976, Normal Editions Workshop has brought more than 125 artists to Illinois State University to collaborate in the production of print editions, including such notables as Kiki Smith, David Wojnarowicz, Phyllis Bramson, Richard Rezac, Judy Glantzman, John Himmelfarb, and Dennis Oppenheim. 

Press

• Press Release

Open October 26 through December 18, 2016

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Artists: Jen Bervin, Stephanie Brooks, Anne Collier, Bethany Collins, Moyra Davey, Marcelline Delbecq, Abigail DeVille, Eve Fowler, Dianna Frid, Coco Fusco, Sabina Ott, Melissa Pokorny, Dawn Roe, Kay Rosen, Carrie Schneider, Xaviera Simmons, Lisa Tan, Cecilia Vicuña, Catherine Wagner, Carrie Mae Weems, Deborah Willis

Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy features work by contemporary female artists that acknowledge or reference women writers. The exhibition's title is derived from a sentence Sylvia Plath underlined in her copy of Virginia Woolf's The Waves, and that Stephanie Brooks later appropriated for a text-based artwork. These multiple layers of mediation are integral to all of the included works. The exhibition features 34 works by 21 artists inspired by writers Octavia Butler, A. S. Byatt, María Elena Cruz Varela, Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurston, Clarice Lispector, Gabriela Mistral, Toni Morrison, Alejandra Pizarnik, Mary Shelley, Rebecca Solnit, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Virginia Woolf.

As a tribute to Woolf's foundational essay "A Room of One's Own," all the artists selected for Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy are female in order to focus the interpretation of literature through the lenses of subsequent generations of artists. The works in the exhibition demonstrate the political and creative progress of feminism, examine writers' intellectual pursuits, navigate their status as literary icons, and interpret their legacies. They also engender an intimate and sustained contemplation of texts—a cerebral, analytical pursuit whose future is threatened by a culture that favors sound bites, hashtags, and 140-character tweets.

A catalogue is forthcoming in 2017 featuring texts by exhibition curator Kendra Paitz, art historian Melissa Johnson, poet/artist Cecilia Vicuña, and artists Xaviera Simmons, Kay Rosen, Deborah Willis, and Marcelline Delbecq.

This exhibition is organized by University Galleries' Senior Curator Kendra Paitz. The exhibition has been made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and is co-sponsored by the Harold K. Sage Foundation and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund. The catalogue is funded in part by a grant from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Programs at University Galleries are funded in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Resources

• Strange Oscillations and Vibrations of Sympathy Video
• Purchase Publication
• View sample pages

Press

• WGLT: Exploring The Connection Between Writer And Artist

Open January 15 through February 15, 2015

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The MFA Biennial presents the work of the seventeen students currently enrolled in the School of Art's Master's of Fine Arts program. These artists are at various points in the three-year program that is dedicated to helping them "develop a mature body of work by exploring the relationship between active studio practice and rigorous intellectual inquiry." The mediums represented include photography, painting, glass, printmaking, ceramics, and sculptural installation.

Although each exhibitng artist offers a distinct point of view, shared concerns are evident. Works based in biomorphic form and nature run the gamut from the representational, in Mike Tracy's exquisite glass bonsai trees, to the surreal, in Jeremy Lampe's mischievously stalking glass creatures and Stoney Sasser's floor-to-ceiling, patterned fabric-wrapped tendrils, to the nearly abstract, in Venise Keys's gestural swirls of rich pigment recalling Action Painting, Micah Zavacky's meditative prints inspired by direct observations of nature, Emma Farber's fiery color-field paintings referencing landscape, and Dylan Welch's prints’ “simultaneous evocation of physical internality and cosmic vastness.”

The grid, with a particular reference to woven fabric, is evident in Gina Hunt’s pulsating stripes, sometimes sliced, twisted and stapled, other times spray painted directly onto the canvas, as well as in Samantha Buchanan's frayed-edged, bulging paper weavings, and prints on paper with loom-like interstices.

Prints by Chris Hagen, ceramics by George Barecca, and color photos by Catherine Davis address the idea of service. Hagen's impressions result from food and wine spilled inadvertently on embossed paper during dinners he hosts, while Barecca's brightly colored and irregularly shaped cups, tureens, and plates dare the viewer to put them to use. Davis's vivid, iconic portraits of “pink-collar” workers allude to inequity in the service industry.

The human figure has a strong presence in Krista Profitt’s brash, erotically charged paintings teeming with sunning, jumping, and bicycling nudes, Meg Coonelly's traumatized veterans fittingly rendered in painterly machismo, and m. jo hart's legions of exquisite, doll-scaled ceramic feet lined up on the floor and ascending onto the wall. In Laura Newman's monumental yet fractured ceramic throne, the absence of a power-wielding monarch is palpable. Finally, the eerie lighting and oblique point of view in Lexie Bragg's photographs of isolated figures in domestic and institutional settings contribute a Lynchian touch to the exhibition.

Press

• STATEside video
• Press Release

Open February 24 through April 4, 2015

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Winded Rainbow premieres eight new works by Juan Angel Chávez and offers a historical view of the artist’s practice through the inclusion of maquettes for his large-scale sculptures and installations from 2007-2014. Eight smaller-scale three-dimensional works from 2011-2012 are also included. The exhibition coincides with Chávez’s recent desire to transition away from primarily constructing large wooden structures and toward making sculptures from accumulated materials like clothing, signage, and even hair extensions.

Many of Chávez's works over the past ten years relate to aspects of his experience in both Chicago’s urban environment and in his native country of Mexico: the inventiveness, scavenging skills, and spontaneous construction of shelters pertinent to survival there have influenced not only his choice of salvaged lumber, traffic cones, PVC pipes, and billboards as materials, but also their transformation into immersive installations in which viewers become participants. One such work was Neptuno (2011), whose title was taken from a Mexican pop song that advises those seeking passage to the U.S. to blend in by “try[ing] not to look like you’re from Neptune.” This colossal, curved, wooden corridor-like structure—which from different angles resembles a UFO or submarine—evokes the complicated dynamics of border crossing, particularly through smugglers’ tunnels into the U.S. Chávez says that he makes art that “deals with issues of adaptation and survival,” which he considers to be “universal experiences.” Examples of other installations include his Scraping the Bowl (2012), a raised floor created from the residual material of a dilapidated barn that he and collaborators riddled with bullets and then burned down, and Speaker Project (2007), a 25-foot-long architectural “stereo speaker” that provided free practice and performance space within public arts centers in Boston and Chicago. Photographic documentation and maquettes for these and ten other works are included in the exhibition.

Inspired in part by an ancestor (six generations removed) who was a prospector throughout the Western United States and Mexico, Chávez has created several new and recent works relating to the idea of an explorer in a new land. His forefather's imagined resourcefulness and ingenuity regarding materials and survival are evident in the artist's choices. Chávez's new works, among other things, include references to: shelter (a 12-foot diameter hut made primarily from salvaged clothing); gathering food (sculptures forged from tangles of bowed fishing rods and mammalian forms covered in synthetic hair extensions); fire (charred wood in multiple works); and communication (text-based works featuring dialogue from movies about the American West and the artist's mash-ups of American slang from 1850-1920 with contemporary Mexican phrases). Chávez's manipulation and contextualization of his chosen materials brings their histories to light through multiple layers of poetics and recognition.

Chávez describes himself as a "Mexican-born artist, adapted Chicago native, distinctive visionary, and spirited explorer." In 2014, he was selected as the Chicago Ideas Week Artist-in-Residence and also received a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. He has received grants and awards from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Richard Driehaus Foundation, Artadia, 3Arts, Illinois Arts Council, and the Neighborhood Arts Program through Chicago's Department of Cultural Affairs. Chávez's work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago; Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis; Matthew Marks Gallery, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Diverse Works, Houston; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Mass Art, Boston; FIGGE Art Museum, Davenport, Iowa; and New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art, New Harmony, Indiana. Chávez lives and works in Chicago, where he teaches at the School of the Art Institute.

A 24-page booklet featuring an essay by Senior Curator Kendra Paitz will be published in March.

This exhibition and its related programming is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency; the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation—Mirza Arts and Culture Fund; and MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative.

Additional Programming

University Galleries is collaborating with the Ecology Action Center, the Children's Discovery Museum, and Illinois State University's Art Education department on educational programming.

Junior high and high school students from several schools will visit University Galleries through field trips subsidized by a grant from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation. Following their curator-led tours of the exhibition, graduate students in Art Education will visit their classrooms to lead artmaking activities and discussions. An exhibition of the resulting artworks will be on display at University Galleries in May.

Educators can earn recertification points by participating in a free workshop co-presented by the Art Education department on Saturday, March 7, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. The workshop will feature an exhibition tour, discussion, activities, and lesson plans. Please register by contacting Kendra Paitz at gallery@IllinoisState.edu.

Families with young children are invited to participate in a free activity co-sponsored by the Ecology Action Center on Saturday, March 7, at 1:00 p.m. Kris Hall, Assistant Director of the EAC, will read The Garbage Monster aloud and discuss recyclable materials. A scavenger hunt through the exhibition will follow. No registration is required.

Participants in two Children's Discovery Museum programs (Youth Maker Night on March 19 at 5 p.m.) and (Homeschool Workshop on March 13 at 1:00 p.m.) will tour the exhibition before returning to the Museum to build their own work in the Maker's Space. Registration is required. Please contact the Children's Discovery Museum at 309.433.3444.

As always, free curator-led tours are available for classes and community groups.

Additionally, University Galleries is partnering with Home Sweet Home Ministries (which is lending materials for one of Chávez's sculptures) to collect textiles, clothing and shoes for its HSHRenew recycling program February 24 through April 4. The donations will be used by HSHM to support their programs to provide food, shelter, and hope to the hungry, homeless, and hurting in our community.

Resources

• Juan Chavez
• Home Sweet Home Ministries

Press

• Press Release
• Pantagraph
• Central Illinois Proud

Open February 24 through April 4, 2015

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A Moment on the Lips features ten photographs each from Laura Letinsky's two recent series, Albeit and Ill Form and Void Full. The artist has been making both bodies of work concurrently, starting on Ill Form and Void Full in 2010 and Albeit in 2012. Although both series include elements of the domestic still lifes for which she received wide recognition—leftover fruit rinds, spilled red wine, recently used plates, and not-quite-fresh flowers, all employed to reference satiation, need, and desire—these works represent a departure not only in Letinsky's method of making but also in her thinking about photography. Installed in two adjoining galleries, viewers can see how Ill Form and Void Full and Albeit have informed each other, while each series maintains its integrity.

For her Ill Form and Void Full series, Letinsky photographs "still lifes" that she constructs in her studio from actual objects and fragments of images from home décor and art magazines, advertisements, digital images, and her earlier work. At a quick glance, objects such as yogurt-covered spoons, sliced ham, squeezed grapefruit, fresh raspberries, ceramic platters, and melting lollipops seem to rest on sun-bathed tabletops, but upon a closer look, it becomes evident that these "objects" are reproductions. Her images teeter and tilt on shifting planes made from overlapping layers of white that serve as walls and tables. Letinsky deftly exploits the possibilities of positive and negative space, carefully slicing the shapes of goblets, vases, flowers and plates either into or out of images of other dishes, tablecloths, or florals. She invites the viewer to witness the labor of their making by allowing the pieces of tape holding the compositions together to show and the edges of cut pieces to curl thereby revealing bits of text on the verso.

Letinsky's resulting images shift a viewer's perception of a photographed space, calling, in the artist's words, ;our want of illusions into question. They make the photographic moment evident as it is engendered by the camera's monocular lens. While discussing the inspiration for this turn in her work, Letinsky shares her view that photography, in its infinite reproducibility, feeds into the "endless cycle of obsolescence, repetition, compulsion that is endemic in our society" and these photographs offer a "propositional, in-between place" that undermines the authority of the camera.

As with Ill Form and Void Full, for her intimately scaled Albeit works, Letinsky composes an arrangement of images she has cut and torn from existing sources; however, she builds the composition on a flatbed scanner, turning over control of the light and depth of field to the tabletop machine. Letinsky discusses the scanner's movements across the surface as an all-seeing eye and a true democratic process compared with the singular lens of the camera.

Letinsky's work has been included in solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Denver Art Museum; Mumbai's Focus Photography Festival; Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, Ottawa, Ontario; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto; Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York; and the Photographer's Gallery, London, among others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; Miami Art Museum, among others. Letinsky's work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Getty Center, Los Angeles; Microsoft, Seattle; Hermés, Paris; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. The artist has received grants or fellowships from the Richard Driehaus Foundation, Illinois Arts Council, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and Anonymous Was A Woman Foundation. Her publications include Ill Form and Void Full (Radius Books, 2014); After All (Damiani, 2010); Hardly More Than Ever (The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2004); Blink (Phaidon, 2002); and Venus Inferred (University of Chicago Press, 2000). Letinsky, a Professor at the University of Chicago, is represented by Valerie Carberry Gallery, Chicago, and Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.

This exhibition was curated by Senior Curator Kendra Paitz, and is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Resources

• Laura Letinsky

Press

• Press Release

Open April 14 through May 10, 2015

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has showcased new artwork produced by students at Illinois State University. The juried exhibition, which features work in a variety of mediums and styles, offers many students the first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals outside the University.

The School of Art is pleased to present the 2015 Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award to MFA student Krista Profitt and BFA student Cole Harkless. Both artists will be recognized for their achievements during the presentation of awards. To further honor their accomplishments, University Galleries will devote additional exhibition space to the presentation of new works by both artists.

The Student Annual awards include ten Irving S. Tick awards, the Nam Clark Drawing Award, the Josefina Ferrán Scholarship, and the Glen Lapekas Scholarship. Additional awards are presented by Randy Reid, Pete Guither, Arts Technology, Normal Editions Workshop, and the following areas within the School of Art: Ceramics, Glass, and Graphic Design. The School of Art sponsors the Best in Show award.

The awards ceremony at 6 p.m. will include the presentation of many scholarships for School of Art students.

This year's studio jurors are Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger, who, according to writer Erin Rook, "explore the dynamics of love and loss through performance pieces that emphasize the artistic process as a metaphor for the cycles of life and death, of connection and separation." Both artists graduated from Illinois State University's School of Art in 1991 and currently reside in Chicago. They have exhibited and performed jointly at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, Maine; Western Exhibitions, Chicago; and Diverse Works, Houston. They are recipients of a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, an Artadia Individual Artist Award, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. In addition to their shared practice, each artist has an active solo career. The artists are represented jointly and individually by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

The 2015 Student Annual is sponsored by Casey's Garden Shop and Florist, Jimmy John's, the College of Fine Arts, and Friends of the Arts.

Resources

• Award Recipients
• Student Entry Form

Open May 16 through May 19, 2015

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All Around Art features artwork made by students from eleven regional schools, as well as students who are home schooled. The students participated in a field trip program that was offered in conjunction with University Galleries’ exhibition Juan Angel Chávez: Winded Rainbow . The three-part program consisted of a curator-led tour; a found object artmaking workshop taught by graduate students in Illinois State University's Art Education department; and this public exhibition of the resulting artworks.

A generous grant from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation—Mirza Arts and Culture Fund enabled University Galleries to offer field trip stipends, significantly increasing arts accessibility for public schools.

Participating schools:

• Bloomington Junior High, Bloomington
• Blue Ridge High School, Farmer City
• Fieldcrest High School, Minonk
• LeRoy High School, LeRoy
• Lexington High School, Lexington
• Tri-Point Schools, Kempton
• Washington High School, Washington
• Normal Community High School, Normal
• Chatsworth Elementary School, Chatsworth
• Regional Alternative High School, Bloomington
• Secular Homeschoolers of Central Illinois

Press

• Press Release

Open May 26 through September 6, 2015

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Torrent is a light-producing sculpture from a series that investigates visual representations of fire, water, structure, and atmosphere to offer poetic glimpses of nature's entropic and restorative processes.

Torrent produces images of fast-moving spherical bodies. Within the machine's projection, colliding shapes implode, expand and travel in concert from ceiling to floor and back again, suggesting both the movements of large celestial bodies and the collisions of microscopic particles. The production of heat and energy are the unequivocal result of these collisions, therefore suggesting the innate intelligence of all matter.

—Gary Justis, 2015

Resources

• Artist website

Open May 26 through September 6, 2015

This exhibition features recent acquisitions in photography, sculpture, and glass, as well as highlights from University Galleries' Permanent Collection.

Featured Artists

Nicolas Africano, Marilyn Baker, Dmitry Baltermants, Matthew Boechner, Glenn Bradshaw, Kathe Burkhart, Bill Conger, Charles Corelle, Caitlin Cox, Jeanne Dunning, William S. Doan, George Grosz, J. Hanewski, Miyoko Ito, Jasper Johns, Bob Jones, Venise Keys, Jeanette Klute, Oskar Kokoschka, Tim Kowalczyk, Leonid Kozintsev, Dan Mrva, Nina Kuo, Gerd Kuth, G. Knye, Mike Lash, Jason Lazarus, Danny Lyon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Niki McNeil, Claes Oldenburg, Pablo Picasso, Jeremy Popelka, Claire Prussian, Robert Rauschenberg, Timo Sarpaneva, August Sander, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Theodore Sellner, Kiki Smith, Rachel Smith, Pauline Solven, Karl Struss, Rufino Tamayo, George Thieves, Britten Traughber, Jack Tworkov, Joseph Yoakum, Andy Warhol, Kurt Wallstab

Open June 15 through September 9, 2015

Normal Reality presents twelve artists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe, whose embrace of popular digital technologies raises questions about normalcy in the age of accessibility. Video art as a medium began in the mid-1960s with the advent of portable cameras and recorders, which, though cumbersome and expensive, offered a limited number of artists a new tool for exploring issues of time, space, language, and the body—with an immediacy not possible with film. As video technology advanced to camcorders in the 1980s, "effects processing" facilities still had to be rented by the hour for anyone trying to use digital effects and edits with any level of sophistication. Now, many of us carry high-definition smartphone cameras in our pockets, with fairly easy access to the limitless possibilities of cutting-edge editing software.

The artists featured in Normal Reality are guided by the exploratory concerns laid out by early video practitioners, but the environments they navigate are accessed largely through a multilayered and ultra-fragmented media experience of gaming, 24/7 Internet access, social media posting at a stoplight, and GPS. This experience is a given: digital reality is reality, Facebook is our forum, and posting pictures of where we are and what we are eating is increasingly how we define ourselves.

Sparkling I by Petra Cortright (Los Angeles) is one of twelve videos in the exhibition exemplifying this "normal reality." Performing in front of a built-in webcam with preset digital effects, Cortright nonchalantly waves a tree branch like a magic wand that dissolves into sparkling star effects, accompanied by the most clichéd synthesized fairytale-like soundtrack. Her digitized body's real-time oscillation between actual motions and their dematerialization into a virtual realm hits home the increasing displacement of actual nature by our experience as measured on screen time.

In Jaakko Pallasvuo's (Helsinki) video, Utopia, the artist/narrator dispassionately relates, in the manner of a director's commentary on a DVD, his failure to capture in video-as opposed to language-the essence of an idyllic Swedish landscape we view on the screen. Cutting to his small Finnish apartment where he edits on a laptop whose screen we view face-on, his interspersing of Japanese emoticons and clip art implies that the video he shot is no more capable of capturing the Sublime than emoticons are of expressing actual emotion. As the sequence quickly cuts back to him walking into an expanse of mountain peaks and lush greenery, his voiceover states "...Maybe it felt as unreal as it looks."

In Realm of Nothingness, Kathy Rose (New York) integrates dance, theater, and cinematic features into a dream-like narrative which draws parallels between tradition and hi-tech. Her audio and editing mimicking the rhythm and choreography of Japanese Noh theater, she holds true to the traditional storytelling about masks as a means of transformation between supernatural and human forms. In Rose's case, the masks are not made from Japanese Cypress but from digital collage, and the theater is not a hardwood stage but a black video screen on which the characters can pop in and out between reality and illusion.

The nine other videos in the exhibition are: Everything Becomes X-Ray by Mariam Graff (Fairview, Illinois), The Realm of Nothingness by Rosa Menkman (Arnhem, Netherlands), MindPlace ThoughtStream by Shana Moulton (New York, NY), central~lattice by Brenna Murphy (Edmunds, Washington), The Land Behind by Sabrina Ratté (Montreal), Implicit Bias—ghost in the shell by Wolfie E. Rawk (Chicago), Island Light by Andrew Rosinski (Chicago), QTzrk_loop by Jon J. Satrom (Chicago), and floVV by Małgosia Woźnica (Warsaw).

This project is organized by University Galleries’ Curator Jason Judd, and is supported in part by the Illinois Arts Council.

Additional Programming

Milner Library

University Galleries is partnering with Milner Library to display 12 videos from Normal Reality on a large flat screen television in the stairwell on the third floor landing during all hours of operation August 3 through October 12.

ACRE TV

University Galleries is collaborating with ACRE TV to broadcast videos from the artists in groups of three, producing four weekly segments between August 5 and August 31.

Press

• Press Release

Open September 11 through September 13, 2015

University Galleries is participating in Normal 1-5-0, the celebration of the Town of Normal's 150th anniversary. We are partnering with Milner Library and a private collector to display circus-related items from September 11 through September 13, 2015. The mini-exhibition will include a hand-painted circus banner created by Urbana-based artist/curator Glen C. Davies for University Galleries' 2011 Magnificent Menagerie exhibition and twelve reproductions of original circus posters from Milner Library, Special Collections - Circus and Allied Arts. On Saturday only, the display will also include original costumes from Cecil B. DeMille's 1952 film, The Greatest Show on Earth.

University Galleries' hours for this event are 9:30 - 5:00 p.m. on Friday, and 12:00 - 4:00 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday.

Open September 20 through October 19, 2015

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University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to announce the opening of Alumni Spectacular 2015. A public reception will be held on Saturday, September 19, 2015, from 5:00 to 7:00 pm. The exhibition will be on view through October 19. Illinois State University’s Alumni Relations will host a public reception at University Galleries in conjunction with the beginning of Homecoming Week and the Uptown Normal tree-lighting ceremony on Monday, October 19, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm.

University Galleries will exhibit artwork by a large group of talented alumni to welcome them to our new space in Uptown Normal and celebrate their accomplishments. All alumni of the School of Art were invited to participate in this open-call exhibition. Neither a degree in studio art nor a diploma was a requirement. All works submitted will be displayed; the only stipulation imposed was that each piece must measure no more than 20 inches in any dimension. The exhibition will include drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, photographs, metals, glass, paintings, collages, and videos.

University Galleries organized the first Alumni Spectacular in 2010 to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the College of Fine Arts at Illinois State University, and it was the most encompassing alumni show ever installed at University Galleries, with 259 artists from 30 states and Canada.

The Alumni Spectacular 2015 coincides with the first anniversary of University Galleries’ move to Uptown Normal, the Town of Normal’s 150th anniversary, and the kickoff for Illinois State University’s Homecoming festivities.

Resources

• Participating Artists List

Press

• Illinois State News

Open October 29 through December 20, 2015

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Nine Trips Around the Sun is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Carrie Schneider's photographs and films to date. Spanning the years 2006 through 2015, the 59 works offer a survey of the artist's self-described documents of something performed for the camera and demonstrate the range of lens-based processes she has employed. The exhibition includes works from her Derelict Self, Figure-Ground, Burning House, and Reading Women series, and will premiere a 16mm film and photographs from her recent Moon Drawings series and silver gelatin prints from her new Summer Drawings project. Schneider's Dance Response videos, made in collaboration with choreographer/dancer Kyle Abraham, will also be on view.

The earliest works in the exhibition are Schneider's Derelict Self photographs (2006-2007), for which the artist and her brother enacted mundane moments together bathing, napping, or wrestling—that, in childhood, evince the intimacy of sibling relationships, but, in adulthood, point to complex emotional dynamics, including the navigation of simultaneous desires for closeness and separation. Schneider created her psychologically charged Figure-Ground works (2008), which merge the artist's body and the stark natural landscape, while completing a Fulbright Fellowship in Finland, the country where her grandmother was born.

For her Burning House series (2010-2013), Schneider traveled repeatedly to northern Wisconsin, each time building a small wooden house, rowing or dragging it to a tiny island, setting it on fire, and photographing and filming it. The endurance of her action is mirrored in the fortitude of the house, which, although perpetually engulfed in flames, never seems to burn down, even as the times of day and seasons shift. For Reading Women (2011-2014), Schneider likewise set up scenarios to concurrently photograph and film, in this case repairing to the domestic interiors of her creative cohort to record 100 individual female artists, curators, writers, and musicians as they each read a book of their choosing by a female author. Schneider relates that during the course of their reading, the sitter loses awareness of the camera and any semblance of a pose, forgetting her cultural performance.

Schneider traveled to North Carolina's rural mountains and spent one month, the duration of an entire moon cycle, photographing and filming the moon for her Moon Drawings (2014-2015). She used a medium-format 6x7 camera and exposed the same twenty rolls of film on a nightly basis—sometimes rewinding and shooting again multiple times in one night—resulting in 300 unique silver gelatin prints and a 16mm film. Schneider's Summer Drawings (2015) are also unique silver gelatin prints, but their mysterious abstractions of figures, plants, and architecture were made by directly exposing photographic paper in the camera.

University Galleries will publish Schneider's first monograph in 2016. The 84-page book will feature essays by Julie Rodrigues Widholm (Director of the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago) and Joanna Szupinska-Myers (Curator of Exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography, University of California Riverside ARTSblock) and a conversation between Schneider and exhibition curator Kendra Paitz (Senior Curator at University Galleries).

The exhibition and publication have been made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.

Additional Programming

High school classes are invited to participate in a free field trip program, which will include a curator-led exhibition tour and a photography-based workshop led by Kayla Heuneberg, a graduate student in Illinois State University's Art Education Program. Exhibition tours are available November 2 through December 18, and workshops are available on Friday, November 13, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m., and Friday, December 4, at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. Please register by calling 309.438.8191 or sending an email to gallery@IllinoisState.edu.

Educators can earn recertification points by participating in a free workshop on Tuesday, November 3, from 5:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. The workshop will include a curator-led exhibition tour and discussion, activities, and lesson plans led by Judith Briggs (Associate Professor in Art Education) and graduate students in the Art Education Program. Please register by calling 309.438.8191 or sending an email to gallery@IllinoisState.edu.

Schneider's Reading Women film will also be on view at Illinois State University's Milner Library (on the third floor) from November 3 through December 20.

Senior Curator Kendra Paitz will lead a free public tour on Tuesday, November 10, at 6:30 p.m.

Please contact University Galleries at 309.438.5487 or gallery@IllinoisState.edu to schedule a free curator-led tour for your class or community group.

Schneider's work has been exhibited in solo presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; California Museum of Photography, University of California Riverside ARTSblock; and Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway; and in group exhibitions at the School of the International Center of Photography, New York; Galer a Alberto Sendr's, Buenos Aires; and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen. She has received awards from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council Agency, and was a Fulbright Fellow at Kuvataideakatemia (Academy of Fine Arts), Helsinki, and a Sumner Rulon-Miller Fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Schneider received her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and she is currently participating in the Whitney Indepedent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She lives in Brooklyn and is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Resources

• Carrie Schneider
• Purchase Publication
• View sample pages

Press

• WGLT News on Reading Women
• Press Release

Open January 16 through February 16, 2014

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Between 2010 and 2011, Carrie Schneider took twelve trips to northern Wisconsin, each time building a small wooden house, rowing it to a tiny island, setting it on fire, and photographing and filming it. The endurance of her performative action is mirrored in the fortitude of the house, which, although perpetually engulfed in flames, never seems to burn down, even as the times of day and seasons shift. Ultimately, Schneider produced a series of 15 photographs and one 12-minute video. Argentinian composer Cecilia López’s soundtrack for the video was created by recording the resonances and feedback coming from giant sheets of scrap metal called 'chapas.'

For the first time, a selection of Schneider's Burning House photographs will be exhibited with a large-scale projection of her 2012  Burning House video. A takeaway poster featuring an essay by exhibition curator Kendra Paitz will be available in a limited quantity. A digital version is available under Exhibition Information. 

Schneider's work has been included in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki; Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh; Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norway; and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Chicago Cultural Center; School of the International Center of Photography, New York; Kunsthal Charlottenberg, Copenhagen, Denmark; Artspace, New Haven, Connecticut; The Kitchen, New York; and Galería Alberto Sendrós, Buenos Aires. The artist has received grants or fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, The Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Illinois Arts Council. Schneider has been a Fulbright Fellow at Kuvataideakatemia (Academy of Fine Arts), Helsinki, Finland, and a Sumner Rulon-Miller Fellow at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Madison, Maine. She received her B.H.A. at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh in 2001 and her M.F.A. at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2007. Schneider is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Resources

• Carrie Schneider
• Downloadable Show Poster

Press

• WGLT Interview

Open January 16 through February 16, 2014

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Featuring painting, sculpture, ceramics, glass, wood, drawing, photography, printmaking, video, graphic design, and sound, the Faculty Biennial celebrates current faculty members at Illinois State University and offers a snapshot of their practices. The Studio Art, Graphic Design, and Art Education areas in the School of Art, as well as the Program in Arts Technology, are represented. Among the artists exhibited are those who have shown their work nationally and internationally. 

The exhibition features works by Daniella Barroqueiro, Colleen Brennan, Judith Briggs, Peter Bushell, Ian Carey, Melissa Cook, Tony Crowley, Nancy Fewkes, Richard Finch, Andreas Fischer, Brian Patrick Franklin, Julie Johnson, Gary Justis, Megan Kathol Bersett, Cynthia Kukla, Jin Lee, Claire Lieberman, Tyler Lotz, James Mai, Rose Marshack, John Miller, Bill O'Donnell, Melissa Oresky, Aaron Paolucci, Morgan Price, Laura Primozic, Scott Rankin, Jason Reblando, Randall Reid, Veda Rives, Archana Shekara, Sarah Smelser, Albion Stafford, Ed Stewart, Paul Trapp, Rick Valentin, Neil Ward, Michael Wille, and Arjan Zazueta. 

Please join us for a Faculty Forum series, during which art historians, art educators, and studio practitioners will discuss their work and answer questions.  Participants include Colleen Brennan, Lea Cline, Andreas Fischer, Melissa Johnson, Jin Lee, Melissa Oresky, Morgan Price, Vanessa Schulman, Sarah Smelser, and Michael Wille.

Resources

• School of Art Website

Open January 16 through February 16, 2014

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Known for her own performances in front of the camera, often walking through areas of Los Angeles sharing musings, ramblings, and jokes, Stanya Kahn has begun making videos in which she does not appear. In her most recent works, the artist's critical deployment of dark humor, absurd storytelling, and linguistic play are often mediated through other subjects—whether small monsters created from crumpled notebook paper, a windup robot, or her own mother. Blood, Paper, and Mud (leave your slippers at the door) features Happy Song for You, Kahn's collaborative video with influential painter/musician Llyn Foulkes, for which he wrote and performed an original song. Foulkes appears blindfolded and bloody, calling to mind the "bloody head" series he has been making since the late 1970’s, particularly, Lucky Adam, a mixed media work from 1985. While Happy Song… is driven primarily by music, another video, Arms Are Overrated, is propelled by dialogue…between two self-destructive creatures (made from notebook paper) who suffer various traumas and speculate on desires, fears, and failures. The exhibition also features six ink drawings on paper and Six Animations, a video that evidences Kahn's time-based drawing.

Blood, Paper, and Mud (leave your slippers at the door), Kahn's first solo exhibition in the Midwest, is curated by Kendra Paitz, Curator of Exhibitions. The artist's free public lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Art's Visiting Artist Program.

Kahn's work has been included in solo exhibitions at Pigna Project Space, Rome; New Museum, New York; Cornerhouse, Manchester, U.K.; and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Culver City, California. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hammer Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; Kunsthalle Bonn, Bonn, Germany; Future Gallery, Berlin; and the Hayward Gallery, London. Kahn's monograph, It's Cool, I'm Good, was published by Cornerhouse in 2012. Her work has been featured in exhibition catalogues published by the Whitney Museum of American Art, Orange County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum, and the Getty Institute, while her writing has been featured in journals such as LTTR, and books including Nothing Moments and  Userlands: New Fiction from the Blogging Underground. Kahn, who was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, received her M.F.A. from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, Red Hook, New York, and her B.A. from San Francisco State University. She is represented by Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Image: Stanya Kahn with Llyn Foulkes, Happy Song for You, HD color video with sound (5:07 minutes), 2011. Courtesy of the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 

Resources

• Stanya Kahn

Open February 25 through March 26, 2014

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Annie Boyden Varnot transforms everyday materials into sculptures and installations that, among other things, explore the balance between health and disease, life and death. Using the egg as a metaphor for the fragility of life in the wake of her breast cancer diagnosis, the artist created W/hole, an installation made of hundreds of hollowed chicken eggs and plaster. The bodily references evoked by the sculptural pieces are reinforced by the accompanying videos’ focus on handling and draining the eggs. Although the work was inspired by her traumatic personal experience, she hopes that for others, W/hole offers "a poetic suggestion of life and death while also referencing the here and now."

Varnot is a Visiting Artist in the School of Art's Visiting Artist residency program. For the last week of her exhibition, Varnot will remove W/hole to install work created during her time at Illinois State University.

Varnot's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Baltimore, and Mandelieu-La Napoule, France. She has received grants from the Pollock Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, Change Inc., and Artists’ Fellowship Inc. Varnot has received residency fellowships from the Jentel Artist Residency Program, Camargo Foundation, Weir Farm Artist-in-Residence Program, La Napoule Art Foundation, and Headlands Center for the Arts. She received her MFA from University of Massachusetts, Amherst and her B.S. from Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn.

Resources

• Annie Varnot

Open February 25 through March 26, 2014

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Organized through a partnership between Illinois State University's Student Counseling Services and University Galleries, this open-invitational exhibition features a variety of artworks dealing with media representations of the body and the cultural norms of body image. Students currently enrolled at Illinois State University, Illinois Wesleyan University, Lincoln College, and Heartland Community College were invited to participate. Be-You{tiful} occurs during National Eating Disorders Awareness Week (February 23 – March 1) to help prevent eating disorders and negative body image.

Student Counseling Services is coordinating additional events: 

• Monday, February 25: Mirrorless Monday in the residence halls on campus 
• Wednesday, February 27, from 10:00 a.m. - 2:00 p.m.: Photobooth at Bone Student Center 
• Wednesday, February 27, from 6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.: Fitness class at the Student Fitness Center Sports Courts 
• Thursday, February 28: Bulletin Board Contest in residence halls on campus 
• Friday, March 1, from 10:00 a.m. - 2:30 p.m. : Giveaways and media literacy displays outside the Watterson Dining Center 
• Wednesday, March 6, at 6:00 pm: America the Beautiful 2: The Thin Commandments film screening in the Prairie Room of the Bone Student Center, featuring a discussion with the documentary’s director Darryl Roberts. Free admission.

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Resources

• Entry Form
• National Eating Disorders Association
• Student Counseling Services
• Eating Disorder Recovery Center

Press

• Illinois State News

Open February 25 through March 26, 2014

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Groundswell, the title of the exhibition, refers to both a geological event with a disruption in the land and to an overwhelming surge of emotion. Regan Golden’s hand-cut photographs and graphite drawings of forests examine the role of “the woods” in areas that will imminently be transformed into subdivisions. The artist has particularly focused on the Pioneer Valley in Western Massachusetts, where Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole and Frederic Church once painted. Golden has said that “bridging the gap between the lived experience of this forest and how it has been represented has required me to invent new techniques for altering and constructing landscapes.” The exhibition, which features the artist's hand-cut photographs, graphite transfer drawings, and digital collages, includes works from 2010-2014.

In September, Golden was a Visiting Artist in the School of Art's Visiting Artist residency program. University Galleries is partnering with the program to host exhibitions or performances by the 2013-2014 residents.

Golden's work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Chicago, New York, Houston, Minneapolis, and Toronto. She has received fellowships or grants from the Core Program, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the National Science Foundation; the Joan Mitchell Foundation; and the Stone Summer Theory Institute at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a co-founder of the Drawn Lots Collaborative. Golden is also a writer whose art criticism has been published in Modern Painters, Temporary Art Review, and Newcity. She received her MFA from Peck School of the Arts at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and her BA from Grinnell College. The artist lives and works in Minneapolis.

Resources

• Reagan Golden
• DRAWN LOTS

Estévez begins with a PowerPoint presentation on the noteworthy characteristics of Speedos, which leads him into a narration of an encounter with an underwater creature at a Caribbean beach resort. He recounts an unexpected face-to face meeting with a being that feeds on fresh algae and boasts an iridescent tail dotted with pearly scales. The audience is gradually submerged and witnesses Estévez's trials as a tourist stranded in the warm waters of the tropics, running the risk of missing a buffet dinner at the Hibiscus Lounge back at the hotel.

The presentation, which references Zora Neale Hurston's experiences as described in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica, includes drawings and photographs documenting this pseudo-anthropological account.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez treads an elusive path that manifests itself performatively or through experiences where the quotidian and art overlap. He has exhibited and performed extensively in the U.S. as well as internationally at venues such as Madrid Abierto/ARCO, The IX Havana Biennial, PERFORMA 05 and 07, IDENSITAT, Prague Quadrennial, The Pontevedra Biennial, The Queens Museum of Art, MoMA, Printed Matter, P.S. 122, Hemispheric Institute of Performance Art and Politics, Princeton University, Rutgers University, The Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary, The MacDowell Colony, Provisions Library, El Museo del Barrio, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, The Center for Book Arts, Longwood Art Gallery/BCA, The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Franklin Furnace, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. He has attended residencies at MoMA/P.S.1, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. He has received grants from Art Matters, Lambent Foundation, National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, Printed Matter, and Puffin Foundation. Estévez holds an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA; and an MA from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York. He is currently curating an exhibition from El Museo del Barrio's permanent collection. Publications include Pleased to Meet You: Life as Material for Art and Vice Versa (editor) and For Art's Sake. Born in Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, Dominican Republic, Estévez was baptized as a Bronxite—a citizen of the Bronx—in 2011.

Estévez is the current resident in the School of Art's Visiting Artist Program. University Galleries is partnering with the program to host lectures, performances, and exhibitions by the 2014 Visiting Artists.

Open February 25 through April 6, 2014

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winding on and through the lands is an invitational exhibition featuring recent videos, photographs, drawings, sculptures, paintings, and installations by eight alumni of the School of Art at Illinois State University: Diana Gabriel (Chicago), Jenny Hansen (Normal, Illinois), Jason Judd (Chicago), Mary Laube (Iowa City, Iowa), Joseph Madrigal (Decorah, Iowa), Jason Sherman (Tucson, Arizona), Lisa Thomas (Bloomington, Illinois), and Neal Vandenbergh (Chicago).

The exhibition title is taken from a poem written by Jason Sherman, whose modestly scaled, luminous paintings—consisting of metallic enamel, oil paint, and spray paint—are bold abstractions evoking details of fiery landscapes. Constructed primarily from string, Diana Gabriel describes her site-specific installations as "structures designed to be rooted somewhere between logic and daydream." Neal Vandenbergh's high-intensity Yellow Monochromes—three 8-foot panels coated with yellow traffic paint and prismatic sheeting—simultaneously reference Hard-Edge Abstraction and urban construction zones. Jenny Hansen's layered collages are frenetically worked assemblages of drawing, detritus, and writing inspired by autobiographical experiences, literary fiction, and popular culture. Jason Judd also references literary sources with works such as Not dumb now, a text-based triptych that is a proper phonetic translation of an excerpt from Franz Kafka's The Rejection. Mary Laube's recent work includes an 11-foot-high geometric wall "painting" created from cut vinyl, and Warp Whistle, her collaborative project with composer and sound artist Paul Schuette. Ceramicist Joseph Madrigal exploits and often subverts the "rich and varied histories" of clay, including its status as craft, instilling in his elegant mixed-media objects a "perpetuity of emergence and connection to materiality." Finally, Lisa Thomas combines ephemeral everyday materials such as shelf-lining paper, lint, and hair, with painting and drawing, creating enigmatic and poetic works.

Open March 18 through April 8, 2014

In his University Galleries’ debut, artist Billy McGuinness has been invited to install two series of photographs that investigate the penal system in Illinois. His exhibition, entitled Illinois Corrections, is held in conjunction with performances of The Exonerated, a play about wrongful prison convictions presented by the School of Theatre and Dance. As part of the collaboration, McGuinness will contribute to a panel discussion on Illinois prisons following the first performance of the play on Friday, March 21.

Illinois Corrections illustrates the architecture of Illinois justice cellblock by cellblock, pixel by pixel. McGuinness’s first series of photographs, from which the exhibition garners its title, lines the walls of the gallery in a Rothkoesque patchwork. Earth tones transected by white and gray lines set-up a Minimalist aesthetic of beauty where painterly fields of color are configured in geometric balance. Repeated forms recur throughout the work, giving a semblance of order through abstraction. From a distance, the images appear to be aerial snapshots of partially developed agricultural lands; however, closer inspection reveals that each image is a high-resolution composite, with every line tracing the boundaries of guilt. People dot the landscape. The recurring “X”s are inmate cellblocks and the repeated lines that delineate the space are razor wire-capped walls. Gleaned from the panoptic eye of Google Maps, each of the 13 works depicts a different Illinois Department of Corrections’ facility.

Inmate Locator: 13,000 at the Cook County Jail is situated on a pedestal in the gallery’s center, blockading free movement within the space. Graphite lines drawn across the pedestal’s surface create a grid, which is interspersed with photographic portraits of Cook County Jail inmates. Selected from the sheriff’s website, each portrait depicts an inmate with whom McGuiness has communicated to receive permission to share their images with the public; the remaining blank squares represent the permissions yet to be received. Although considerable personal information is presented through the website, many of the inmates wait on the threshold of justice, having been charged with a crime, not convicted. McGuinness has selected this phenomenon as an entrance point to discuss an organization that he views as hungry for more members.

McGuinness describes his work as “grounded in the human experience...where ephemerality collides with the hunger for something permanent.” Traces of coffee from the cups in a soup kitchen, bits of rusty metal, metadata downloads, and his own body contribute to the diversity of his practice. Complemented by his selection of media, McGuinness presents a conceptual depth that consecrates simplicity with an overt politicality. An MFA candidate in Studio Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the artist received his BA in Film and Television from the University of California (Los Angeles). He is an active contributor to the arts in Chicago, including participation in the performance collaborative, Collective Cleaners, who use hand-woven rags to clean public and private spaces in a consciousness campaign to “perform our shared responsibility.”

The Collaboration

Illinois Corrections is part of a cross-campus collaboration between the School of Theatre and Dance, the Department of Criminal Justice Sciences, and University Galleries. This effort aligns McGuinness’s exhibition with the play The Exonerated, and a community discussion of criminal justice issues in Illinois. Running concurrently with McGuinness’s exhibition, The Exonerated presents a theatrical retelling of stories from wrongfully convicted death row survivors. Following a special performance of the play on Friday, March 21, at the Center for the Performing Arts, McGuinness will join Dr. Dawn Beichner and Sherrin Fitzer in a panel discussion of issues inspired by the play’s themes. Moderated by Will Daddario, Assistant Professor of Theatre Studies, the panel discussion will bring together the expertise of these individuals and their experiences with prisons in Illinois. The conversation will begin immediately following the 7:30 pm performance.

Dr. Dawn Beichner is Associate Professor of Criminal Justice Sciences, Women’s and Gender Studies faculty affiliate, and co-director of Peace and Conflict Resolution Studies. Her current research focuses upon family reunification and societal re-entry for women following incarceration. Sherrin Fitzer, who has been teaching incarcerated prisoners since 1991, is the Women and Family Administrator at Logan Correctional Center in Lincoln. She received the distinguished Liberty Bell Award in 2013 for her work with incarcerated women.

The Exonerated

Directed by Cyndee Brown, Associate Professor of Theatre, and written by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen, The Exonerated is constructed from interviews, letters, transcripts, case files, and public records that detail the lives of six individuals mistakenly sent to death row but eventually exonerated for their crimes. In addition to the special performance on March 21, regularly scheduled performances of The Exonerated will take place in Centennial West 207 on March 27 – 29 and April 1 – 5 at 7:30 p.m. A matinee performance will take place on April 5 at 2:00 p.m.

Resources

• Billy McGuinness

Open April 15 through May 11, 2014

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Brian Gillis' installation is based on historical evidence of Illinois Black Panther leader Fred Hampton's bedroom on December 4, 1969, the night he was shot and killed by Chicago police on an assignment from then Cook County State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan. Mark Clark, the organizer of the Peoria, Illinois, chapter of the Black Panthers was also killed during the raid. The physical evidence later showed that the officers had fired nearly 100 shots in the apartment where Hampton, his girlfriend, and several other members of the Black Panther Party were sleeping. According to Gillis, the officers left the scene but the Black Panther Party painstakingly documented it and then opened it to the public (similar to Emmett Till's open casket funeral in Chicago following his 1955 racially motivated murder in Mississippi). Through a series of lawsuits filed by the People's Law Office, it was later discovered that the FBI's secret COINTELPRO program played a major role in the assassination and cover-up. Gillis's priority with this project is to show the depth and breadth of who Hampton was and the impact that he both had and could have had. For example, while involved with the Black Panthers, he facilitated a massive peace agreement between many of Chicago's street gangs, organized rallies, provided political education, and played a significant role in a free breakfast program for children. He was only 21-years-old when he was assassinated.

Gillis, an Oregon-based artist, was inspired to develop His Room for this exhibition in response to Illinois's historical, political, and cultural connections to the Hampton case. He accumulated a research archive and will present it in an installation that evokes a reading room and reproduction center. Before entering the reading area, participants will pass through a layered curtain, functioning as a metaphor for both the transgression of boundaries and the revelation of secrets concealed 'behind the curtain.' The archive will be filled with news accounts, imagery, and literature related not only to this event, but also to a range of relevant topics including police brutality, street gangs, the Weather Underground, John Brown, FBI corruption, and the Black Panthers. In describing his motivation for the spectrum of topics, Gillis said, “I'm hoping that these books serve as the primary foundation for an inquiry into the life and death of Fred Hampton as a way to, perhaps, understand the complexity of issues regarding race and social revolution in the U.S.” Additionally, Gillis will present copies of the books that Fred Hampton had in his bedroom on the night of his death, with topics ranging from imperialism, to the origin of various sciences, to pregnancy (his girlfriend was pregnant at the time), which will also be on view. Lastly, the exhibition will feature nine books Gillis compiled that include the Grand Jury's report about the case, inventories of physical evidence collected from government repositories, and files accessed via the Freedom of Information Act. He produced the books with the intention of including them in a university library's collection— even binding them in the appropriate book cloth with suggested call numbers in an institutional sans serif font—and will make them available for study during the exhibition.

Gillis is an artist-in-residence in the School of Art's Visiting Artist Program. University Galleries is partnering with the V.A.P. to host lectures, performances, and exhibitions for the 2014 Visiting Artists. University Galleries is collaborating with Milner Library to include books related to the topic in the exhibition.

Gillis' work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama; Milwaukee Art Museum; CUE Art Foundation, New York; Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, Michigan; and American Museum of Ceramic Art, Pomona, California, among others. He has received grants and awards from the Oregon Arts Commission, the Illinois Arts Council, Contemporary Artists Center, University of Oregon, University of Illinois at Springfield, and Shanghai University. The artist's work has been included in multiple books including  Paperclay: Art and Practice (Bloomsbury Publishing/University of Pennsylvania Press); Studio Space (McGraw Hill);  The Plywood Book (Storey Publishing); and Free Radio Manual (CUE Art Foundation). Gillis, who received his M.F.A. from Alfred University and his B.A. from Humboldt State University, is Associate Professor of Art at University of Oregon in Eugene.

Resources

• Brian Gillis

Open April 15 through May 11, 2014

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has been known as the showcase for the most prominent art produced at Illinois State University. Visitors to the exhibit will be struck by the variety of media presented and the wide array of styles and techniques employed. A juried exhibition open to all current I.S.U. students, the Student Annual offers many their first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals from the contemporary art world.

This year's studio juror is Jim Lutes, Professor of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lutes's paintings have been included in such prestigious exhibitions as the 2010 Whitney Biennial and Documenta IX, as well as solo and group presentations at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. His monograph, Jim Lutes: Paintings and Drawings: 1995-2008, was published by University Galleries of Illinois State University in conjunction with his 2008 solo exhibition.

The School of Art is honored to present the 2014 Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award to two current M.F.A. students—Brittany Culkowski and Gina Hunt. Both artists will be recognized for their achievements during the presentation of awards. To further honor their accomplishments, University Galleries has devoted extra gallery space to the presentation of new works by both artists.

The 2014 Student Annual awards include ten Irving S. Tick Awards, the Nam Clark Drawing Award, the Josefina Ferrán Scholarship, and the Glen Lapekas Scholarship. Additional awards are presented by Bill Conger, Randy Reid, Pete Guither, Arts Technology, Normal Editions Workshop, and the following areas within the School of Art: Ceramics, Glass, and Graphic Design. The School of Art sponsors the "Best in Show" award.

The Awards Ceremony at 6pm will also include the presentation of many scholarships for School of Art students.

The 2014 Student Annual reception is sponsored by Casey's Garden Shop and Florist, Jimmy John's, the College of Fine Arts, and the Friends of the Arts.

Resources

• Entry Form

Open May 27 through September 28, 2014

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Featuring works by Gertrude Abercrombie, Nicolas Africano, Richard Anuszkiewicz, George Atkinson, Marilyn Baker, Jennifer Bartlett, Max Beckmann, Frank Berkenkotter, Richard Boschulte, Glenn Bradshaw, James Butler, Robert Colescott, Robert Cottingham, Caitlin Cox, Richard Cramer, Peter Dean, Jane Dickson, Jim Dine, William S. Doan, Jeanne Dunning, Danell Dvorak, Dennis French, Benjamin Gardner, Harold Gregor, Alex Grey, George Grosz, Robert Gutierrez, Duncan Hannah, Erin Hayden, Robert Holcombe, Luis Jiménez, Jasper Johns, Lester Johnson, Wonsook Kim-Linton, Tim Kowalczyk, Nina Kuo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Janet McKiernan, Miller & Shellabarger, Robert Motherwell, Deborah Muirhead, Gladys Nilsson, Claes Oldenburg, Nathan Olivera, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ed Paschke, Dan Peterman, Claire Prussian, Seymour Rosofsky, August Sander, Brandon Siscoe, Kiki Smith, Rufino Tamayo, Britten Traughber, Phil Wagner, and David Wojnarowicz.

Resources

• WGLT Feature

Open October 17 through December 21, 2014

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University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to announce the opening of Walter Robinson: Paintings and Other Indulgences, the inaugural exhibition at its new storefront space at Uptown Station in Normal, Illinois. The exhibition is the first museum survey of the prolific New York-based artist's paintings from 1979 to 2014. The ninety-four paintings on view provide a broad selection of the artist's work, including the pulp-novel romance paintings which garnered Robinson critical recognition in the early 1980s, still-lifes featuring over-­the-counter pharmaceuticals, recent representations of Lands' End clothing models and online erotic selfies, and many others.

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1950, and raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Robinson moved to Manhattan in 1968 to pursue an art history degree at Columbia University. By the late 1970s, he had become a critic for Art in America, co-founder of Printed Matter, Inc., co-editor and publisher of Art-Rite magazine, and member of the influential artist collective Collaborative Projects (Colab.) From 1983 to 1985 Robinson was art editor of the East Village Eye, and from 1996 to 2012 he was editor of the online journal Artnet Magazine.

Robinson presented his earliest paintings at the historic Times Square Show organized by Colab in 1980 at an abandoned building on West 41st Street, and within two years was exhibiting modestly scaled but brashly colored paintings of pulp romance cover illustrations at the seminal Metro Pictures gallery. In a fashion similar to Richard Prince and Jack Goldstein, he appropriated tropes of popular culture as a means of celebrating the emotional dynamics of images from mass media. Whereas the aforementioned artists mined photography and film, Robinson was examining painting itself, taking lurid illustrations from the 1940s and 50s and re-representing them in a style culled from "how to paint" books. Commenting critically on painting's role as both commercial enterprise and intimate act, he imbued his work with—in the words of art critic Carlo McCormick—"a devious sense of irony done with incredible sincerity." His square-jawed detective types and swooning vixens penetrate the psyche as archetypes of desire rather than clichés.

By the mid-­1980s, Robinson's painting style had matured and become more succinct, with gestural flourishes that pastiched the Abstract Expressionists' sacrosanct personal touch. He had also strayed beyond the borders of appropriation by painting from his own photographs, while broadening his sphere of subjects to include Morandi-­‐like arrangements of beer cans and bottles, monolithic over-the-counter pharmaceuticals and toiletries from Excedrin to Tampax (with allusive titles like Pain Killers and Fertility), and even outright bastions of kitsch such as greeting-­‐card kittens and spin art. Recognizing the conceptual bent of Robinson'swork, even as he seemed to be on the brink of genre painting, critic Holland Cotter noted, "his still lifes of consumer amenities were like painted 'ready-mades.'" At the same time, Robinson became a chronicler of the burgeoning East Village scene, capturing unposed, loosely rendered yet spot-on portrayals of dozens of luminaries including gallerists Annie Herron and Doug Milford, writers Joseph Masheck and Carlo McCormick, and artists Martin Wong, Mark Kostabi, Ellen Berkenblit, and Mike Bidlo.

In paintings from 2000 to the present—whether exhaustive series of individual burgers from every imaginable fast-food restaurant, mail-order clothing models, or online porn selfies, Robinson addresses the collision of capital and everyday cravings in a media-saturated world. Among the most recent works in the exhibition are paintings in which single packs of cigarettes or liquor bottles are presented frieze-style, as frontally and iconically as possible. In the artist's words, "the idea was to revive the still life by remaking it as an object of desire—putting back the content that modernism [expunged] when it transformed the emblematic Dutch still life into a formalist exercise." The bold geometries of these soulful, wistful works allude subversively to this "content restoration" in their subtle references to abstractions by modernists like Richard Diebenkorn and Brice Marden.

The accompanying monograph, with photographs of nearly 200 paintings spanning the artist's thirty-five-year career, will be published in Fall 2015. It will feature texts by Barry Blinderman, exhibition curator and Director of University Galleries, Glenn O’Brien, Charles F. Stuckey, and art historian Vanessa Meikle Schulman.

Partial funding for the Walter Robinson publication has been provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and an anonymous donor. Partial funding for the exhibition has been provided by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

University Galleries is located at Uptown Station at the corner of Beaufort and Broadway. Parking is available directly above, and first hour is free. If you need special accommodations to participate in any event, please contact University Galleries at 309.438.5487 or gallery@ilstu.edu. Please allow sufficient time to arrange the accommodation. Please note that all events at University Galleries are free.

Resources

• Jeffery Deitch
• Purchase Publication
• View Sample Pages

Press

Normal, Illinois

• Artcritical Essay by Glenn O'Brien: The Balthus of Swingers?
• Artforum Review by Michelle Grabner
• The Brooklyn Rail: Walter Robinson with Phong Bui
• The Bloomington Pantagraph: Robinson's art takes 'novel' approach

Philadelphia

• New York Observer: 14 Things to Do in New York's Art World Before November 6
• New York Observer: Walter Robinson and Anthony H-G: 2 Art World Titans Over Drinks and Books at Max Fish
• Artnet: David Ebony Interviews Artist and Editor Walter Robinson on His Parallel Lives
• Artnet: Walter Robinson's First Solo Museum Survey Opens in Philadelphia
• Metro: Walter Robinson Turns Erotic Selfies into Art
• Philadelphia Inquirer: Walter Robinson celebrated at Moore College of Art & Design
• Art Critical: “Wanting to be Art”: Buy, Sell and Desire in the Paintings of Walter Robinson

New York

• BLOUIN ARTINFO: Jeffrey Deitch to Host Walter Robinson Survey
• Paper Magazine: Gone for Three Decades, Walter Robinson Returns as an Artist
• The Guardian: Walter Robinson: "I'm just a stupid painter. We're like dumb horses"
• RMarts: Brief musing on Walter Robinson’s pulp fiction pictures: on occasion of his opening at Jeffrey Deitch Projects
• Time Out New York: Walter Robinson’s paintings of lurid paperback covers get a major showcase
• The New Yorker: A Man-about-downtown Gets His Due
• Ohio Edit: Amy's Journal: A Visit to Walter Robinson's Studio
• Video: James Kalm: Walter Robinson opening reception
• Art in America: Walter Robinson
• CRAVE: Curator Barry Blinderman Examines Our Relentless Desire to Possess in "Walter Robinson: A Retrospective"

Concert Series

Now in its second season, New Sounds Uptown is a series of genre-bending concerts, providing exposure for musician-composers whose work diverges from the traditional formats of jazz, classical, pop, and rock.

New Sounds Uptown is made possible by a generous award from the Harmon Arts Grant Program.

Open February 23 through April 7, 2013

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Participating artists: Reed Barrow, Corinne Botz, Jan Bünnig, Anne Collier, Bill Conger, Drew Conrad, Sue de Beer, Rachel Feinstein, Andreas Fischer, Anya Gallaccio, Benjamin Gardner, Katy Grannan, Alice Hargrave, Bob Jones, Brian Kapernekas, Rachel Khedoori, Peter Krashes, Jacco Olivier, Robert Overby, Dario Robleto, Gregor Schneider, and Sarah E. Wood.

Inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1851 novel of the same name, The House of the Seven Gables features 22 contemporary artists who explore themes of haunting, portraiture and the domestic uncanny. The titular mansion in the book embodies generations of violence, superstition, melancholy, repressed memories, and ancestral guilt for the Pyncheon family. Serving as a repository of memory and atonement, the house itself functions as a portrait of the family's collective trauma. Written concurrently with the rise of daguerreotype photography—and notably featuring an ever-shifting oil portrait, a fetishized miniature pencil drawing, and daguerreotypes made by a central character—the modes of representation Hawthorne references become increasingly more modern as the novel progresses to reflect the passage of generations.

Consistent with motifs in Hawthorne's novel, the 27 works included in the exhibition reflect variously on the passage of time, the supernatural, and aspects of mystery and foreboding. One such work is Dario Robleto’s Diary of a Resurrectionist (I’ll be waiting for you), for which the artist fastidiously constructed photo albums from a bewitching amalgam of materials—including cast and carved bone dust, fragments of soldiers’ personal mirrors, and melted vinyl from Jackie Wilson's album “Lonely Teardrops”—in order to encase antique “spirit” photographs. The work thoughtfully comments on the precious nature of family photographs as well as nineteen century ideas linking photographic technology to magic. 

The horror film functions as an updated version of the Gothic novel in Sue de Beer’s video installation, The Quickening. The historical and supernatural references that she draws upon—including excerpts from Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” photographs of the House of the Seven Gables in Salem, Massachusetts, and imagery of murdered female protagonists hanging from nooses—evoke the spiritual tension and resulting violence that are foundational to Hawthorne’s novel. 

While de Beer incorporated found photographs of the house, Corinne Botz visited Salem to create her newly commissioned works, including a photograph of an ink stain on the desk at which Hawthorne wrote the book. Her closely cropped forensic investigation resonates with the celebrated author’s physical trace as well as a notion of stained histories. 

Hawthorne’s guilt about the role his ancestor, Judge Hathorne, played in the Salem Witch Trials seeps through in the book’s references to mesmerism, curses, an unjust hanging, and a corrupt judge. Bob Jones’ concrete sculpture, Father’s Headdress, explores the heavy burden of ancestral acts, while its conical black shape recalls the vernacular iconography of witchcraft. 

University Galleries has collaborated with faculty and students in the School of Art, the School of Theatre and Dance, the English Department, and Milner Library to develop programming that encourages further dialogue not only about Hawthorne’s novel, but also a visual approach to interpreting literature.

The exhibition was curated by Kendra Paitz, Curator of Exhibitions at University Galleries.

The exhibition catalogue includes essays by Kendra Paitz, Christopher Atkins, Justine S. Murison, and Corinne May Botz.

The exhibition and catalogue have been made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Additional funding for the catalogue was provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation. Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency

Resources

• View Sample Pages
• Purchase Publication

Press

• WGLT Coverage
• Datebook Interview with Curator Kendra Paitz

Open March 5 through April 7, 2013

This exhibition features new acquisitions and recently framed works on paper, selected from University Galleries' Permanent Collection.

Open Aril 16 through May 3, 2013

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has been known as the showcase for the most prominent art produced at Illinois State University. Visitors to the exhibit will be struck by the variety of media presented and the wide array of styles and techniques employed. A juried exhibition open to all Illinois State University students, the Student Annual offers many their first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals from the contemporary art world.

This year’s studio juror is Tony Tasset, Professor of Studio Arts in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Tasset works in a variety of mediums including sculpture, video, photography, film, and painting. He exhibits internationally and has gained renown for his Pop-inspired public works, most notably Eye, a 30-foot-tall, hyper-realistic sculpture of an eyeball temporarily installed in Chicago in 2010.

The 2013 Graphic Design juror is John Bonadies, principal and creative director of Bonadies Creative Inc., and co-founder and president of the newly formed mpressInteractive, LLC. With over twenty years of design and creative management experience, Bonadies has worked on accounts for Citicorp, Merrill Lynch, Johnson & Johnson, AT&T, Pfizer, General Electric, and MetLife.

The School of Art is honored to present the 2013 Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award to Megan Kathol Bersett. Kathol Bersett will be recognized for this achievement during the presentation of awards. To further honor her accomplishments, University Galleries has devoted an entire gallery wall to the presentation of her new paintings.

The 2013 Student Annual awards include ten Irving S. Tick Awards, the Nam Clark Drawing Award, the Josefina Ferrán Scholarship, and the Glen Lapekas Scholarship. Additional awards are presented by Randy Reid, Pete Guither, Arts Technology, Normal Editions Workshop, and the following areas within the School of Art: Ceramics, Glass, and Graphic Design.

The 2013 Student Annual reception is sponsored by Casey's Garden Shop and Florist, The Copy Shop, The Garlic Press, Jimmy John's, The College of Fine Arts, and the Friends of the Arts.

Resources

• 2013 Student Annual Entry Form

Open May 21 through July 27, 2013

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T.E.A.M. (Teen Education & Art Mentors) is a year-long collaboration between Illinois State University and regional schools resulting in three exhibitions of student artwork made in response to art viewed at University Galleries.

Full Circle features works created by students from:

• Blue Ridge High School
• Fieldcrest High School
• Heyworth High School
• Lexington High School
• Olympia High School
• Normal Community High School
• Ridgeview High School
• Tri-Valley High School
• Washington Community High School

Resources

• TEAM Workshop: Tri Valley High School
• TEAM Workshop: Lexington High School
• TEAM Workshop: Olympia High School
• TEAM Workshop: Normal Community High School

Open August 6 through October 13, 2013

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The Rural Documentary Collection Exhibition fills the entirety of University Galleries’ four exhibition spaces and includes a satellite exhibition of photographs at Milner Library of Illinois State University. This exhibition program presents a snapshot of documentary photography and video produced through the Rural Documentary Collection, a program of the School of Art at Illinois State University. Also included in the exhibition at University Galleries are historic photographs of McLean County produced between 1918 and 1926, social documentary works created by current and recent students, and photographic portraits created at this year's McLean, Livingston, and Woodford County Fairs. The exhibition at Milner Library showcases 4-H student photographers enrolled in the Rural Documentary Collection Youth Project workshops at University Galleries.

Founded in 1988, the Rural Documentary Collection consists of over 800 photographs created primarily by M.F.A. students at Illinois State University. In the words of the Collection's founder, Rhondal McKinney, Professor Emeritus of Photography at Illinois State University:

The works are about the social realities confronting rural people as they try to hold together communities that are threatened by decline of the economy, a weakening of the social fabric, and the neglect of an ever more urban- and suburban-focused government and policy-making apparatus.

The works of ten photographers from the Rural Documentary Collection are featured in Gallery 1, including Ted Diamond, Hava Gurevich, Julie Lindemann, Rhondal McKinney, Mark Rabung, Beatrix Reinhardt, Juli Reiten, John Shimon, Nancy Siesel, and Gerritt Sinclair. Documentary strategies used by each photographer range from intimate portraits to sweeping landscapes, and include both color and black and white.

This selection of images from the collection's past is situated amongst a historic view of McLean County taken by Clara Brian between 1918 and 1926. Brian, McLean County's first home extension adviser, traveled from farmhouse to farmhouse to teach community members about health and modern living. As she traveled, she documented her experiences with a camera, capturing home interiors, school children, and country living.  McKinney selected and printed the photographs from the Clara Brian archive, which is maintained by the McLean County Museum of History.

In Galleries 2 and 2.5, recent works by students and alumni of I.S.U.'s photography program highlight an array of approaches to social documentary. These works record events of social or personal significance not restricted to the rural communities of Illinois. These photographers pursue other geographic locations, such as the Austrian Alps, and people on the cultural fringe, like Sasquatch seekers, to offer experiences divergent from the rest of the exhibition. Photographers include: Matt Burns, Caitlin Cox, Ulrich Eigner, Alex Hogan, Marie-Susanne Langille, Jason Reed, Britten Traughber, Michelle Lee Wallace, and Marissa Webb.

The Rural Documentary Collection County Fair Project is highlighted in Gallery 3. Through this project, more than 300 portraits of fairgoers were created at this year's McLean, Livingston, and Woodford County Fairs as a record for posterity. These photographs were produced by Marissa Webb and Alex Hogan with the assistance of student photographers who received training during a documentary photography workshop presented by University Galleries. In addition to the works created at the fairs, portraits made by students during the training workshop are included in the exhibition.

A satellite exhibit, the Rural Documentary Collection Youth Project Exhibition, will take place at Illinois State University's Milner Library from September 30 through December 15. This exhibition presents a selection of landscape photographs created by 4-H student photographs enrolled in the Rural Documentary Collection Youth Project, which took place in June.

These events are generously supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency, and the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation—Mirza Arts and Culture Fund. The Gallery Gallop is organized by the Friends of the Arts at Illinois State University.

Press

• Pantagraph.com | Rural routes: A new exhibit finds life and art beyond the city limits
• Pantagraph.com | Photo project documents local county fairs

Open October 22 through November 10, 2013

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Mark Joshua Epstein's recent paintings and works on paper invite viewers to "question conceptual relationships between different visual traditions that employ pattern as both deception and disguise." The artist incorporates visual patterns of wallpaper, textile, and clothing. He has taken particular interest in security envelopes, whose interiors are printed with monochromatic patterns that, beyond adornment, conceal sensitive personal information. Epstein will cover the walls of Gallery 2.5 with photocopies of envelope patterns, hang paintings on top of his "wallpaper," and install small screens in front of each of the paintings to partially obscure their views.

Epstein is an artist in residence in the Visiting Artist Program in ISU's School of Art. University Galleries is partnering with the Visiting Artist Program to present exhibitions or performances by the 2013-2014 artists in residence. While on campus, he will teach a seminar, conduct critiques with students, present a public lecture, and install his exhibition. Epstein has exhibited his work in London, New York, San Francisco, Rome, and Boston. He has had residencies at the Millay Colony in Austerlitz, New York; the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire; and the Klondike Institute for Arts and Culture, Dawson City, Yukon, Canada. Epstein received his MFA from the Slade School of Fine Art, London in 2004, and his BFA from Tufts University, Boston in 2002.

Resources

• Mark Joshua Epstein

Open October 22 through November 14, 2013

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As part of Benjamin Britten at 100: An American Centenary Symposium (October 24–27), Britten: Practitioner, Modernist, Inspiration presents selected ephemera, autograph scores, and historical photographs detailing the life of the preeminent English composer, Benjamin Britten. In conjunction with the symposium, University Galleries will host two noontime recitals echoing the concert-in-museum series begun in 1941 by famed pianist Dame Myra Hess. During World War II, London's concert halls were closed due to blackout restrictions and air raids by the German Luftwaffe—more than 1,700 concerts were held instead at London's National Gallery in an effort to bolster morale.

For further information, including a complete schedule for Benjamin Britten at 100: An American Centenary Symposium, visit the School of Music.

Open October 22 through December 15, 2013

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Canterbury Exchange showcases the works of 12 faculty members from Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, England, and includes videos, photographs, graphic design, and work incorporating radio transmissions. The artists selected from Canterbury's Media, Art, and Design Departments are: Darren Ambrose, Rob Ball, Andy Birtwistle, Andrew Butler, Magz Hall, Bryan Hawkins, Mary Ikoniadou, Tim Long, Kate McLean, Benjamin Rowley, Karen Shepherdson, and Sam Vale.

Canterbury Exchange stems from longstanding relationships between two communities and two universities. The Town of Normal became a Sister City of Canterbury, England, in 1989; Illinois State University established a collegiate affiliation with Canterbury Christ Church University shortly thereafter. In the years since, scholars and students have been traveling to and from each country to further collegial and civic involvement between communities. In fact, the Office of International Studies and Programs at Illinois State University reports that this is a record year for students traveling from Canterbury to study in Normal. Canterbury Exchange provides a public venue for this intercontinental dialogue to continue.

The works presented in Canterbury Exchange offer enticing tales of memory, loss, struggle, and control. Ultimately, the story that unfolds through this artistic breadth is united by the concept of change and the struggles to fight against it.

Sounds from Bryan Hawkins' videos are an invitation into the exhibition that can be heard from the gallery foyer. The artist aligns his personal muse with the mythic daemon conjured by the seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick. Hawkins' video, The Departure of the Good Daemon—a title borrowed from Herrick—layers the poem's reading upon ambient sounds and views of the English countryside. Birds sing through a humming breeze as the artist begins the poem: "What can I do in poetry now the good spirit's gone from me?" The voice fades to silence as the view cuts to the sky where white contrails from a passing airplane divide the blue, signifying a separation between the tangible and the intangible, between the Earth and ideas.

Informed by sensorial studies, Kate McLean's graphic design work uses olfaction to reveal the "smell portrait of a city." Her cartographic experiments cite crowd sourcing and personal observation as the source materials for the collective memory of a place. Subject to atmospheric shifts, smells are temporary by nature and yet McLean suggests that certain odors are inextricably linked to identity. Struggles against the wind become analogous to losing identity upon a changing cultural map.

Mary Ikoniadou's series of collages, Behind the velvet curtain, explores political identity in the Greek diaspora. Ikoniadou excerpts the magazine Pyrsos (Torch)—published by Greek nationals living in the German Democratic Republic between 1961 and 1967—to reenvision the changing face of Socialism in Europe.

Andy Birtwistle suggests that human control is a dream and that one manifestation of its delusion is the material used to structure civilization: concrete. His video Concrete presents contemplative views of decaying sites from Taiwan and the United Kingdom. Concrete becomes synonymous with control—control of people, the environment, and ideas. A highway snaking through the countryside is coupled with narration: "In every human activity, there is a standard of conduct to which, in the common interest, we are expected to conform." A black compact car careens toward the camera, honking, before disappearing off screen.

This exhibition was initiated and co-organized by Scott Rankin, Associate Professor from the School of Art at Illinois State University. While a Fulbright Senior Specialist at Canterbury Christ Church University in 2011, Rankin started an "exchange" conversation with Canterbury colleague Andy Birtwistle, and subsequently began working with Tony Preston-Schreck, Curator and Interpretive Programs Coordinator at University Galleries, to develop Canterbury Exchange. University Galleries is privileged to present these compelling works from our colleagues in England and thus continue the conversation between our communities. An exchange of works from the School of Art at Illinois State University is planned for presentation in England in 2016.

Open November 12 through December 15, 2013

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Peter Krashes, an artist and community activist based in Brooklyn, examines how private citizens can empower themselves in the face of governmental and corporate power. His paintings stem directly from his political actions, whether writing a letter to a government official, organizing a public meeting, or attending a press event to raise questions. In the artist's words, "I play a role in shaping what I paint before I paint it. A letter in my work is a letter that needed to be sent; a meeting is a meeting that I helped to organize; I had a stake in the outcome of the rally. As a result, the paintings are the last step in a process I have been engaged with from beginning to end." For his exhibition at University Galleries, Krashes will install recent gouache works on paper.

Krashes is an artist in residence in the Visiting Artist Program in ISU's School of Art. University Galleries is partnering with the Visiting Artist Program to present exhibitions or performances by the 2013-2014 artists in residence. While on campus, Krashes will teach a seminar, conduct critiques with students, present a public lecture, and install his exhibition. His work has been included in solo exhibitions at Theodore: Art, Brooklyn; Derek Eller Gallery, New York; and Momenta Art, Brooklyn; and in group exhibitions at Crane Arts, Philadelphia; He Xiangning Art Museum, Shenzhen, China; Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; White Columns, New York; Zolla/Lieberman, Chicago; and Galerie Chez Valentin, Paris. Krashes was the recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and a National Endowment for the Arts Visual Arts Fellowship. The artist received his B.F.A. (M.A.) from the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at the University of Oxford. He received his B.A. from Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vermont.

Resources

• Peter Krashes

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This exhibition includes works by students currently pursuing a Master's of Fine Arts degree in the School of Art. The  MFA Biennial  celebrates the rigorous efforts of Illinois State University’s Master of Fine Arts program. Providing our extended community a wonderful opportunity to experience contemporary art created in Bloomington-Normal, the exhibition   highlights selected work by the 17 students currently enrolled in the program. Steeped in current issues within the field as well as historical traditions, these students adhere to standards of excellence in order to achieve mastery in their individual studio practices. The various mediums represented include painting, mixed-media and sculptural installation, glass, ceramics, printmaking, and photography.

Featuring: Samantha Buchanan, Matthew Burns, Ian Carey, Brittany Culkowski, Erin Elizabeth, Slate Grove, Christopher Hagen, m. jo hart, Alex Hogan, Gina Hunt, Megan Kathol Bersett,, John Moran, Krista Profitt, Stoney Sasser, Harry Sidebotham II, Alyssa Tauber, and Marissa Webb.

Open January 17 through February 28, 2012

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Highlighting the first semester of a yearlong community project, this exhibition of photographic works by area youth is a collaboration between University Galleries, Milner Library, and more than a dozen regional schools and community organizations. 

This program is supported by the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation Mirza Arts and Culture Fund; Target; and Milner Library.

Open February 28 through April 1, 2012

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University Galleries has invited six artists to realize An Experiment in Collectivity through their formation of a temporary collective. Informed by 20th century movements such as Dada, Situationist International, Surrealism, and Fluxus, collaborative approaches to art making during the past decade have received much critical attention.

For this artist-directed exhibition, Daniel Bainbridge (New York, New York), Jennifer Gustavson (Brooklyn, New York), Melanie Hunter (Bloomington, Illinois), Tim Kowalczyk (Minonk, Illinois), Colin Nesbit (San Diego, California), and Beatrix Reinhardt (Astoria, New York) will make work in response to the space of University Galleries, acting as both producers and collaborators. Each artist must negotiate working method, content, and flow of space within parameters set by the group. The project embraces unpredictability and explores how an inter-artist dialogue—rather than curator-artist dialogue—manifests itself, and whether it may facilitate a new approach to exhibition-making.

For the past several months, the artists have interacted virtually through Skype and a private group blog, fostering the conversations critical to the project's development. Through email correspondence, they developed a promotional image that draws on the Surrealist exercise, “exquisite corpse,” and features segments of each artist’s work placed in response to the others’.

The exhibition's installation will demonstrate not only the artists’ varied practices but will also highlight possible relationships between art and the institution in which it is exhibited. Artistic processes range from installations using books borrowed from ISU's Milner Library; to figurative sculptures incorporating trash collected on site; to trompe l’oeil ceramic works referencing the specific packing materials the artists are using to ship their work to Normal; to installations of photography. University Galleries will function as a site of engagement during the installation of the exhibition. The doors of the gallery will remain open while the artists are working, encouraging visitors to observe the artists’ processes and to interact with them.

All six artists graduated from Illinois State University's School of Art. Daniel Bainbridge (MFA, 2006); Jennifer Gustavson (BFA, 2005); Melanie Hunter (MFA, 1993); Tim Kowalczyk (MFA, 2011); Colin Nesbit (BFA, 2003); and Beatrix Reinhardt (MFA, 2001).

This exhibition co-sponsored by the Theatre of Ted Alumni Guest Program.

Resources

• An Experiment in Collectivity video
• Jennifer Gustavson
• Melanie Hunter
• Tim Kowalczyk
• Colin Nesbit

Open February 28 through April 1, 2012

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Munro Galloway, Visiting Artist in the School of Art, seeks to expand the language of painting through collage, appropriation, ruptured narrative, and inexpensive print technology. Galloway's recent projects include Green River, for which he committed to completing one painting per day for an entire year, and True Flag, a series of colorful abstract paintings with evocative titles like Should Have Taken Acid With You. The artist also incorporates books and prints into his practice, using the vocabulary of collage to create jarring juxtapositions of images, and frequently of images and text.

Galloway received his M.F.A. from Bard College (2006), and his B.A. from Brown University (1994). His work has been exhibited at Murray Guy, New York; The Ohio State University, Columbus; Hudson-Franklin, New York; and Galerie Martin Kudlek, Cologne, Germany. His work has been reviewed inArtforum, Flash Art, and The New Yorker. He is a Lecturer at the School of Visual Arts, New York and Co-Director of Soloway, an independent project space in Brooklyn. Galloway lives in Brooklyn.

Resources

• Munro Galloway

Open February 28 through May 12, 2012

Seventeen exhibitions featuring works by BFA and MFA students who will complete graduation requirements in Spring 2012. Complete schedule below:

Becky Dolenak, BFA: In Reverie 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, February 28 - Saturday, March 3, 2012
Opening Reception: Tuesday, February 28, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. 
Artist Talk: Wednesday, February 29 at noon

Steven Ciezki, BFA: Live for the Moment
Gallery 3, Tuesday, February 28 - Saturday, March 3, 2012 
Opening Reception: Tuesday, February 28, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.  
Artist Talk: Friday, March 2 at noon

Scott Jenkins, BFA: From Conception to Reception: The Inception of the In-Between 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, March 6, Gallery 2 - Saturday, March 10 
Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 6, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.  
Artist Talk: Thursday, March 8 at noon

Angela Baldus, BFA:
Gallery 3, Tuesday, March 6 - Saturday, March 10 
Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 6, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.  
Artist Talk: Wednesday, March 7 at noon 

Ryan Smith, BFA:
Gallery 2, Tuesday, March 20 - Saturday, March 24

Hayley Fisk, BFA: Day-to-Day 
Gallery 3, Tuesday, March 20 - Saturday, March 24 
Opening Reception: Tuesday, March 20, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Artist Talk: Wednesday, March 21 at noon

James Fazio, BFA: 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, March 27 - Saturday, March 31

Kelsey Just, BFA: 
Gallery 3, Tuesday, March 27 - Saturday, March 31

Daniel Rosen, BFA: Being Now Past (Works on Paper and in Cloth by Daniel Rosen) 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, April 3 - Saturday, April 7 
Opening reception: Tuesday, April 3, 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m. 
Artist Talk: Thursday, April 5 at noon

Melissa Cook, MFA: Sincerely, With Love 
Gallery 3, Tuesday, April 3 - Saturday, April 7

Lisa Lofgren, MFA: Discovering the Still Point 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, April 4 - Saturday, April 10

Brandon Siscoe, BFA: 
Gallery 3, Tuesday, April 10 - Saturday, April 14

Grace Sheese, MFA: 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, April 17 - Saturday, April 21

Megan Stroech, MFA: 
Gallery 3, Tuesday, April 17 - Saturday, April 21

Casey VanHecke, BFA: 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, May 1 - Saturday, May 5

Danielle St. Hilaire, BFA: 
Gallery 3, Tuesday, May 1, Gallery 3 - Saturday, May 5

Jacob Ryckman, BFA: 
Gallery 2, Tuesday, May 8 - Saturday, May 12

Open April 10 through May 13, 2012

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In an interactive installation created exclusively for University Galleries, Takeshi Moro has constructed a site of performance and action where persons become directly involved with his art. Using a combination of pedestals and photographs, Moro asks viewers to question whether these objects are art, props, cultural artifacts, or a series of stages for performance. Ultimately, the body is at the center of Moro's work; how meaning is conveyed through bodily gesture is left for participants to consider. Moro worked with a number of community members, including students at Blue Ridge Community High School in Farmer City, to create his installation. 

Takeshi Moro was born in Tokyo, Japan and currently lives and works in Chicago and Columbus. Moro completed his M.F.A. in at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2008). He studied photography at Rhode Island School of Design and holds a B.A. in Visual Arts from Brown University (2001). Moro's solo exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Arteles Gallery, Haukijarvi, Finland; and Incheon Art Platform, Incheon, South Korea. His work has been included in recent exhibitions at: Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, Florida; Rajaportin Sauna Gallery, Tampere, Finland; Azimuth Projects, Chicago; and Dayton Visual Arts Center, Ohio. Moro's work resides in the permanent collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, as well as in various private collections.

Resources

• Takeshi Moro

Open April 10 through May 13, 2012

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Open to all ISU students, the Student Annual provides a forum for students to submit their work for review by professional artists, designers, critics, and curators.

Studio Art Juror: 
Buzz Spector, Dean of the College and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. 
-Lecture by Buzz Spector:  Libraries of Signs, Wednesday, April 4, at noon, CVA 149 

Graphic Design Juror: 
Michael Brown, Brand Design Lead, Groupon

Reception sponsored by: Casey's Garden Shop and Florist; The Copy Shop; The Garlic Press; Jimmy John's; The College of Fine Arts; and the Friends of the Arts.

Awards sponsored by: Charles and Jeanne Blines Scholarship; Nam Clark Drawing Award; The College of Arts and Sciences; Josefina Ferrán Scholarship; Pete Guither; Glen Lapekas Scholarship; Meltdown Graphix; Randy Reid; Irving S. Tick Award; the following programs within the College of Fine Arts—The School of Art; Arts Technology, and Normal Editions Workshop; and the following areas within the School of Art—Ceramics, Glass, and Graphic Design.

2012 Student Award Recipients (listed alphabetically):

Michael Ater: ISU Graphic Design Program Best in Show Award 

Jennifer Baker: Irving S. Tick Award in Woods or Metals 

Morgan Bomkamp: ISU Ceramics Program Award 

Steven Ciezki: Irving S. Tick Award in Glass 

Melissa Cook: Irving S. Tick Award in Painting 

Caitlin Cox: Pete Guither Photography Award 

Becky Dolenak: The College of Arts and Sciences Multidisciplinary Award 

Patrick Donovan: Graphic Design Program Best Newcomer Award 

Derick Downey: Arts Technology Program Best in Interactive Media and Technology Award 

Erin Elizabeth: Irving S. Tick Award in Printmaking 

Hayley Fisk: Irving S. Tick Award in Photo 

Sean Goffinet: Irving S. Tick Award in New Media 

Michael Goldberger: Glen Lapekas Sculpture Award 

Slate Grove: Glass Program Award 

Erin Hayden: Josefina Ferrán Painting Award

Alex Hogan: Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award 

Kelsey Just: Normal Editions Workshop Undergraduate Award 

Kelsey Just: School of Art Best in Show Award 

Lisa Lofgren: Normal Editions Workshop Graduate Award 

Samantha Corrinne Moderhock: Randall Reid Jewelry Award 

Katherine O'Shea: ISU Ceramics Program Award 

Kyle Riley: Irving S. Tick Award in Video 

Daniel Rosen: Irving S. Tick Award in Drawing 

Kayla Sanders: Nam Clark Drawing Award 

Adam Sedwick: Arts Technology Program Special Achievement in Interactive Media and Technology Award 

Brandon Siscoe: Irving S. Tick Award in Sculpture 

Shannon Marie Slaight: Irving S. Tick Award in Ceramics 

Ryan Tinsley: Graphic Design Program Best Concept Award 

Ryan Tinsley: Meltdown Graphix Award in Graphic Design 

Michael Vincent: Graphic Design Program Best Typography Award

Resources

• Student Annual Entry Form

Open April 2012

Season Six Screenings

University Galleries is partnering with the McLean County Arts Center to host screenings of Art21's Season Six episodes. 

Art21 screenings are free and open to the public.

Resources

• Art21

Open May 22 through July 1, 2012

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Picture This... is a photography exhibition created by 300 community youth during the past school year. With 17 schools and organizations from throughout Central Illinois participating in the project, this exhibition signifies the largest cooperative art project ever organized by University Galleries.

Participating organizations include:

• Bloomington Junior High School
• Blue Ridge High School
• Boys & Girls Club of Bloomington-Normal
• Children's Discovery Museum
• Gibson City Melvin Sibley High School
• Hammitt School of the Baby Fold
• Heyworth High School
• Lexington High School
• Olympia High School
• Parkside Junior High School
• Ridgeview High School
• Thomas Metcalf Laboratory School
• Tri-Point Middle School
• Tri-Valley High School
• UNITY Community Center
• Western Avenue Community Center

Picture This... offers a multi-sensory experience for gallery patrons that begins with the audible voices of youth echoing from the Gallery foyer: “A photograph is the imitation of life…a moment of the soul stolen away from time for future archive;” “A photograph is a small puzzle piece of life;” “A photograph is….” These disembodied voices create an aural portrait of the students involved with the project, a portrait that is clearly articulated through the hundreds of images displayed on the gallery walls. In addition to the photographs and audio created by participants, an interactive display allows patrons to investigate photographs dating back to the 1860s.  

At its core, Picture This... provides youth the tools to understand the meaning of photographs. They take what they learn about those images and apply their knowledge to creating their own photographs. Coupling the resources provided by University Galleries with the individual creativity possessed by each student, we begin an exploration of the very nature of representation—how others are represented and how we represent ourselves for others to see. Showcasing the insights uncovered during these investigations provides students—and their shared communities—opportunities to "picture" themselves in an entirely new context. It is within this context that we are able to bring these exercises of playful study to larger audiences in order to share what they might reveal about ourselves.

Picture This... has been made possible through generous support from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation—Mirza Arts and Culture Fund; Target, and Milner Library of Illinois State University. Through these sources, University Galleries has been able to purchase digital cameras, provide field trip support for regional schools, as well as supplement the printing costs of bringing the photographs to public exhibition.

Open July 14 through October 14, 2012

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2012 marks the 50th anniversary of the Studio Glass Movement in the United States, and University Galleries is celebrating this momentous occasion with Studio Glass at 50: A Tradition in Flux. Encompassing all four galleries, this exhibition highlights the spectrum of glass artists from early pioneers to contemporary masters of the medium. Glass became an individualized medium as it flared away from its factory origins and kindled the furnaces of artists worldwide; this exhibition provides the context for that historical transformation. 

Featuring works by: Rik Allen, Martin Blank, Robert Carlson, Jamie Carpenter, José Chardiet, Dale Chihuly, Scott Darlington, Einar & Jamex de la Torre, Laura Donefer, Fritz Dreisbach, Erwin Eisch, Dorie Guthrie, Robert DuGrenier, Jen Elek, Slate Grove, Henry Halem, Kim Harty, Melanie Hunter, Martin Janecky, Kim Knowles, Gene Koss, Harvey Littleton, Carmen Lozar, Richard Marquis, John Miller, MOG Hot Shop Team, John Moran, Nick Mount, Jay Musler, Joel Myers, Paul Nelson, Osamu Noda, Danny Perkins, Marc Petrovic, Stephen Rolfe Powell, Stephen Proctor, Ross Richmond, Richard Royal, Davide Salvadore, Jack Schmidt, Therman Statom, Alex Stisser, Boyd Sugiki & Lisa Zerkowitz, Janusz Walentynowicz, Randy Walker, and Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen & Jasen Johnsen.

This exhibition is funded in part by the Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass and the Midwest Contemporary Glass Art Group.

Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Demonstrations at the Glass House:

Glass blowing, enameling, and engraving demonstrations will take place at the Glass House—found at the corner of Main and Willow, West of the Ropp Agricultural Building in Normal on October 3, 4, 5, and 9. There is an "open door" policy for each of the demonstrations, with the public encouraged to visit during either morning or afternoon sessions. 

Artist Talks at University Galleries:

University Galleries is honored to present public lectures by early pioneers from of the Studio Glass Movement, as well as contemporary practitioners working with the medium. Artist talks will occur at University Galleries, beginning at noon each day.

The Artists:

As one of Harvey Littleton's first students at the University of Wisconsin (Madison), Fritz Dreisbach completed his MFA in 1967. Dreisbach has been central to the development of the Studio Glass Movement since 1964. As a founding member of the Glass Art Society (1971), he helped to direct the movement. Dreisbach has led over 300 workshops, lectures, and classes in over 150 glass art facilities throughout the world.

Henry Halem has been working with glass since 1968. He founded the Glass Program at Kent State University (Kent, Ohio) in 1969 and co-founded the Glass Art Society (GAS), where he served as the organization's first president. Halem received the Lifetime Achievement Award from GAS for his accomplishments in the field in 2008 and currently a Fellow of the American Crafts Council.

Kim Harty completed her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design (2006) and has attended Pilchuck Glass School (2005, 2007). An emerging artist within the Studio Glass Movement, Harty approaches the medium in a performative manner, mixing hot glass processes with installation art. She has served as Visiting Lecturer for the Glass Art Society.

Jack Schmidt is recognized as Illinois State University's first Glass program graduate (1973). His work has been exhibited internationally, with his reputation earning him a National Endowment for the Arts Individual Fellowship Grant, in addition to other prestigious awards. Schmidt has served as visiting artist and lecturer at the University of Wisconsin (Madison); Pilchuck Glass School (Stanwood, Washington); Penland School of Crafts (Penland, North Carolina); Cleveland Institute of Art (Ohio); among others.

Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass and the Midwest Contemporary Glass Art Group are central organizers of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Studio Glass Movement. Similar events are taking place at museums and arts centers throughout the United States as a result of their initiatives. Studio Glass at 50: A Tradition in Flux has received generous support from both organizations.

Open October 27 through December 16, 2012

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For his exhibition at University Galleries, Kendell Carter will realize his first multi-room, site-specific installation. The artist "samples" from hip-hop culture, modernism, architecture, and furniture design to create immersive environments loaded with a multiplicity of meanings that provoke dialogue about race, gender, history, and consumer culture. He cites his choice of hip-hop as a model for the work, identifying it as "one of the few multiracial, multigenerational contingencies that we have." Carter seeks to push discourse on his work past that of a black artist making art about politics, and towards one that acknowledges the integrated visual culture in which we are all participating.

A large wrestling ring serves as the centerpiece of the exhibition and signifies Carter's retirement from wrestling with traditional ideas and expectations related to identity politics. Instead, he proposes the pairing of subjectivities as a means of achieving "we-ness" and "truth seeking." Toward that end, Carter has invited artist Darren Hostetter to collaborate on the execution of many works in the exhibition. Surrounded by custom-made wainscoting, the wrestling ring in That Fight Ain't Real! They're Friends in Real Life… (2012) encompasses raw cotton and portraits of Carter and Hostetter with their arms folded in refusal to wrestle. Circling the ring are groupings of paintings, drawings, du-rags, and objects that act as abstract surrogates for individual spectators. Each grouping corresponds to a figure that has influenced either of the artists, and contains a collaborative work consisting of paint "WEavings." Additional works include We (2012), a presentation of bronze-plated shoes that celebrate retirement, and Feel Me (2012), an installation of du-rags that fills an entire gallery.

Carter received his MFA from California State University, Long Beach (2006) and his BFA from The Atlanta College of Art (1994). His work has been exhibited at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Savannah College of Art and Design; and The California African American Museum, Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California; and the Fundação Sindika Dokolo, Luanda, Angola. Carter lives in Long Beach, California, and is represented by Monique Meloche, Chicago.

Hostetter received both his MFA (2006) and BFA (2001) from California State University, Long Beach. His work has been exhibited at the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California and Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles. Hostetter lives in Long Beach and is represented by Sam Lee Gallery, Los Angeles.

A publication is forthcoming, with an essay by Claudine Ise, and an interview with the artist by Kendra Paitz. The exhibition and publication have been made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Programs at University Galleries are supported by the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

This exhibition is co-sponsored by MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative.

Image: Kendell Carter and Darren Hostetter, Untitled Relationships, Jay-Z Group, 2012, mixed media. Courtesy of the artists and Monique Meloche, Chicago. Photo credit: Dawn Altier 

Resources

• Kendell Carter
• Darren Hostetter
• Purchase Publication

Open January 17 through February 19, 2012

The decisions of early artists and photographers who explored and documented the American Southwest still resonate with us today. As our ancestors marked their journey, recorded their conquests, and sought to prove the American dream as their destined right they took great advantage of the subjective nature of their mediums, misrepresenting or wholly ignoring many people. From these early artworks, photographs, and later films, a framework guiding how to view and understand the region took shape. Our perceptions have shifted little from that early-engineered myth of the west.

Borderland Collective was created in response to this myopic history. Through participation and collective creation we work to realize a more complex narrative of the American Southwest, challenging the power that Edward S. Curtis, John Wayne, and their successors still hold over our conception of this region. This is achieved by working with young people in public schools across the Southwest, facilitating opportunities for them to explore and document their own personal, familial, and cultural lives through photography. The Will to Believe in Something More is a selection from our ongoing image archive and represents our ambition to bring forward critical dialogue by providing an alternative history and more inclusive portrayal of our homeland.

The photographs in this exhibition were all made by youth ranging in age from 8-20 years old living in Southwest Texas and Central New Mexico. Among them include young women navigating between Native American tradition and urban culture in Albuquerque, East Asian and African refugees new to America and searching for a sense of place in San Antonio, and young men who ranch in Mexico on the weekends but call Presidio, Texas home.

Singularly each image compels us to be accountable to the photographer's view of the world, as they ask us to look closely and reflect on what they see as significant. Collectively the photographs function as a catalyst for an inclusive discourse on the formation of identity and the nature of representation (historic and current) in both the Southwest and broader contemporary America.

By engaging with these pictures we inherently measure the space between our own lives and the people and places of these photographs. In so doing we are given an opportunity to experience new moments, transcend expectations, find commonalities, be empowered by young people, and reflect upon the possibility of something more. The exhibition serves as an index of place and time, but also of questions about who we are, where we live, and how we represent ourselves, affirming art's ability to function not only as an idolized end-product but also as a transformative space for critical inquiry, self-realization, and cultural exchange.

–Jason Reed, Curator
Director of Borderland Collective

This program is co-sponsored by the Illinois Arts Council, MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative, and Theatre of Ted.

Resources

• Borderland Collective
• Picture This
• Curator Statement

Press Release

Borderland Collective is a participatory social art project that utilizes photography to "facilitate collaborative storytelling between artists, teachers, youth, and families in the US/Mexico borderland region." The organization engages collaborative art practices as a critique of the narrow historical narratives constructed by those in power. Examples of the youth and families involved in Borderland Collective projects include: young women negotiating between their Native American traditions and the urban lifestyle in Albuquerque, NM; African and East Asian refugees searching for a sense of home in San Antonio, TX; and young men who live in Presidio, TX but work on ranches in Mexico.

Jason Reed, Founder and Director of Borderland Collective, imagines The Will to Believe in Something More as "a collective poem, one that illuminates life as a young American while simultaneously troubling forgone notions of who holds knowledge, what stories are told, and who controls the liminal space of history's creation." Taken by young people ages 8-20, the photographs included in the exhibition offer intimate access to their (often overlooked) lives and promote an inclusive dialogue about identity and the history of contemporary America.

Reed, who is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Texas State University, San Marcos, received his MFA from Illinois State University in 2007. Borderland Collective projects have been exhibited at San Antonio Central Library, San Antonio, Texas; la Asamblea Legislativa del Distrito Federal, Mexico City, Mexico; and Amnesty International Human Rights Art Festival, Washington, D.C. For more information about Borderland Collective, please visit: http://borderlandcollective.org.

The exhibition is co-sponsored by MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Diversity Initiative, and Theatre of Ted. It is also partially supported by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Open January 17 through February 19, 2012

View the Installation

A multiplicity of work by current studio, art education, and graphic design faculty in the School of Art. The Faculty Biennial features work by School of Art faculty working in painting, sculpture, ceramics, glass, drawing, photography, printmaking, video, graphic design, metals, and wood. The Studio Art, Graphic Design, and Art Education areas are represented. Among the artists exhibited are those who have shown their work nationally and internationally.

Featuring works by,

Daniella Barroquiero, Gary Justis, Bill O'Donnel, Judith Briggs, Cynthia Kukla, Melissa Oresky, Peter Bushell, Jin Lee, Laura Primozic, Benjamin DeMott, Claire Lieberman, Scott Rankin, Nancy Fewkes, Tyler Lotz, Randall Reid, Richard Finch, James Mai, Archana Shekara, Andreas Fischer, Rhondal McKinney, Sara Smelser, Brian Patrick Franklin, Veda Rives, Albion Stafford, Duriel Harris, John Miller, Tim Van Ginkel, Michael Wille

Open October 27 through December 16, 2012

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The stars are not wanted now is the largest and most comprehensive presentation of Melanie Schiff's photographs to date. Spanning the years 2005 through 2012, and bracketing the period of Schiff’s move from Chicago to Los Angeles in 2008, the exhibition illuminates ongoing concerns in the artist’s investigations of light, atmosphere, place and landscape. “The stars are not wanted now” is taken from a line in W.H. Auden’s “Funeral Blues,” an oft-recited elegiac poem decreeing the suspension of time, light and communication.  The phrase alludes to the imprints of time and memory apparent in Schiff’s solitary meditations. A close reading of the title also suggests Schiff's poetic engagement with penetrating natural light, the role of natural phenomena in her subject matter, and her transition from incorporating the histories of icons in popular music, or “stars.”

Schiff achieves dramatic, sometimes haunting, effects with everyday objects, simple gestures, or found landscapes and interiors. Feeling less bound to objects as representations of self, the artist has stepped away from her earlier references to pop and youth culture. Schiff's recent work is rooted in the tradition of photographers in the American West, such as Robert Adams, who ventured out into the landscape to look. Her prolonged engagement with specific locations and her precise sensitivity to the particularities of light yield quiet, almost mystical, revelations brimming with the residue of other lives.

Schiff has said that she speaks not from an individual's perspective about an individual experience, but more collectively about how people feel connected to certain spaces. Her photographs often invite a slowed-down viewing of an idyllic space, whether indoor or outdoor. The artist is especially interested in sites that make one aware of time, such as unpopulated graffiti-covered canals that simultaneously reference the past and suggest a science-fiction version of the future. For example, inHandball Double (2012), multiple exposures of a black and white image of a concrete handball court wreak havoc on our architectural understanding of a space. In Hellroom (2009), layers of graffiti in an abandoned concrete drainage canal form a vibrant palimpsest that implicates each of the lives that have traversed this hallmark of urban infrastructure. Schiff engages a dialogue about painting and mark making, exploring how people signify their presence and claim their own bit of territory. InClaybirds (2012), sparse vegetation on a dry California hillside is punctuated by painterly washes of bright orange. Upon closer inspection, one discovers discharged shotgun shell casings as the unexpected source of the brilliant color.

A publication is forthcoming, with an essay by Shamim Momin, a poem by Kristen VanDeventer, and an interview with the artist by exhibition curator Kendra Paitz. The exhibition and publication have been made possible by a grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Schiff's work was featured in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, and has also been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Print Center, Philadelphia; Seattle Museum of Art; Indianapolis Museum of Art; Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. Her work is included in the collections of Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas; and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. She has received a Chinati Foundation artist residency and an Artadia Award grant. Schiff attended Goldsmiths College, London and received her BFA from New York University (1999), and her MFA from University of Illinois-Chicago (2002). She lives and works in Los Angeles. Schiff is represented by Kavi Gupta, CHICAGO | BERLIN, where her concurrent solo exhibition, Sun Land, will be on view from October 26 through December 8.

Programs at University Galleries are supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Resources

• Melanie Schiff
• Melanie Schiff at CAM
• Purcahse Publication

Press

• Indy Week
• Herald Sun

Open January 11 through February 27, 2011

View the Installation

Miller & Shellabarger: Alone Together features recent collaborative works by husband-and-husband artists, Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger. Relying upon historic forms of representation such as silhouetted portraits, embroidered monograms, woven hair, and cameos, Miller & Shellabarger conjoin their likenesses to document what they call "the bittersweet rhythms of human relationships." From larger-than-life paper cut-outs, to the use of outmoded photographic techniques such as the tintype, the artists use cultural history to re-contextualize their own relationship.

The artists' performances of Seed Drawings and Sewn Together on the Illinois State University campus will provide a unique opportunity for our community to witness contemporary art practice in action.  Sewn Together involves the artists stitching themselves together from shirt collar to trouser hem, then ripping the seams apart, to evoke both cooperative harmony and separational discord. Seed Drawings will be performed throughout the Illinois State University Quad and on In Exchange (between Stevenson and Williams Halls). Using bird seed, the artists will outline the perimeters of each other's body, creating overlapping illustrations of human presence directly on the ground.

Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger graduated from Illinois State University's School of Art in 1991 and currently reside in Chicago. They have exhibited and performed jointly at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland, Maine), Western Exhibitions (Chicago), and Dolos (Miami), in addition to several art fair exclusives, including NADA (Miami), VOLTA (Basel, Switzerland), and NEXT (Chicago). They are recipients of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, the Artadia Award, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. In addition to their shared practice, each artist has an active solo career in art. The artists are represented jointly and individually by Western Exhibitions, Chicago.

Miller & Shellabarger: Alone Together is co-sponsored by MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative, Theatre of Ted, and the Illinois Arts Council, A State Agency.

Resources

• Seed Drawings and Sewn Together Performance Video
• Seed Drawings Performance Photos
• Sewn Together Performance Photos
• Miller & Shellabarger
• Western Exhibitions

Open January 11 through February 13, 2011

View the Installation

The MFA Biennial celebrates the rigorous efforts of Illinois State University's Master of Fine Arts program. Providing our extended community a wonderful opportunity to experience contemporary art created in Bloomington-Normal, the MFA Biennial highlights selected work by the 18 students currently enrolled in the program. Steeped in current issues within the field, as well as historical traditions, these students adhere to standards of excellence in order to achieve mastery in their individual studio practices. The various mediums represented include painting, video, mixed-media and sculptural installation, glass, ceramics, printmaking, and photography. 

Artists: Alex Beam-Ward, Ian Carey, Melissa Cook, Matthew Cummings, Slate Grove, Alex Hogan, Megan Kathol Bersett, Tim Kowalczyk, Lisa Lofgren, John Moran, Connie Richards Aigner, Jeff Robinson, Grace Sheese, Emily Smith, Megan Stroech, Alyssa Tauber, Paul Trapp and Jared Wittenmyer.

Open January 11 through February 27, 2011

View the Installation

Drawing inspiration from her lived environments, including her native Scotland, the Midwest, and her current home in the New England, Shona Macdonald limns her experience of landscape through the veil of memory. Whether responding to long-distance commutes by car or manipulating topographical maps, her art examines the tradition of landscape painting by mining the crevices of personal experience as source material. Macdonald's investigations into the "rough edges of landscape" are for art historian Martin Patrick: "mappings which cannot actually direct one anywhere specifically in real space, but instead are likely to move the sympathetic viewer toward various engaging states of contemplation, reverie, and wonderment." This exhibition features recent works on paper, including two-floor installations and multiple wall works.

Macdonald taught in the School of Art at I.S.U. from 1998-2006, attaining the rank of Associate Professor. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Architecture and Art History at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Resources

• Shona Macdonald

Open February 22 through March 11, 2011

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The Jettisoned is the much-anticipated premiere by collaborators Yoni Goldstein and Meredith Zielke. This three wall cinema projection presents a sweeping imaginary of frozen historical, ritual, and symbolic moments. Rendered from footage shot in Chicago, Warsaw, and Mexico City, each of the three projections suggests the illusion of time in suspension. This illusion dissipates as we catch a blink of an eye, a twist of smoke, a glisten of fluid as it streams from an elaborate network of forensic tubes. Although many of the symbolic elements found throughout the videos are informed directly by art history—from the tradition of tableau vivant to Northern European still life painting—the work has a distinctively contemporary visage made possible through the use of high-resolution film. The rigid boundaries erected by conventional interpretations of collective, conditional, and bodily identities are torn down in The Jettisoned: bodily mechanisms present sickness and health as being part of the same process of sustained loss; anachronistic renditions of epic gestures deplete the national epic of its definitive qualities; crypto-Judaic ritual offers veiled signs of a heritage while simultaneously dissolving it into working-class Mexican Catholic traditions. The Jettisoned carefully considers the rich cartography of identity at its most nebulous form.

Recent graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Goldstein and Zielke have established an international artistic presence within a short time. Their award-winning projects have appeared in numerous exhibitions, festivals, and screenings the world over. Recent artistic endeavors have included events in Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Korea, Mexico, Poland, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Resources

• The Jettisoned Project

Open February 22 through April 3, 2011

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Your Time Is Gonna Come is Jason Lazarus' first museum survey, comprising photographic works and installations from his burgeoning international artistic practice. Lazarus' work examines the nature of photography, past and present, implicitly asking viewers to assess the reach of photography within their own lives. Lazarus uses his lens and the lenses of others to unite the genres of documentary and vernacular photography with the fanaticism of celebrity worship. In so doing, he heightens our awareness of where photography stands as a fine arts tool, a cultural symbol, and as a mnemonic device. Lazarus' practice uses the image as a point of departure into a vast conceptual milieu that encompasses biography, popular culture, and the nature of meaning itself.

With pathos ranging from lighthearted to solemn, Lazarus' multifarious practice ranges from traditionally presented photographs and photograms to appropriated and solicited photographs and texts. In his framed, large-scale works, Lazarus unites the consummate technique of a studio photographer (Eric Becklin, first human to see the center of our galaxy) with the impromptu spontaneity of a vernacular street photographer (Michael Jackson Memorial Procession, June 25th, 2010 [Gary, IN to Chicago]). His towering white-on black photograms from the Orion Over Baghdad series, consist solely of snapshot titles Lazarus mined from the Flickr accounts of U.S. soldiers stationed in Iraq.

Lazarus' installations often include the photographic works of others. Too Hard To Keep, for example, is an archival repository consisting of images solicited from anyone interested in relieving themselves of a photograph that has become too difficult to keep in their lives. Other archives presented in the exhibition include excerpts from NIRVANA, a collection of snapshots and texts submitted by project participants in response to the question, "Do you remember who introduced you to the band Nirvana?" and Sarasota Photomat, an archive of surreptitiously collected images from a one-hour photo developer.

In Lazarus' unabashedly subjective re-envisioning of shared phenomena, he aims to capture the "moments and spaces in which our political, cultural, and historical landscape reveals itself."

Since receiving his MFA in Photography (2003, Columbia College, Chicago), Jason Lazarus has established an international exhibition history with solo shows at Kaune, Sudendorf Gallery (Cologne), D3 Projects (Los Angeles), Des Moines Art Center, Andrew Rafacz Gallery (Chicago), and a 12x12 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Lazarus' work has appeared in many group exhibitions, including: the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), P.P.O.W. (New York), Renaissance Society (Chicago), Das Weisse Haus (Vienna), Kunstraum (Dusseldorf, Germany), Rotterdam Hofplein (Netherlands), and Queens Museum of Art (April 2011). His work may be found in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Milwaukee Museum of Art, the Ruttenburg Collection (Chicago), and the Spertus Institute (Chicago), among others. Lazarus teaches at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is represented by Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago.

This exhibition is co-curated by Barry Blinderman and Kendra Paitz, and is co-sponsored by Alice and Fannie Fell Trust.

Resources

• Jason Lazarus
• Purchase Publication

Press

• WGLT Interview

Open February 22 through April 3, 2011

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Lori Field crafts exquisite and wondrous worlds, dreamy yet unsettling, floating somewhere between Alice's looking glass and the Brothers Grimm's darkest forest. Here, part-creature, part-humans, nearly all tattooed, coexist among flowers, baubles, butterflies, and lace. Whether they are masked, or true hybrids with twin kitty heads or antlers springing from their hair, they are nearly all female, their attendant mystiques running the gamut from sugar-and-spice to the huntress Diana and the temptress Eve. While well grounded in the history of art—Bosch, Raphael, and Redon come immediately to mind—Field's paintings are refreshingly defiant of tradition, in a world of their own.

For this site-specific installation, Field will situate her signature colored pencil and encaustic paintings against specially printed vinyl wallpaper, accompanied by silverpoint drawings, sequined paintings on tree trunk slices, and drawings made directly on the wall.

Resources

• Lori Field

Open April 12 through May 8, 2011

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Since its inception in 1974, the Student Annual has become known as the showcase for some of the most prominent art produced at Illinois State University today. This popular exhibition features a wide range of media, including myriad styles, traditions, and themes. A juried exhibition, open to all ISU students, the Student Annual offers many their first opportunity to have their work reviewed by professionals from the contemporary art world.

This year’s jurors are Tumelo Mosaka, Curator for Contemporary Art at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and Robert Rowe, Professor of Graphic Design and Interactive Media from Bradley University, Peoria.

During the Award Ceremony at the opening reception, the College of Fine Arts will recognize MFA student Megan Stroech as the 2011 Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award recipient. Additional awards sponsored by individuals, groups, and businesses from the community will be distributed, as well as scholarship awards for School of Art students.

2011 Student Annual Award Recipients: 
Congratulations to all the award winners!

Megan Stroech: Marshall Dulaney Pitcher Award (featured image)

Charlyn Reynolds: Babbitt's Books Drawing Award

Sara Pipala: The Nam Clark Drawing Award

Samantha Corinne Moderhock: Randy Reid Metals Award

Shannon Slaight: Ceramics Area Award

Tim Kowalczyk: Ceramics Area Award

Melissa Mamroth: Pete Guither Photography Award

Melanie Kaplan: Josefina Ferrán Scholarship Photography Award

Becky Dolenak: University Galleries Photography Award

Josh Stewart: Glass Area Award

Slate Grove: Charles and Jeanne Blines Scholarship Glass Award

Brandon Siscoe: Normal Editions Workshop Undergraduate Printmaking Award

Lisa Lofgren: Normal Editions Workshop Graduate Printmaking Award

Abigail Kern: Graphic Design Program Best Newcomer Award

Michele Bock: Graphic Design Program Best Typography Award

Jordan Cullen: Graphic Design Program Best Concept Award

Elyssa Reale: Graphic Design Program Best in Show Award

Allyssa Colletti: Arts Technology Program Interactive Media Award

Brandon Siscoe: Glen Lapekas Scholarship Sculpture Award

Michele Bock: Glen Lapekas Scholarship Sculpture Award

Connie Richards-Aigner: University Galleries Sculpture Award

Paul Trapp: University Galleries Painting Award

Timothy Winkelman: University Galleries Painting Award

Matthew Cummings: School of Art Best in Show Award

Open April 12 through May 8, 2011

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Brett Balogh’s installations map the imperceptible wavelengths of radio frequencies by capturing these elements from the surrounding environment and translating them into video and sound projections. Tracing the musical lineage and artistic contributions of John Cage, Christian Marclay, Philip Jeck, and points in between, Balogh relies upon analog media technologies to augment our senses of sight and hearing by providing access to worlds beyond our direct observation.

Installed in University Galleries, Gallery 2.5 from April 12 through May 8, 2011, Noospherium drew form from the ethereal formlessness of Hertzian radio frequencies. From the Greek, “mind” and “sphere,” noosphere refers to a theoretical space of collective thought hovering around us with omniscience and omnipresence. Balogh interprets this phenomenon by capturing the frequencies found in this space and translating their wave patterns into bodies of color and sound that morph and collide. Noospherium departs from simple illustration of commercial borders between radio and television stations to synthesize a wholly new, abstract cartographical view. The experience creates both visual and aural saturation, prompting what Balogh refers to as a “conversation with the space.” It is this conversation that prompts us to consider how the amorphous boundaries created by these broadcast signals may reverberate with our own perception.

Brett Balogh’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Hyde Park Arts Center (Chicago), P.P.O.W. (New York), Gallery Project (Ann Arbor), NY Art Book Fair (MoMA PS1, New York), Devotion Gallery (New York), and Green Sound (San Francisco). He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2007) and his BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania (1999).

Resources

• Brett Balogh: Noospherium Video
• Brett Balogh

Open May 23 through August 7, 2011

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Beginning in Gallery 1: Magnificent Menagerie is a circus of artistry and history in motion! We are devoting all 4 galleries to the pageantry and performance of circus, with artistic works and historic artifacts on display ranging in date from 1890 to the present. In fact, the most recent work was completed on-site May 27, as artist Glen C. Davies appeared alive and in person to create a gigantic sideshow banner specifically for our exhibition! View this and many other extraordinary works adorning our walls, floors, ceilings, and building façade. Installed to cajole the memory and excite your imagination, Magnificent Menagerie is the only place to view the region's largest pink elephant—for a limited time only!

Magnificent Menagerie is a tightrope act that asks viewers to balance history and art with their own interpretative meanings. Tigers are leaping and elephants are dancing between 21 circus posters, interspersed with drawings by Danell Dvorak, sideshow banners by Glen C. Davies, film footage from circuses past (1930s-1960s), and a video of I.S.U.'s Gamma Phi Circus performance from April 16, 2011. Gamma Phi's tightrope has been stretched taut with a bicycle stranded without a rider. Modern triple and duo trapezes hang opposite the Valentino's Double trap and catchbar—last used in 1950. Each aerial feature hangs heavy without movement, anticipating your investigation.

Only in Galleries 2, 2.5 & 3: Come and see the mysterious museum of the sideshow where curiosity's arousal is enough to inundate the senses with mystique and wonder! A tributary feeding both into and away from the midway, the sideshow offers access into the unknown. A river of inquiry chartered by commerce, the sideshow explores the exotic, erotic, spectacular, and amusing while challenging one's own sense of reality. In Gallery 2, Davies' sideshow banners are contextualized by Sverre O. Braathen's photographs of 1940s and 1950s midways and sideshows, as well as Fred G. Johnson's sideshow banners. In Gallery 2.5, visitors are granted access to Davies' sketchbook. Configured into a cloud of curiosity on the gallery wall, segments of tracing paper, torn canvas, and scraps of paper offer intimate views of his artistic process and history. In Gallery 3, the clowns, dancers, elephants, and dogs in Dvorak's drawings perform in still silence, leaving only the suggestions of movement. Within this space, community members are encouraged to share their memories of circus past and present, whether through illustration or written commentary.

Davies traveled with the circus beginning in 1973 as an artist employed to paint circus signage, including banners. His work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Krannert Art Museum, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Huntsville Museum of Art. His works reside in the collections of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, McDonald's Corporation, the Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, as well as numerous private collections. Davies' first-hand experience and artistic accomplishments have positioned him to make significant contributions to the history of the circus and the sideshow in particular. His writing is central to the 1995 classic, Freaks, Geeks, & Strange Girls: Sideshow Banners of the Great American Midway. Davies lives and works in Urbana, IL.

Dvorak works as a painter, ceramicist, and teaching artist. With numerous artist-in-residences throughout the state of Illinois, including recent appointments with multiple schools districts, 

Dvorak's artistic pursuits are linked directly with community empowerment and education. Her teaching experience is deepened by work with the Illinois Migrant Council, Eureka College, and Heartland Community College. Dvorak has exhibited her work nationally. She completed her graduate work at Illinois State University and her bachelor's at Illinois Wesleyan University, and currently lives in Bloomington, IL.

Truly a community collaboration, Magnificent Menagerie was co-organized with Illinois State University's Circus and Allied Arts Collection at Milner Library and the Gamma Phi Circus. The breadth of historic circus content was loaned by Milner Library, and the majority of the performance equipment displayed in the exhibition was loaned by Gamma Phi Circus. Additional artifacts were loaned by the Flying Valentinos—George Valentine, Lorraine Valentine, and Sue Pelto—courtesy of the Valentine Family.

Resources

• Glen C. Davies paints Magnificent Menagerie exhibition banner
• Glen C. Davies
• Danell Dvorak
• Dan Barth
• T. Daniel and Laurie Willets

Open August 16 through October 16, 2011

The Mobile Projects Unit's program, Picture This, creates a cycle of learning that circulates students through exhibitions at University Galleries, provides classroom instruction related to artwork on exhibit, and offers students an opportunity to demonstrate what they have learned as they display their own works during a public exhibition at University Galleries. Picture This is research-driven and based upon Illinois Learning Standards for Fine Arts. This program will take place during the 2011-2012 academic year.

Picture This incorporates contemporary art and recent developments in teaching to establish a positive environment for creativity and personal exploration. At its core, the project provides visual literacy tools for youth to see meaning in the images around them. For many, looking for the "art of the everyday" is a wholly new way of seeing the world. Pop-up ads on a computer screen or photographs kept in a family photo album may have limited "artistic" value, but for the Mobile Projects Unit, we see these images as subjects of inquiry and study, much as an anthropologist would. Our process uses a combination of experiential and collaborative learning to reflect upon the nature of these images—their design, origin, purpose, and cultural value—to devise ways of making new images and new meaning through artistic inquiry and creation. We enable students to reflect upon their personal experiences—aspects of their daily lives—as their subject matter. In a sense, participants must become "researchers" of their own lives by thinking about who they are in the context of the world around them. The end result of Picture This is that students become active in their culture, becoming producers and not simply consumers of the culture that they are immersed in every day.

Picture This is tied directly to two photography exhibitions at University Galleries. The first, The Truth is Not in the Mirror: Photography and a Constructed Identity (August 16 – October 16, 2011), is a major survey of 23 contemporary photographers. The second, The Will to Believe in Something More, by the Borderland Collective (January 17 – February 19, 2012), features documentary photographs taken by youth in the borderlands between Texas and Mexico. Lessons created for both exhibitions include projects on identity, culture, the physics of light, and photography's history. Each lesson is designed to help students to "picture" themselves and their community. In order to complete the cycle of learning, the students are able to see the results of their development as they view their own images on display during the 2012 summer exhibition at University Galleries.

University Galleries has received generous support from the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation and Target. The Mirza Arts and Culture Fund of the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation provides field trip assistance for up to 8 rural junior and/or senior high schools from within the Regional Office of Education District #17. In addition to field trip support for qualifying schools (e.g. bussing, fuel, substitute costs, etc.), programming includes lesson programming presented in the classroom by an art professional, in addition to a Gallery 1 exhibition for participating students during the Summer of 2012. Support from Target provides cameras and materials used during the project. Although Picture This is open to any regional school, field trip money is designated for rural schools only.

Please contact University Galleries to become involved or call 309.438.5487.

Open August 16 through October 16, 2011

View the Installation

The Truth is Not in the Mirror: Photography and a Constructed Identity explores the nature of portraits and portraiture in contemporary photography. Including works by 23 photographers, the imagery engages the viewer in an active dialogue. The contemporary photographic portrait is often a highly constructed artifice whose intent and purpose is to comment on the status of the individual and community and to challenge or trick the viewer into looking deeper into issues of identity, with those portrayed serving as ciphers for the photographer's point of view.

The photographs selected for this exhibition offer a range of image-making strategies: For example, David Hockney relies upon Cubist fracturing to magnify and segregate the details of the subject in his multifaceted portraits, whereas Kelli Connell digitally creates double self-portraits that consist of one seamless image built from several. Nikki S. Lee becomes the subject of her work, relying upon others to take her snapshot portraits. Lee Friedlander flattens the picture plane by merging foreground and background, confusing the relationships between the photographer and his subjects.

Each photographer blurs the parameters of truth and believability in their own way with a diverse range of approaches to visual storytelling. Mickalene Thomas' staged portraits of African American women directly reference historical artworks, while LaToya Ruby Frazier's images depict the emotive states of people whose relationships are disintegrating in front of the camera. Works by Graham Miller seem to tell a fragment of a longer story, while Philip Lorca diCorcia's staged fictions use participants unaware of their participation in the work, leaving viewers to wonder where the story begins and ends.

The artists in the exhibition include: Tina Barney, Claire Beckett, Valerie Belin, Dawoud Bey, Jesse Burke, Kelli Connell, Michael Corridore, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Jason Florio, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Andy Freeberg, Lee Friedlander, David Hockney, Nikki S. Lee, Graham Miller, Martin Parr, Thomas Ruff, The Sartorialist, Alec Soth, Will Steacy, Larry Sultan, and Mickalene Thomas.

This exhibition was organized by the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

University Galleries is incorporating The Truth is Not in the Mirror into a year-long project entitled Picture This, which brings youth from the community into the gallery for photography workshops. During the exhibition, each student will use the works on view as inspiration to visualize their own identity and sense of community through creating their own photographs.

Resources

• Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University
• Exhibition Catalogue
• Haggerty Museum of Art: The Truth is Not in the Mirror Flickr gallery

Open August 16 through October 23, 2011

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This exhibition features the work of 13 artists from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, as a completion of an artists’ exchange between MFA students from both Illinois State University and UMASS. Initiated by Shona MacDonald, former ISU Associate Professor, and current Associate Professor in the Department of Art, Architecture and Art History at UMASS, the exchange was designed to showcase works by emerging MFA students from both institutions while highlighting a developing relationship between the two schools. UMASS held its exhibition of Illinois State University works, Four More Than 2, from March 21 through April 1, 2011, in the UMASS Student Union Art Gallery.

Artists exhibited in the current exhibition include: Theresa Antonellis, Katie Baker, John Michael Byrd, Courtney Cullen, Michelle Dickson, Josh Field, Michele Lauriat, Ariel Lavery, Hannah Richards, Chad Seelig, Steve Snell, Karla Stingerstein, and Caroline Valites.

Resources

• University of Massachusets: Studio Arts Graduate Program

Open August 16 through October 23, 2011

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Artists Josué Pellot and Héctor Arce-Espasas embed the tropical color and festive imagery of their native Puerto Rico with a critique of tourism's myth of Paradise, a modern manifestation of colonialism. Featuring both individual and collaborative works, Pellot and Arce-Espasas play upon their shared heritage to investigate national identity, international commerce, and the pleasures connoted by views of the exotic tropics. In one collaboration, Arce-Espasas layers neon-hued graffiti palm fronds and pineapples upon Pellot's choreographed portraits of provocatively posed Latinas on horses, embellishing sexuality with the heat of an equatorial paradise. Illuminated pineapples become the embodiment of culture, transubstantiating the subject's body into that of a delectable fruit. Both artists struggle with the alchemy responsible for transforming culture into consumable tourist objects. Their photographs, paintings, and installations express a desire to unravel the meaning of cultural objects and the dissemination of those meanings throughout the global marketplace.

Pellot currently resides in Chicago. He received his MA from Northwestern University and his BFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Pellot has received attention through a number of solo exhibitions, among them: Universidad Catolica De Puerto Rico, Ponce, Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte de Caguas, Caguas, Puerto Rico; Chicago Cultural Center; and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago. His work has been included in group exhibitions at: Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Contemporary Art Society, London; Vane Contemporary, Newcastle, England; and National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago.

Arce-Espasas currently lives and works in New York. He received his MFA from Hunter College and his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Arce-Espasas had his first solo exhibition at Lloyd Dobler Gallery, Chicago. His work has been included in exhibitions at: Don't Projects, Paris; Vane Contemporary, Newcastle, England; Museu da Cidade, Lisbon; Contemporary Art Society, London; Galeria Candela, San Juan, Puerto Rico; The Swiss Institute, New York; and Betty Rymer Gallery, Chicago.

Resources

• Artist Statement

Open October 29 through December 2, 2011

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This exhibition features the work of Art Education students who completed or will complete requirements for certification between Fall 2010 and Spring 2012.

Resources

• Illinois State University Art Education Program

Open October 29 through December 18, 2011

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Irena Knezevic' artistic practice includes the creation of participatory situations that integrate objects, video, writing, and performance into installations and events. These works engage the public, making them active agents in the construction of meaning. Informed by histories of architecture and art, landscape, trauma, memory, lost economies, nationalism, feminism, and institutional authority, Knezevic densely layers references that range from conceptual artist Sol LeWitt to Soviet satirist Mikhail Bulgakov, and architect Mies van der Rohe to former Yugoslav Communist leader Josip Broz Tito. She asks pertinent questions that not only draw parallels between contemporary global concerns and their historical precedents, but also allow one to imagine alternative histories. Knezevic's work explores the political implications of revolutionary thought.

Knezevic's exhibition at University Galleries will feature an architectural installation inspired by the labyrinth of Greek mythology, within which photographs, videos, sculptures, performance scores, and posters will be displayed. The artist will direct and take video of dancers from the School of Theatre's Dance Area as they perform her site-specific choreography; stage a video screening with a live intermission at the Normal Theater; present a short concert featuring dancers from the School of Theatre's Dance Area and musicians from ISU Bands; and coordinate a public performance with ISU's Debate Team.

Knezevic is a Serbian-born artist based in St. Louis. While living in Serbia, she was a student organizer protesting against the Slobodan Milosevic-led government. Knezevic moved to Chicago where she received her BA from Columbia College and her MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has recently performed, lectured and/or exhibited her work at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; Brown University, Providence, RI; Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; the Moscow Youth Biennale, Moscow; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Knezevic is Assistant Professor at Washington University, St. Louis.

This program is co-sponsored by the Alice and Fannie Fell Trust and MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Office Diversity Initiative.

Resources

• Irena Knezevic (Haiduk)

Press

• ARTforum

Open October 29 through December 18, 2011

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This memorial exhibition for Illinois State University alumnus Todd DeVriese (1960 – 2010) features six of the artist's most recent mixed media works. Statements from DeVriese's students, mentors, and collaborators are included. Organized by Normal Editions Workshop.

Resources

• Normal Editions Workshop

Open October 29 through December 18, 2011

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Uwe Jonas, visiting artist in the School of Art, exhibits six wall paintings covering the entirety of the Gallery 2.5 project space.

Resources

• Jonas Uwe
• Illinois State University Visiting Artist Program

Open December 1, 2011

To remember, to support, to educate…University Galleries of Illinois State University is teaming up with the McLean County AIDS Task Force to increase HIV/AIDS awareness. HIV/AIDS continues to have a devastating impact on individuals and families, both here and abroad. As we take time to recognize the lives of those lost and those living, let us remember that awareness and education are the most potent tools to combatting HIV/AIDS.

To coincide with World AIDS Day, arts organizations annually recognize Day With(out) Art on December 1. This year, University Galleries is bringing attention to those who have been lost to AIDS by supporting those in our community who are living with AIDS-related illnesses. We are collecting gas/grocery gifts cards (or money to purchase gift cards) for the McLean County AIDS Task Force to distribute during their ongoing Holiday Basket drive.

Please bring your donations to University Galleries between Monday, November 28 and Friday, December 9.

To find out how you can get involved with the McLean County AIDS Task Force, please visit http://www.mcatf.org/ or call 309.827.2437.

Open January 12 through February 11, 2010

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This exhibition of photographs exposes the difficulties facing young, poor, disabled, single, or imprisoned mothers.

Co-organized by Women's and Gender Studies, Department of History, and the Visual Culture Program.

Open February 16 through March 28, 2010

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University Galleries of Illinois State University will host a TASK Party with artist Oliver Herring on Saturday, February 6, 2010, at 1:00 p.m. We would like to invite the community to take part in this unique opportunity, which is free and open to anyone age fifteen and up.

TASK is an improvisational collaboration between Herring and a group of participants—generally strangers—that provides a complex, messy, open-ended outlet for creativity. Participants both write and randomly select tasks. Then, using simple, accessible materials like tape, cardboard, aluminum foil, markers, and string, each person interprets chosen tasks. As a participant completes a task, he or she writes a new one for the bucket and draws a different one to interpret. Previous tasks have included directives such as: "Start a revolution;" "Recreate the Iwo Jima picture;" "Defy gender roles;" and "Cut out 40 headlines from newspapers and do something with them." In Herring's words, "the continuous, simultaneous conception and interpretation of tasks fill the 'stage' with seemingly chaotic, yet purpose-driven activity: a complex, ever-shifting, socio-sculptural arrangement of bodies and objects."

Following the TASK Party at University Galleries, involving participation by diverse community organizations and individuals, we will install TASK+, an exhibition of Herring's photographs, videos, and photo-sculptures. The artist's work will be displayed amidst artifacts and detritus created during the party. The participants' contributions will be absolutely integral to contextualizing Herring's other works, which themselves derive from community-based collaborations.

TASK is a co-curated by Barry Blinderman and Kendra Paitz. 
The TASK Party is co-sponsored by Target, The Town of Normal Harmon Arts Grant, the Alice and Fannie Fell Trust, the Illinois State University Parents Association Board, and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Resources

• TASK Party videos (YouTube)
• TASK Party Photos
• TASK Poster
• Oliver Herring
• TASK Midwest
• TASK Master (Book Review)
• Purchase Publication

Press

• Art of TASK at ISU: A party like no other (Pantagraph)
• ISU Galleries, artist TASK people to get creative (Pantagraph)
• "This is your TASK, Go Wild." (Vidette)
• TASK+ Review
• WGLT Interview

Open February 16 through April 12, 2010

View the Installation

Resources

• Bob Jones

Open February 19 through April 18, 2010

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University Galleries of Illinois State University will host a solo exhibition of Shinique Smith’s work in our project space, Gallery 2.5, from February 16 through March 28, 2010.

Smith will create a site-specific installation, painting and collaging elements onto plywood panels installed directly on the gallery’s walls. She will also use objects found in our community, including discarded rugs and lamps, to transform the gallery space. Smith’s installations envelop the viewer in an energetic burst of painting inspired by Japanese calligraphy, Abstract Expressionism, and graffiti, punctuated by discarded clothing and objects. These pieces tie ecological themes of accumulation, disposal, and waste to elements of popular culture and the artist’s personal narrative.

Smith received both her M.F.A. and her B.F.A. from The Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work has received critical attention in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, ARTNews, and Art in America and has been included in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C. Smith will give an artist lecture on Tuesday, February 16 at 4 pm in 145 Center for the Visual Arts.

Resources

• Shinique Smith

Open April 6 through May 9, 2010

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Since 1974, the Student Annual has been one of our most popular and well-attended exhibitions, featuring a wide range of media. Artworks submitted and displayed reflect the changing concerns and trends of the art world at large. Open to all Illinois State University students—not exclusively art majors—the Student Annual provides a forum for students to submit their work for review by professional artists, designers, critics, and curators. It also provides our community an excellent opportunity to evaluate and enjoy numerous artworks by students attending Illinois State. An opening reception on April 6 from 5 to 7 pm will include an awards ceremony and scholarship announcements.

The exhibition awards, sponsored by individuals, groups, and businesses in the community, reward students monetarily and professionally via selection by visiting jurors. The juror for studio work is Jason Lazarus, an artist and Instructor in Photography at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia College, Chicago. The juror for graphic design is Bradley DiCharry, Assistant Professor at University of Iowa and freelance designer for Widgets and Stone, Chattanooga, TN.

The Marshall Dulaney Pitcher award, endowed in 1970 by the family of Marshall Pitcher, honors MFA student Trew Schriefer.

2010 Student Annual Award Recipients: 
Best in Show: Misty Long 
Drawing: Steven Ciezki 
Photo: Britten Traughber 
Photo: Teryn Brown 
Printmaking, Best Undergraduate: Johari Huggins 
Printmaking, Best Graduate: Nick Satinover 
Ceramics: Kim McHenry 
Ceramics: Shelby Fraher 
Painting: Paul Trapp 
Painting: Brittney Hudgins 
Painting: Kelly Carter-Allen 
Painting: Eric Burton 
Sculpture: Brad Jensen 
Sculpture: Brandon Siscoe 
Jewelry: Joseph E. Mandrell 
Glass: Amanda Patenaude 
Glass: Matt Cummings 
Glass: Charlyn Reynolds 
Best in Design: Sean Grady 
Best in Typography: Arlene Waclawek 
Best in Concept: Steve Marsh 
Interactive Media and Technology: David Nichols

Open April 6 through May 9, 2010

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For more than twenty years, painter Julia Fish has integrated the formal aspects of her physical surroundings with the precepts of Minimalist painting. Emergent patterns directly referencing floor tiles, siding, stair profiles, and architectural footprints form the basis of Fish’s abstract compositions. For this exhibition, she will install a selection of studies and drawings she created between 1996 and 2010. 

Fish’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Martin-Gropius Bau, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; and The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. Her work is currently on display in the 2010 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is Professor of Studio Arts in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Resources

• Julia Fish

Open May 25 through September 5, 2010

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This exhibition features nearly 100 paintings, drawings, prints, mixed media works, and ceramics by 88 artists. Though most of the work was created during the 20th century, the time span ranges from 1738 through 2008. Many of the artworks included have not been on display in decades.

The scale and selection of this exhibition presented a unique curatorial opportunity to arrange works of art by theme, genre, color, and composition, rather than by historical period or style. Some groupings are obvious, as seen in an entire wall of depictions of men, opposite one solely of women. Others are more allusive, such as a tiny Sanskrit manuscript paired with an abstract drawing composed of typewritten letters.

Prints by famous artists including Picasso, Goya, Rauschenberg, Goya, Dalí, Kollwitz, and Warhol, are interspersed with work by lesser known artists like Chicago surrealist painter Gertrude Abercrombie, and photographer Britten Traughber, a 2010 graduate of the School of Art's M.F.A. program.

Open June 17 through June 23, 2010

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The Present Perfect with Art21, co-presented with PBS and 92YTribeca, is a live-streamed interactive event about the role of collaboration and performance in contemporary art and everyday life. Artists Oliver Herring and Laurie Simmons will explore how elements of performance influence their work and how they incorporate media--from film and video to dance, fashion, and photography--in their creative collaborations.

Join us for a screening of the live event, featuring Herring and Simmons in conversation with Robert MacNeil, selected participants' submissions, and Herring and Simmons performing participant-submitted choreography.
Wednesday, June 23 at 7 p.m.

A combination of Oliver Herring-inspired choreography and collaborative fun! 

Responding to Oliver Herring’s Three Day Weekend ‘seed choreography,’ staff and students at University Galleries of Illinois State University, generated their own take on performance and collaboration.

University Galleries' participation in The Present Perfect is coordinated by Kendra Paitz and Tony Preston-Schreck.

Resources

• Art21: The Present Perfect

Open August 10 through September 5, 2010

This exhibition features artwork made by young community artists in response to our current exhibit, Selections from the Permanent Collection. This collaboration with the Children's Discovery Museum, the Boys and Girls Club of Bloomington-Normal, and Illinois State Univerity's College for Youth includes more than 90 works by artists 5 to 16 years old.

Organized by Tony Preston-Schreck.

Open August 17 through September 5, 2010

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Jin Lee finds the sublime in the everyday, turning her lens on weeds and detritus near her studio on Chicago's West Side. Lee's project is presented through an Individual Artist Support grant from the Illinois Arts Council.

Open September 18 through October 17, 2010

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University Galleries is pleased to announce the opening of the 2010 Alumni Spectacular.  Organized in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the College of Fine Arts, this open-entry exhibition includes work by Art and Arts Technology alumni who attended Illinois State University since the 1940s. Although there are many works by artists who received BFA or MFA degrees at ISU, neither a degree in studio art nor a diploma was a requirement for admission. 

The exhibition, the most encompassing alumni show ever installed in University Galleries, includes drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, metals, glass, paintings, collages, assemblages, videos, and digital works by 220 artists (at press time) from 28 states across the U.S. The only stipulation imposed was that each piece must measure no more than 20 x 20 inches for two-dimensional works, or 20 x 20 x 60 inches high for three-dimensional works. 

The salon-style hanging of the artworks, necessitated by the sheer volume of work received, emphasizes the inclusionary nature of the exhibition as well as common threads among various artworks.

Open September 18 through October 17, 2010

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National, curated by Adam Farcus, includes works by Maria Gaspar, Matthew Paul Jinks, Rebecca Mir, Irene Perèz, Allison Yusakawa, and Adam Farcus. A group of people who share a common identity and ancestry are designated members of a nation; however, this national identity is defined, and often re-defined, by its members. Nations are frequently identified by a variety of prescribed demarcations including country, state, and region. The people of a nation leave their marks on it, altering the landscape and constructing a national identity. In a similar manner, the cultural markers of people's homelands shape their personal identities. Each artist explores nationality through personal experience and related cultural issues. 

Open September 18 through October 17, 2010

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Organized by James Hejl and cometogetherstudios

Featuring: Angel Ambrose, Michele Bock, Harold Boyd, Todd DeVriese, Michael Dubina, Herb Eaton, Rhea Edge, Gerard Erley, Mark Forth, Rick Harney, James Hejl, Fay Lee, Sandra Oglesby, Michelle Peterson, Lyle Salmi, Chris Starkey

For more than thirty years, the historic Lang-Fuller Printing Company building in downtown Bloomington has housed artists' studios. This exhibition features two works by each artist: one created while working in a Lang-Fuller Building studio, and one created recently. The exhibition environment reflects the artists' studios at the Lang-Fuller Building. Textual and photographic documentation of the building's history accompanies the exhibition.

Resources

• cometogether studios

Open October 26 through December 2, 2010

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Permeating the walls of Gallery 2.5 with colorful explosions of frenetic energy, Maehl's drawings and sketches provide an intimate view of his working process. These works frame the entryway to Gallery 3, where Maehl's recent paintings and sculpture are on display. Created from memories of the "nowhere" places he occupied during his sojourns in Iceland, these introspective reflections are suffused with the sounds of Maehl's original musical compositions.

NOWHERE, directly refers to the works in Gallery 3, the self-described "nowhere" places Maehl spent his time: caves, forests, and a spot overlooking the wild North Atlantic, which felt to him like "the end of the world." The title also draws attention to Maehl's physical and temporal distance from his subject matter. No longer in Iceland, Maehl is "now here" in Chicago, painting, and dreaming of the formative time he spent in another country.

Maehl has collaborated with the internationally recognized performance art group, Gelitin, since 2007. He is also a member of the Iceland-based collective, MoMS. His work has been exhibited in the prestigious Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy; as well as at Deitch Projects, New York; Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; and Lost Horse Gallery, Reykjavik, Iceland. Maehl received his B.F.A. from Illinois State University in 2005 and currently lives and works in Chicago.

This exhibition is curated by Kendra Paitz and is sponsored in part by Theatre of Ted and the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

Resources

• Schuyler Maehl

Open October 26 through December 2, 2010

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On view in Gallery 2, The Twelve Labors of Hercules suite is the culmination of Pozzatti's career-long interest in this enduring Greek mythological subject, and how its themes of strife, heroism and redemption resonate in our own time. Recently published by Normal Editions Workshop, these large-scale lithographs showcase Pozzatti's supple and expressive drawing technique.

Pozzatti is a Distinguished Professor of Fine Arts, Emeritus at Indiana University. He received his both his M.F.A. (1950) and his B.F.A. (1948) from the University of Colorado. Pozzatti's work has been exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, France; and the Art Institute of Chicago. Pozzatti lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana.

The Twelve Labors of Hercules has been supported in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency. This exhibition is organized by Normal Editions Workshop.

Resources

• Rudy Pozzatti
• Normal Editions Workshop

Open October 26 through December 18, 2010

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University Galleries of Illinois State University is pleased to present works by internationally exhibited, multi-media artist, Nadia Hotait. Hotait uses sound and video to deal with the boundaries of culture and the nature of identity. With dual Spanish-Lebanese citizenship and ties to Illinois (she received her M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009), she uncovers beauty within complex geopolitical issues, making her subjects both relevant and accessible to any audience. Although Hotait has exhibited in France, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Spain, and throughout the U.S., preferring the fleeting happiness on earth is her first museum survey. The accompanying programs present a unique cultural opportunity for the Bloomington-Normal community.

Hotait will exhibit six video installations at University Galleries, as well as an outdoor video projection appearing nightly on the façade of the Center for Visual Arts, and two films at the historic Normal Theater. These works include cultural narratives stemming from Mexico, Lebanon, and the United States. In Do you know who I am?, Hotait visits a small Mexican village and films a reversal of the typical journalistic investigation. Hotait’s voice is heard from behind the camera asking numerous residents: “Do you know who I am?” Their answers are demonstrative examples of the assumptions and stereotypes we all make as we attempt to identify the other in our midst.

Hotait returns to Lebanon to uncover love (58 Degrees), loss (Preferring the Fleeting Happiness on Earth), and the metaphysics of humor (The Eternal Happiness in Heaven). She further explores her cultural heritage using melodic storytelling—a tradition used throughout the Arab world—as a lullaby for clothed bodies simultaneously suspended in a state of freedom and detention in Besides the Sea.

Co-sponsored by MECCPAC, a Dean of Students Diversity Initiative and the Unit for International Linkages, Office of International Studies and Programs.

Resources

• Nadia Hotait

Open December 10 through December 18, 2010

University Galleries of Illinois State University will screen two versions of A Fire in My Belly (1986-87), a short film by David Wojnarowicz, from Friday, December 10 through Saturday, December 18. The four-minute version of the film was recently removed from the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition entitled Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, the "first major museum exhibition to focus on sexual difference in the making of modern American portraiture." 

Appearing within Wojnarowicz's film, among images of slaughterhouses, amputees, bandaged hands, and charred bodies, is an eleven-second scene of fire ants crawling over a crucifix. William Donohue, president of the Catholic League, excoriated the video as "hate speech" designed to "assault the sensibilities of Christians." Wojnarowicz's own words from an interview with Barry Blinderman in 1989 belie Donohue's simplistic interpretation of his imagery. Regarding the role of animals as symbolic imagery in his work, the artist stated: "Animals allow us to view certain things that we wouldn't allow ourselves to see in regard to human activity. In the Mexican photographs with the coins and the clock and the gun and the Christ figure and all that, I used the ants as a metaphor for society because the social structure of the ant world is parallel to ours." (from "The Compression of Time: An Interview with David Wojnarowicz," in Tongues of Flame, University Galleries, 1990). 

The four-minute edit of A Fire in My Belly will be projected continuously onto a screen visible throughout the 300-foot main hallway of the Center for the Visual Arts. In addition, the full 21-minute version will play continuously on a monitor in University Galleries' lobby. Reading materials will be available in the gallery lobby, including copies of Tongues of Flame , the book University Galleries produced for Wojnarowicz' 1990 retrospective exhibition of the same name; a scrapbook of articles and ephemera related to the Tongues of Flame exhibition; and news articles related to the National Portrait Gallery's decision. 

Both versions of the film are courtesy of The Estate of David Wojnarowicz and P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, and The Fales Library and Special Collections, New York University. 

Resources

• Exhibition Publication Website
• P.P.O.W. Gallery
• National Portrait Gallery