The Art of 2011

A Year of Unexpected Strangeness

“The unexpected strangeness of the moment.” Artist Dario Robleto used those words to explain the qualities he sought in his art, exhibited in the Des Moines Art Center’s (DMAC) “Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens.” His phrase works just as well though as an explanation of the year 2011 in Des Moines’ art scene. It was a year in which unexpected media such as dirt, projected light and neon often stood in for paints, when green eggs and lasers became sculpture, when worldly artists like Bill Luchsinger unexpectedly turned their visions upon local subjects, and when Stephanie Brunia’s girls in white underwear, Tom Jackson’s children with guns and Jeremiah Elebl’s decapitated humans became subjects of exceptional exhibitions.

The year ended with an unexpectedly strange controversy. Half a century after Andy Warhol placed low culture’s signage (Campbell‘s) on the walls of high culture’s grandest palaces, local paragons of elite culture raised a public fuss about Subway’s signage on Subway’s own venues, at least when they were visible from the perspectives of high culture. Still excellence stood out amidst the strangeness:

Artist of the Year - Sarah Grant’s exhibition at Olson-Larsen demonstrated a new clarity, as if the artist simply intuited when less had become more. Her new work was also more narrative and less abstract than in past years. A ten year retrospective of Paintpushers, almost all artists who were recruited here and employed by Grant, further demonstrated her extraordinary influence on the city’s entire art scene.

People of the Year - TJ and Jackie Moberg nearly doubled the number of artists in their Moberg Gallery stable, salvaged the defunct Art Store’s inventory, saved all the jobs of that company’s employees, opened Moberg Framing, Moberg Editions (an online gallery selling inexpensive art) and Moberg Consultations (a full service firm that directs clients from design to installation of artworks). TJ also worked on a major installation at Prairie Meadows.

Painter of the Year - Matthew Kluber’s series of abstract “paintings” in his DMAC exhibition fused color, line, digital formations, and projected light to create dramatic visual spaces that embraced new technologies.

Exhibition of the Year (museum) - German Anselm Reyle’s exhibition at DMAC introduced Iowans to the contemporary German scene, where in the artist’s words “Cologne is the past. Berlin is the future.” Chrome, bronze, piano lacquer, plinth, aluminum, glass, neon, electric cables, rust, plastic, LED lights, and wood veneer hung out with more traditional Modernist media.

Exhibition of the Year (gallery) - Travis Rice’s “Contamination” became the largest one person show ever at Moberg, taking up the entire gallery plus an outdoor wall. It was inspired by a sci fi film was about alcoholism, green eggs and coffee, in which the green eggs plotted to take over the world.

Exhibition of the Year (non-traditional venue) - “Jeremiah Elbel” at Mars Coffeehouse exhibited a monstrously talented young artist’s black and white, tar and charcoal portraits of decapitated humans - some Mexican drug war victims, some victims of Islamic terrorists, others of Shari'a, or French law.

Design of the Year - InVision’s two story, glass and steel addition to the Iowa State Veterinary Teaching Hospital glowed like a sanctuary on a storm-plagued prairie. It finally presented a coming home platform for Christian Peterson’s iconic statue “The Good Doctor.”

New Artist of the Year - Madai Taylor painted with earth, red dirt of the South and black loam of Iowa, mixed with gesso. That paint was applied in layers on which he scratched while they were drying, much like the plows of agriculture scratch at the same dirt in its natural environment. He process becomes a unique form of shorthand - a primitive scripture.

Rising Star - Stephanie Brunia, a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, became DMAC curator Gilbert Vicario’s latest discovery. That museum showed a series of her prints that mimicked classics like Leonardo‘s “The Last Supper,” Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” and John Everette Millais’ “Ophelia” with decidedly modern, edgy takes of young girls in white underwear.

Sarah Grant

Des Moines’ Art Mama

Sarah Grant is the mother of Des Moines‘ ar scene. More than any person, agency or organization, she gave birth to it, bestowed an identity on it and nurtured its growth. When Grant started Sticks in 1985, as a one person studio, committed artists in Des Moines had to choose whether they wanted to be artists, or to live here. Her company let them do both, by giving full time jobs to some 100 artists at a time. They formed the creative core that snowballed into a legitimate art scene. Sticks makes furniture and art that is now sold in fine galleries and art museums all over the country. Its design work has become as recognizable as an icon, making it easy for tourists from Des Moines to spot it in Los Angeles or New York and feel some local pride.

Grant’s personal art career is also best known in large scale. She constructed, with Michigan architect Stephen Fry, a 30,000 pound kitchen table atop downtown Grand Rapids’ Blue Bridge.

Her giant murals “What I Love About Iowa State,” “We Shall Know Iowa State University by Its Myriad Parts,” and “My World Is So Full of Many Things,” grace Iowa State’s campus. She won an Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Grant has also chronicled her emotional life in abstract paintings. Her annual shows at Olson-Larsen Galleries have been distinguished by moody colors that have made her fans either happy or sad for her. Whether dark or sunny, Grant’s paintings have always been characterized by heavy layering. Even in gay years, they revealed a compulsiveness that almost seemed penitent. One fan called it “the yin to the carefree yang of Sticks.”

Her current exhibition of new work is remarkably restrained. I’m tempted to say it’s better edited. However, painters don’t have an editor’s luxury of going back and subtracting the superfluous. So it’s more as if Grant has attained a new clarity and now simply intuits when less is more. This year’s work is also more narrative and less abstract. She even pushes narratives with playful Sticks-like titles such as “With Bloodhounds, Band-aids Don’t Work,” “Is It Good News?,” “Four Guys in Sports Coats & Ties.”

Most of the new pieces focus through frames within frames, as if the artist is looking reflectively through windows of perspective. “Just an Old Printmaker,” a painting added to the show at the last minute, is autobiographical. (Grant holds an MFA in intaglio printmaking from the University of Iowa.) It is also the most restrained work in the show. All Grant’s work begins as black on white. This painting adds little additional color and yet makes a most dramatic impact.
This exhibition plays through Nov. 26 along with shows of new works by printmaker Paula Schuette Kraemer and painter Thomas Jewell-Vitale. Kraemer exhibits visual prayers, for nurseries and kennels, that have long distinguished her career. Jewell-Vitale reveals a dramatically different palette within his familiar medium of oil and wax. He deserts his trademark cool colors for a sunny excursion to new emotional territory.

Touts

Paintpushers, a group of past and present Sticks artists, are holding their tenth anniversary retrospective at Heritage Gallery through December 1… Jeremiah Elbel, a Des Moines artist who won England’s Saatchi Prize, is exhibiting in Iowa State University’s Memorial Union Pioneer Room through Dec. 5. An artist reception will be held Nov. 30, 5 p.m. - 8 p.m.… Robyn O’Neil, who rocked the Des Moines Art Center two years ago with her black & white visions of Armageddon, is currently exhibiting a single drawing, “Hell,” which took two years to complete and includes 65,000 characters, at New York City’s Susan Inglett Gallery… Des Moines painter Alex Brown has begun work on next year’s return exhibition at Feature Inc., a renowned New York City gallery. He will show drawings as well as paintings this time and a new, retro style.

In the Details, or Not

"My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive." Albert Einstein

Houston scientist-artist-disc jockey Dario Robleto hangs out near “the boundaries of life - those strange places where the longest of odds are defied.” There he seeks the world’s oldest living humans, curators for The Guinness Book of World Records, survivors of lightening strikes, and scholars of antiquated medical practices, defiant gardens (built by soldiers in combat zones) and trench art (found object art built during combat). Robleto spends much of each year with scientists who study glaciers, collecting the flotsam of their melting masses - things like cave bear claws and wooly mammoth tusks. He also kicks around with North Sea fishermen, wounded soldiers and admirers of anything bizarre.

“I want to find the unexpected strangeness of a moment,” he explained.
A casual walk through the Des Moines Art Center’s exhibition “Dario Robleto: Survival Does Not Like in the Heavens” might reveal nothing more spectacular than “another Day of the Dead memorial” as one opening night visitor described it. Like Einstein though, Robleto finds his inspiration in slight details. Just consider the media with which he works. In “No One Has Monopoly Over Sorrow,” he built of basket out of the skeletons of human soldiers’ ring fingers, covered with lead from melted bullets. The rest of that piece consisted of shrapnel, waxed dipped bridal bouquets, flowers of human hair that was braided by a a Civil War widow, and fragments of a mourning dress.

In “Defiant Gardens” Robleto used paper he made from letters exchanged between soldiers and their wives or sweethearts, the skeletons of carrier pigeons, carrier pigeon message capsules, dried flowers collected on famous battlefields, mourning dress fabric, bullets and shrapnel, seeds, seashells, silk, gold leaf and glass. Even the small letters folded into carrier pigeons’ message capsules were from actual battlefield correspondences. This work could be mistaken for a funeral wreath, but only before the slight details are perceived. “Some Longings Survive Death” uses 50,000 year old wooly mammoth tusks, hair flowers that intertwined hair of various 19th century lovers with that of mammoths, plus ivory, bone, ribbon and typeset. That work was enshrined in a case made of bocote, an endangered wood.

“The Common Denominator of Existence Is Loss” is the most dramatic piece in the show. A spotlight shines through a showcase, also made of bocote, which holds the paws of cave bear skeletons which have been extinct for 50,000. They are intertwined with human hand skeletons around a braid of audiotape which holds the first human recording in history. Shadows move under the showcase.
Other pieces in the exhibition are considerably more whimsical, mostly sweet parodies of music album covers and historical signs. Everything though is far more than the sum of its extraordinary parts. This exhibition plays through Jan. 15.

At Moberg Gallery, Mary Kline-Misol unveiled her two year series “Awakenings: The Journey from Pain to Empowerment.” Painting portraits of Des Moines’ homeless became therapeutic for Kline-Misol whose husband, artist and surgeon Sinesio Misol, killed himself in 2010. The portraits in this exhibition leave faces poignantly unfinished, missing the fine details in Kline-Misol’s other portrait series (including a pair of Mahatma Gandhi and George Washington Carver that were unveiled last week at World Food Prize headquarters), or even in marvelous head studies of the same subjects included in the Moberg show. Sometimes the devil is in the detail, sometimes in their detachment.

Touts

After a year off, Metro Arts Expo will feature fine art by juried artists from across the United States, Nov. 4 and 5 at Capitol Square… Paintpusher’ s Ten Year Exhibition features 31 current and alumni artists of the influential Des Moines art collective. Through Dec. 1, with a reception Nov. 12… Olson-Larsen Galleries hosts new works by Sarah Grant, Thomas Jewell-Vitale and Paula Shuette-Kraemer, through Nov. 26.

A Sobering September

September is a virtual second Lent for Des Moines’ art scene, a sobering season that follows a Mardi Gras summer filled with big festivals and light entertainments. At the Des Moines Art Center “Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens” takes the Lenten theme to existential lengths. That major show of Texas conceptual artist Dario Robleto opens September 23 to explore longevity and extinction.

Metro Arts Alliance and Des Moines Social Club take the post Mardi Gras theme more literally with “Sweeping Up the Mess” opening this Friday at White Carpet Gallery at Hillyard (4267 109th St., Urbandale). That juried exhibition of painting, sculpture, poetry, and other art forms requires the use of custodial supplies and highlights Iowa’s refugee community. Rex Haussmann, Deb Seeger, Jennifer Rivera, Jason Barr, Katherine O'hara, and Yarn Dawgz will exhibit.

At Moberg Gallery, Thomas Jackson’s “Child’s Play” continues a forty days run providing an ironic look at the ambiguity of American character. For a decade now, Jackson has been composing stacked images that consider a subject from seemingly incongruous points of view. His choice of subjects has been influenced by Robert Frank’s mid - 1950’s series “The Americans.” That work, which reduced 28,000 images into a seminal look at the national character in mid century. Jackson has been trying to do the same thing for the new millennium. While most of his imagery began as a photographic safari, he now translates much of it into paintings and ink brush drawings. His most dramatic painting, “Photo Op,” stands on its own and translates a famous film image of George W. Bush hearing the news of the 9-11 disaster into giant pixels.

The dominant ambiguity of Jackson’s new show stacks images of child’s play with deadly serious stuff like hand guns, violence, sex and advertising. “American Cypher 40” places a doll house under the image of an actual row house that barely looks real. In another, a messed up hotel bed is stacked over another doll house. Clenched teeth of an anxious lady stand above symbolic ruby slippers. Several works use hand guns and rifles juxtaposed with the toys of little boys. Toy trucks collide in one ominous childhood scene while another toy truck graces a dashboard in an eerie dessert. Wedding cake figures of a bride and groom lurk over dancing senior citizens in another. One collage of photographic images compiles roadside attractions that fight for tourists’ attention. This show plays through October 1.

Other area artists have been busy with large public commissions. Frank Hansen’s three story mural on the side of a Des Moines Street building has been turning heads for much of the summer. People love it and people hate it with equal fervor. Des Moines artists Thomas Rosborough and William Barnes won commissions by the Army National Guard and the United States Army Reserve to paint a giant mural in the new Armed Forces Reserve Center in Middletown, Iowa, as part of Iowa’s Art in State Buildings program. Also in that program, Sarah Grant is currently in residence at Iowa State University creating an installation within the atrium of Horticulture Hall, as part of the Horticulture Teaching and Research Greenhouse Complex.

Locally works by William Barnes, Scott Charles Ross and John Preston will be shown at Olson-Larsen Gallery through October 8. New, more whimsical works by Jamie Navarro are on display at Pegasus Gallery, along with large paintings by the late Don Dunagan. Hilde DeBruyne-Verhofste and John Schwatzkopf are showing through at the Polk County Heritage Gallery. An opening reception will be held this Sunday.

Two Iowa artists are showing in America’s first and second cities. Anthony Pontius opened last week in “Shirts & Destroy,” a major group show at Tara Mcphearson’s “The Cotton Candy Machine” Gallery in New York City. Brent Houzenga’s show “Remixed Media” continues at Pawn Works in Chicago.

August Is the New October for Color

Three new exhibitions in Des Moines examine color from different points of view. Less (color) is more in Steven Vail Fine Arts current exhibition “Selective Color in Printmaking.” Curator Breianna Cochrane talked about the show’s forefather.
“Barnett Newman, a color field painter, came under fire when the National Gallery of Canada bought one of his works for $1.8 million in 1989. A nearly monochromatic piece of blue and red, it was mocked for its simplicity and extravagant cost, to the point where it was slashed with a knife by an angry viewer. Without innovations like that, the path to selective color might never have been explored.”

The Vail show, which h. In this show their works explore how minimal uses of color - black, as drawn attention from the New York City art media, includes works of such pathfinders from five different countries, some with big names: Rita Ackermann, Kamrooz Aram, Carlos Amorales, Donald Baechler, José Bedia, Ross Bleckner, Robert Cottingham, Eric Fischl, Wayne Gonzales, Antony Gormley, Beverly Semmes, Josh Smith, Pat Steir, and Donald Sultan. They demonstrate how restrained use of just black, white, gray and the primary colors can have major dramatic impact in reductive art. Using a variety of print media, their works communicate more through texture, pattern and balance, avoiding the use of color as their primary expressive tool.

“The simplicity inherent in primary colors is often reflected in the pieces themselves,” Cochrane explained.


Matt Corones designed this shirt to match his window installations.

Less (volume) is also more as the Des Moines Art Center’s “Iowa Artists 2011” continues with just two works by Matt Corones- large-scale “stained glass” windows in the museum’s lobby and Pei wing. These were each built with three patterns, based on photographs of flowers, and digitally-created patterns influenced by Middle Eastern decoration and by "Matisse Camouflage," - brightly-colored riffs on the Modernist master’s cut-paper collages. Each pattern was printed on large sheets of transparency film, which were then layered on top of one other and adhered to the glass. The effect is anything but minimal color wise - it dazzles entire rooms. These windows will be on exhibit through October 2.

In a separate exhibit under the “Iowa Artists 2011“ umbrella, Matthew Kluber presents a series of abstract “paintings” that also reference Barnett Newman. They profess an additional debt to the color studies of Joseph Albers, in which one color changes by its association or proximity with another. Kluber fuses color, line, digital formations, and projected light to create dramatic visual spaces with more of an embrace of new technologies than the works at Vail. His exhibition continues through October 2. Corones and Kluber will both speak at the museum on September 1.

Road trips to two Iowa art museums offer far more traditional experiences. Mason City’s MacNider Art Museum is exhibiting forty original photogravure prints by Edward S. Curtis, through October 29. That selection provides an overview of Curtis’s legendary “The North American Indian Collection.” Famous images like “Geronimo” and “Cañon de Chelly – Navaho” mix it up with lesser known but equally intriguing images like “Bear Bull – Blackfoot” and “Wichita Grass-House.” Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is preparing for a September 3 opening of its exclusive showing of “An American Masterpiece: Charles Wilson Peale's George Washington.” Commissioned by John Hancock , this was Peale’s first portrait of Washington to portray him as commander in chief of the Continental Army. America’s daddy will hang around until New Year’s Eve.

Notes

Ames artist Peter Goché’s “Water Hutch,” has been on exhibit this summer in Omaha’s Bemis Center for Contemporary Art… Moberg Framing plans a September opening of the their new shop on Ingersoll… Frank Hansen will auction several of his paintings at The Mansion September 24 in a “Paint It Black” event. Any painting that does not receive a minimum bid will be painted black and recycled. The Snacks will play.

Fall Arts 2011

For Des Moines‘ fine art scene, autumn is the sobering, back-to-work season that follows carefree summers filled with big festivals and light entertainments. This year‘s fall calendar supports such sobriety with a preponderance of deadly serious exhibitions. “Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens,” a major show of Texas conceptual artist Dario Robleto at the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) explores longevity and extinction. Another DMAC exhibition “Black White Gray Blue” revisits the horrors of American slavery. A third DMAC show studies the psychology of portraiture with a title nod to dementia a la Vincent Van Gogh.

“Mingled Visions: Selections from Edward S. Curtis's ‘The North American Indian‘” revisits the extinction of the Plains Indian way of life at the MacNidar while The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (CMA) goes to THE founding father for gravity, showing “An American Masterpiece: Charles Willson Peale's George Washington.” CMA also studies photography‘s effect on grave social conditions in “Shout Freedom! Photo League Selections from the Columbus Museum of Art.”

The gallery scene is also filled with deep stuff. Mary Kline-Misol’s long awaited series of portraits of homeless Iowans comes to Moberg, as do Thomas Jackson’s ironic reflections on serious matters. William Barnes will show his latest meditations on ephemerality and wistfulness at Olson-Larsen while Steven Vail Fine Arts will continue to show “Selective Color,” a nationally acclaimed exhibition that demonstrates how subtle uses of color can make dramatic statements.

For levity, fall also brings annual celebrations with Art Stop, Quilt Walk and the fall studio tours of arty Winneshiek County highlighting that genre.

Calendar (*APT* indicates a special Art Pimp tout)

Recurring Events and Family Attractions
Thursday Night Art Walks in downtown Newton

First Friday Art Walks, Fairfield Town Square
Open houses at Studio 100 (304 Fifth St., 778-8768,
http://www.jamesellwanger.com)
James Elwanger plans on monthly open houses, mostly on the last Thursday of each month, but subject to change. Check website for latest details.

Special Events
September 8
Pecha Kucha VI
The international anti-Power Point movement takes on the arts and creativity this year, in the Des Moines Art Center courtyard.

September 23-24
Art Stop - ( www.myspace.com/artstop, www.artstopinfo.com )
A two day visual and performing arts event, with shuttle busses to Valley Junction, East Village, Ingersoll, Gateway West and Roosevelt, but not Drake.

October 7-9
Northeast Iowa Artists Studio Tour (Winneshiek County Convention and Visitors Bureau, 800-463-4692, www.iowaarttour.com ) APT
Iowa’s original art studio tour takes places around Decorah‘s autumn majesty.

September 28 - October 1
“Quilt Walk”
Nine Historic Valley Junction merchants feature quilt-related exhibitions and demonstrations, and hosting opening receptions with artists. Special open house events on September 29.

Galleries
Ongoing

Art Dive (1417 Walnut St., www.artdive.com )
Des Moines’ original alternative gallery plans alternative exhibitions. Be surprised.

2AU (200 Fifth, West Des Moines)
Pearls reign this fall in Au‘s effort to provide Art Deco comforts in a troubled year.

Finder's Creepers (515 18th St. www.finderscreepers.com)
Alternative to alternative.

Kavanaugh Gallery (131 5th Street West Des Moines, 279-8682, http://www.kavanaughgallery.com)
Specializing in purchased estate collections, there’s no telling what you might find here.

Susan Noland Studio Gallery (902 42nd St.)
The psychological properties of gems are front and center in this master goldsmith‘s repertoire.

Teeple Hansen Gallery (108 W. Broadway, Suite 206. Fairfield)

University Museum (3219 Hudson Road, Cedar Falls, www.uni.edu/museum)

Special ExhibitionsOlson-Larsen Galleries (203 Fifth, West Des Moines, www.olsonlarsen.com )

Through September 3
“Three Takes on Photography”
Peter Feldstein, David Ottenstein, Dan Powell.

September 9 - October 8
“New Works by John Preston, Scott Charles Ross, William Barnes” ATP

October 14 - November 26
“New Works: Sarah Grant, Thomas Jewell-Vitale, Paula Schuette-Kraemer”

December 2 - January 7, 2011
“Debra Smith, Tilly Woodward” APT

Moberg Art Gallery (2921 Ingersoll Ave., www.moberggallery.com )

August 26 - October 1
“Thomas Jackson” APT

October 7 - November 26
“Mary Kline-Misol” APT
Historical realist Kline-Misol reveals her long awaited series of homeless portraits. Coincidentally, her portraits of George Washington Carver and Mohandas K. Gandhi will also be unveiled at the World Food Prize headquarters.

December 2 - February 2011
“New Works by Bill Luchsinger & Karen Strohbeen” APT
Creating their first prints in 1970, Karen and Bill were among the nation’s digital print making pioneers, even before David Hockney made it cool. The exhibit will showcase new work on paper, canvas, and ceramic tile.

Heritage Art Gallery (111 Court Ave., www.heritagegallery.org)

August 29 - October 9
To Be Announced

October 17 - December 1
“Ten Year Exhibition”
Featuring 31 current and alumni artists of Paintpushers, a Des Moines artists collective. Reception - Saturday, November 12 from 3 to 8 pm.

December 5 - 2011
“Des Moines Exhibited”

Steven Vail Fine Arts (300 E. Locust St., 309-2763, www.stevenvailfinearts.com )

Through December
“Selective Color” APT
Works by Rita Ackermann, Kamrooz Aram, Carlos Amorales, Donald Baechler, José Bedia, Ross Bleckner, Robert Cottingham, Eric Fischl, Wayne Gonzales, Antony Gormley, Beverly Semmes, Josh Smith, Pat Steir, and Donald Sultan demonstrate how minimal color in reductive art can have a dramatic impact.

Museums
Des Moines Art Center (4700 Grand Ave., www.desmoinesartcenter.org )

Through September 4
“Surface Value”
James Gobel, Alison Elizabeth Taylor, and Mickalene Thomas present visions of American life and lifestyle, exploring pop culture influences, issues of racial and sexual identity, and the varying subcultures that make up our diverse population.

Through October 30
“Single Channel Two Melodrama” APT
Split screen high definition video features Christopher K. Ho’s Lesbian Mountains in Love.

Through September 18
“The Fashion Show”
An examination of how clothing communicates who we are and who we wish to be through the ages.

Through October 2

“Iowa Artists 2011: Matt Corones” APT
Corones created two large-scale “stained glass” windows in the museum’s lobby and Pei wing, each with three patterns, based on photographs of flowers, digitally-created patterns influenced by Middle Eastern decoration and "Matisse Camouflage," a brightly-colored riff on the master’s cut-paper collages

“Iowa Artists 2011: Matthew Kluber” APT
Kluber projects an ever-changing computer generated image onto a field of multi-colored stripes, resulting in a work that constantly changes form over time. You have to see this to believe it.

September 23, 2011 — January 15
“Survival Does Not Lie In The Heavens “ APT
Dario Robleto’s recent exploration of longevity and extinction through his incorporation of 19th-century folk traditions used to create visually arresting objects. This is a major national art event.

September 23 — January 29
“Black White Gray Blue”
Revisiting the horrors of slavery in the US.

October 7 - January 25
“Vincent van Gogh and the Psychology of Portraiture” APT
Portraits from the Des Moines Art Center's Permanent Collection, including the recent Vincent van Gogh acquisition.

Ankeny Art Center (1520 SW Ordnance Rd., www.ankenyartcenter.com )

September
“Jacklin Stoken and group”

October
“Works by Ben Schuh”
“Works by Marry Rork-Watson”

November
“Works by Heather and Nicole from Studio3”

Octagon Center for the Arts (427 Douglas Avenue, Ames www.octagonarts.org)

Through October 15
“Linda Lewis & Annick Ibsen” APT
Sculptures of irony and human nature.

Through October 23
“Iowa Watercolor Society Exhibit”

Brunnier Museum of Art (University Museums, 290 Scheman Bldg., Ames, 515.294.3342, www.museums.iastate.edu )

Through December 30
“French Art Nouveau”
Decorative arts, particularly glass and tapestry, are featured in this exhibition.

“The Age of Brilliance”
Twenty nine cut glass pieces from the Brilliant Era of American glass, circa 1876.

“Relationships: Interstitial Connections”
Studio faculty make connections to other disciplines.

“ Fragile Thread of Glass”
Thirty centuries of glass as aesthetic objects for utilitarian uses.

“Priscilla Sage: Contemporary Sculptures”
Textile sculptures.

“Iowa City and Keota Glass”
Works from two 19th century Iowa glass companies that were directed by J. Harvey Leighton.

“NC Wyeth: America in the Making”
Saturday Evening Post illustrator’s works chronicle 20th century.

“Ulfert Wilke: Words to Be Seen”
German immigrant to Iowa, Wilke’s art was heavily influenced by Asian calligraphry.

Christian Petersen Art Museum, Morrill Hall, Iowa State Campus

Through December 16
“Subject to Change: Art & Design in the 20th Century”
Rotating show from the permanent collection.

“Commissioning a Collection: 75 Years of Public Art”

Anderson Sculpture Garden, around Morrill Hall, ISU campus

Through August 2012
“Realities: the Lyric Sculpture of William King” APT
Pop Artist’s work commissioned for ISU.

The Vesterheim (523 W. Water St., Decorah, www.vesterheim.org)

September 1, 2011 - September 3, 2012
“Sigvald Asbjørnsen, Sculptor”
Works by the renowned artist, including portrait busts of famous Norwegians and Americans.

Through April, 2012
“Polar Exploration” APT
Featuring Roald Amundsen, Richard Byrd, and Bernt Balchen.

Through April 7, 2012
“Norwegian-American Lutheran Colleges”
Institutions of higher education shaped by religious and ethnic identity.

Faulconer Gallery (Grinnell College, www.grinnell.edu/faulconergallery)

Through September 4
“Liz Steketee - Family Albums” APT
"Reconstructed memories" offer creative insight into the act and the art of taking family photos.

September 7 - November 30
“Chinese Propaganda Posters”
Exhibition of posters will open on September 7 with a gallery talk by Yang Pei Ming of the Shanghai Propaganda Poster Art Center. We don’t make this up.

September 23 - December 11
“Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin in Iowa”
Renderings and models of Griffin works, focusing on those in Iowa, will put the College's Griffin-designed house, Ricker House, in regional context on the centenary of its construction

September 23, 2011 - December 11
“From the Book Forest: Commercial Publishing in Late Imperial China”
Commercial printing during the Ming and Qing dynasties (15th-19th centuries), this exhibition will feature visiting artists from China who will demonstrate traditional woodblock printing techniques.

Cedar Rapids Museum of Art (410 Third Avenue SE, Cedar Rapids), www.crma.org

Through September 4
“Shout Freedom! Photo League Selections from the Columbus Museum of Art”
Non-profit organization of photographers committed to the transformative power of photography to effect social change. Its members included Berenice Abbott, Lewis Hine, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Paul Strand, and Weegee.

Through October 9
“A Show of Hands: Ceramics from the Collection”
Studio ceramics from the 1970’2 and 80’s.

September 3 - December 31
“An American Masterpiece: Charles Wilson Peale's George Washington”
Commissioned in 1776 by John Hancock, president of the Continental Congress, this was Peale’s second full-scale life portrait of Washington, and the first to portray him as commander in chief of the Continental Army.

September 24 - January 15, 2012
“Seeing and Remembering: Portraits and Their Stories”
Exhibition looks at the different types and situations within portraiture.

Blanden Art Museum ( 920 Third Avenue South
Fort Dodge, 515-573-2316, http://www.blanden.org )

Through October 29
“Don Heggen: Master of Luminous Watercolors”

Through January 21
“Joyce Blunck: Assemblages & Paintings”
Venerable found object artist retrospective.

MacNider Art Museum (303 2nd Street Southeast, Mason City,
641- 421-3666, www.macniderart.org

Through September 10
“A Series in Progress by Larry Gregson”
Winner of Area Show: 42 exhibition gets a solo show.

Through October 29
“Mingled Visions: Selections from Edward S. Curtis's ‘The North American Indian‘” APT
Photogravures include famous images like “Geronimo” and “Cañon de Chelly – Navaho” and less well-known images like “Bear Bull – Blackfoot” and “Wichita Grass-House.”

November 10 - January
“Iowa Crafts 40”

July used to be the dead month for Des Moines fine arts. Not any more. This year the kind of big brilliant shows that galleries used to hold back until autumn are opening this month at four different venues.

Travis Rice’s exhibition “Contamination” is the largest one person show ever at Moberg Gallery, taking up the entire gallery plus an outdoor wall. It’s inspired by a 1980 Italian cult film of the same name. That sci fi classic was about alcoholism, green eggs and coffee with the green eggs plotting to take over the world. I don’t make this stuff up. You can leave all expectations at the door of the exhibition.
“I’ve always had issues with germs and bacteria. I became interested in the way they move and multiply. I observed some bacteria that expanded into aerial routes, detracting and retracting to new hosts. That’s the way they are. That’s what I tried to capture in my prints, then in the paintings. Those are my ideas about what a 3D diagram of a sneeze might look like,” Rice explained.

Rice’s meditations on bacterial growth also include neon sculptures, 3D paintings, video monitors,

and several metal sheds filled with fluorescent lights and props one might use in decontamination zones. Some of those are covered with metastasizing green eggs. All are covered with textured fluorescent film and separated from each other with shredded colored paper, a Rice trademark. This show is serious summer fun. Through August 20.

James Ellwanger’s new exhibition “41 degrees N / 93 degrees W” presents a series a ten portraits of Des Moines. Each composition is printed on four layers of Plexiglas stacked on top of each other. The background prints are satellite photos of Des Moines while the top three layers consist of various images within the satellite photo. Each set of prints is made in an edition of five and many have already been sold.

Ellwanger will also be showing a series of sculptures he’s been making out of motorcycle parts. Each portrays an animal, complete with a taxidermy tick bird. “I like to think about what it might be like some day when our pets are all robots. Plus it’s a lot of fun to work with motorcycle parts,” he said. The show begins July 28 and runs two months in the former Fitch Gallery, at 304 15th St..

Steven Vail Fine Arts’ new exhibition also opens July 28 and studies “Selective Color” in printmaking. Artists come from five different countries and use minimal color for dramatic effect in reductive art. Works range from figural to virtual abstraction and include Eric Fischl, Donald Sultan, Carlos Amorales, Robert Cottingham and seven others.
Vail quoted Alberto Giacometti while explaining the inspiration for the show. “My colleagues admonish me, ‘paint with more color,’ Isn’t grey a color too? If I see everything in grey and if within that grey I see all colors that impress me and that I would like to convey, why should I use another color?”

Works range from a screen print with flockings from Sultan’s seminal Poppies series to black on black etchings of butterflies from Amorales. The exhibition has already attracted interest from the New York City art media. One national writer expressed hope it would travel to the Big Apple.

Olson-Larsen Galleries opens “Three Takes on Photography” demonstrating different approaches by Peter Feldstein, David Ottenstein, and Dan Powell. Feldstein uses cliché verre, a technique first practiced in the 19th century, applying ink and paint to glass, film, or translucent paper by etching, rubbing and daubing. He then scans his "positive" and manipulates it digitally. Ottenstein presents new prints from travels through Iowa and the West. Powell’s hand-manipulated photographs feature out of focus objects blended with unusual scenes, enhanced by bleaching, toning and the application of pencil and oil paint. This show runs through September 3.

More Summer Fun

Steven Vail Fine Arts’ new exhibition also opens July 28 and studies “Selective Color” in printmaking. Artists come from five different countries and use minimal color for dramatic effect in reductive art. Works range from figural to virtual abstraction and include Eric Fischl, Donald Sultan, Carlos Amorales, Robert Cottingham and seven others.

Vail quoted Alberto Giacometti while explaining the inspiration for the show. “My colleagues admonish me, ‘paint with more color,’ Isn’t grey a color too? If I see everything in grey and if within that grey I see all colors that impress me and that I would like to convey, why should I use another color?”

Works range from a screen print with flockings from Sultan’s seminal Poppies series to black on black etchings of butterflies from Amorales. The exhibition has already attracted interest from the New York City art media. One national writer expressed hope it would travel to the Big Apple.

A new Matthew Clarke sculpture showed up last week at Moberg Gallery. We heard Jim Hubbell gave him a home.
Olson-Larsen Galleries opened “Three Takes on Photography” demonstrating different approaches by Peter Feldstein, David Ottenstein, and Dan Powell. Feldstein uses cliché verre, a technique first practiced in the 19th century, applying ink and paint to glass, film, or translucent paper by etching, rubbing and daubing. He then scans his "positive" and manipulates it digitally. Ottenstein presents new prints from travels through Iowa and the West. Powell’s hand-manipulated photographs feature out of focus objects blended with unusual scenes, enhanced by bleaching, toning and the application of pencil and oil paint. This show runs through September 3

More Summer Fun

James Ellwanger’s new exhibition “41 degrees N / 93 degrees W” presents a series a ten portraits of Des Moines. Each composition is printed on four layers of Plexiglas stacked on top of each other. The background prints are satellite photos of Des Moines while the top three layers consist of various images within the satellite photo. Each set of prints is made in an edition of five and many have already been sold.
Ellwanger will also be showing a series of sculptures he’s been making out of motorcycle parts. Each portrays an animal, complete with a taxidermy tick bird. “I like to think about what it might be like some day when our pets are all robots. Plus it’s a lot of fun to work with motorcycle parts,” he said. The show begins July 28 and runs two months in the former Fitch Gallery, at 304 15th St..

Girls in White Underwear

Highbrow or Lowbrow?

At a recent Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) lecture launching a Stephanie Brunia exhibition, an audience member asked the artist what prizes her art had won. DMAC curator Gilbert Vicario answered on behalf of the rather puzzled young artist.

“An exhibition in a major art museum is a significantly bigger prize than any blue ribbon at any state fair or street fest,” he said, as diplomatically as possible.

The incident illustrated how highbrow and lowbrow culture clash these days in Des Moines. Vicario has played a significant role in that, bringing Leslie Hall, the super diva of trailer jive and satirical rap, into the hallowed confines of the DMAC last year. Brunia, still a graduate student at the University of New Mexico, is his latest discovery. He first saw her dramatically lit C prints of young girls mimicking Biblical scenes in white under ware at painter Larassa Kabel’s home. Kabel bought them at the 2009 Des Moines Art Festival, the only street fest or fair in which Brunia ever participated. The prints at DMAC comprise a series Brunia made on her grandfather’s farm near Ames. They include takes on classics like Leonardo‘s “The Last Supper,” Michelangelo’s “Pieta,” and John Everette Millais’ “Ophelia.”

She built the compositions one model at a time and stitched her compositions together on her computer. Her “Last Supper” includes “all the earthly delights and most of the seven deadly sins.” Brunia described her role as being “as much a performer as a photographer.” For instance, she obtained dramatic lighting effects by hand holding $10 flashlights for 30 second exposures while keeping all props smothered in bug spray. While her use of light recalls both Leonardo and the Dutch masters, these works are more suggestive of the more controversial ads by Ralph Lauren and Benneton.

Brunia has become a source of pride for the Art Festival, elevating the aegis of their emerging artists section. Her DMAC show runs through August 7.

Photography also delights the eye at the Faulconer Gallery where Liz Steketee’s “Family Album” begins June 24. The Bay Area artist uses photos “to rewrite history from my vantage point.” One panoramic shot of an ice cream parlor in Michigan looks like it belongs in the Smithsonian. Steketee says she reconstructs narratives in old photos, then prints them and ages these new photos to “reconstruct memories, address old confrontations and face old demons.” If that isn’t therapeutic enough, yoga classes will be taught in the gallery each Thursday June 30 - August 18. Steketee will speak there September 1.

At Moberg Gallery, John Phillip Davis confronts his “Nightmares and Allegories” in large scale. The artist says this series of mostly 36 square foot canvasses is meant to discuss a single subject from a dualistic point of view.

“If you found someone in the rain crying, and you could not tell if the they were really laughing or crying, you would need to think in other contexts… Nightmares talk about slightly more specific focal points that energize us, or make us afraid or excited. Allegories talk more to subtlety, a self narrative that is personality bent,” he explained. That show runs through July 9.

Olson - Larsen Galleries comforts us with dreamy summer landscapes. This year’s show adds two new artists to the popular trio of Gary Bowling, David Gordinier and Betsy Margolius. Rod Massey uses the geometric distortions of old fashioned Regionalism to personify houses and landscapes. British artist Roger Towndrow draws exclusively with pencil, revealing “serial and sequential” landscapes in flux. That exhibition continues through July 16.

TJ and Jackie Moberg bought the Art Store and will move its framing operations to Ingersoll this summer. The Eighth Street store will close. The Mobergs also opened Moberg Editions, an online gallery selling inexpensive art, and Moberg Consultations, a full service firm that directs clients from design to installation of artworks.
　

Much Ado About Shakespeare

Iowa’s Many Mannered Love of the Bard
(Originally published 2010)

Last month Othello’s anxiety reverberated through Greenwood Park in Des Moines.

“I have lost the immortal part of myself.”

Yet, four hundred years after William Shakespeare wrote those words, it remains to be seen whether they were well founded. The Bard of Avon is bigger than ever in America. Elizabethan theaters and Shakespeare festivals have become primary tourist attractions in cities from Ashland, Oregon and Cedar City, Utah to Odessa, Texas and Hempstead, New York. For several years, outdoor Shakespeare festivals have been drawing large crowds, including many Iowans, to Kansas City, Omaha and beyond. In Rosalind’s words from As You Like It, “Farewell Monsieur Traveler.”

At least six different companies will produce Shakespeare events in Iowa this summer. In Des Moines, two of them will duel, like Mercutio and County Paris, over the same weekend for the second year in a row. That coincidence could turn mid July into a midsummer week’s dream for Bard lovers. Performance dates might be the most common denominator for Des Moines’ two biggest Shakespeare events. Certainly, their venues do alteration find.

Shakespeare on the Lawn


Venerable Salisbury House was built in the Roaring Twenties. Cosmetics magnate Carl Weeks and his wife Edith modeled it after the 16th century King’s House in Salisbury, England, a mansion which Shakespeare himself would have known. The Salisbury House Foundation’s stated purpose for the 42 room house and its collections is “to preserve, interpret, and share (its) international significance for the educational and cultural benefit and enjoyment of the public.” So their annual productions of “Shakespeare on the Lawn” tend toward faithful interpretations of the plays. That conservative approach suits Repertoire Theater of Iowa (RTI) director Richard Manning well.

“As Shakespeare wrote, ‘the play’s the thing.’ His plays have stood up for over 400 years. I heard (British actor) Jonathan Miller speak at symposium called ‘Reinventing the Classics.’ Miller was known for that from his work with Beyond the Fringe but he adamantly insisted that the classics should not be reinvented at all. Their main value is the window they provide for looking in on another time and place, to the way people lived in another era. That’s why we love Salisbury House, it comes as close as anything to setting Shakespeare in his own time,” Maynard explained.

RTI tries to bring Elizabethan manners to contemporary Iowans. Before last summer’s productions of Twelfth Night, Wes Drahuzel played a vendor transposed from the beginning of seventeenth century. He peddled fortunes, charms and souvenirs including “water from the well of St. Withburga” and polished glass “guaranteed to reveal the location of a lady’s true love.” He didn’t sell much because he couldn’t take American money.

“Be careful, the queen has spies everywhere,” he warned picnickers.
For RTI, all the mansion’s balconies, gardens, terraces and porches are a stage. Even its underground tunnels connect to backstage dressing rooms.

“We don’t see any need to put Shakespeare in a contemporary setting. We don’t even lighten his sentiment. That’s why we played the mean things that are done to Malvolio (in Twelfth Night) as maliciously as they were written. That’s the lens through which Shakespeare observed his world, with an overkill of malice in his humor. It seems to surprise people today but it shouldn’t. After all, Shakespeare wrote the prototypical slasher film - Titus Andronicus,” Manning explained.

“We chose The Merry Wives of Windsor this year because it’s the only play Shakespeare set in his own time. It’s a magnificent window into his world. And this year, when Master Ford hires Falstaff to seduce his wife, it won’t be done in the manner of buffoonery. It will be a nasty, jealous thing,” Manning predicted.

Shakesperience™ Fest

The Simon Estes Riverfront Amphitheater was built as part of Des Moines’ downtown revitalization in the 1990‘s. A civic park, it hosts multiple concert series each summer and its price scale discriminates to favor free events and weddings. As a “people’s park,” it suits Shakesperience™ Fest - the current name for a theatrical company founded by Lorenzo Sandoval and Robin Heinemann, who were also the original producers of the Salisbury House’s Shakespearean event.

"We don't do 'yer run of the mill’ Shakespeare'," the couple said, emphasizing that their company creates Shakespearean drama for a new, broader audience. This year‘s production of A Midsummer Night‘s Dream Extravaganza will move Shakespeare from the Golden Age of Athens to the mythological Illyria (site of Twelfth Night) in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Tina Haase’s original music will mix with show and movie tunes from the 1930‘s. Sandoval said to expect John Zickefoose’s Puck to be “more like Noel Coward” than the usual impish bad boy of forest. Argentine choreographer Karina Barone will translate the entire dialogue of the fairy royalty into silent dance. Heinemann predicted that these fairies will suit the elaborate fancies of the fairy people cult too. Sandoval will write new dialogue, in iambic pentameter, to help the audience keep up with the spirit or the fairies. He explained his approach.

“Modern dramaturgy tries to make Shakespeare as accessible as possible. We want to discover new ways of doing theater. That adds to the canon at the same time it expands the audience. I think that’s how we discover new insights into Shakespeare as well as humanity,” he said.
Venues aren’t the only difference between the companies. Salisbury House sells tickets. Shakesperience™ Fest is free. It’s also more ambitious, and better endowed, than its rival company with a budget ten times that of RTI’s entire annual budget. Heinemann pointed out that it’s only about a fourth that of Omaha’s Shakespeare fest.

“We want to compete with Omaha - to keep Iowan’s in Iowa spending tourist dollars and even attracting a few Nebraskans,” she said.

Heinemann mentioned eight different funding sources before adding “and many, many more. More than I can count.” She said that her multiple grantees also make peripheral activities possible. This year’s event will include Family Night, VIP parties, a mini art fair, wine tastings, after parties, cocktail soirees for young professionals, and library programs all over metro Des Moines. There will also be readings by a children’s book author Cynthia Mercati and scholarly pre-show talks on Shakespeare in the African American tradition and community by WOI radio’s Hollis Monroe.

The Picnic’s the Thing, Too

The two troupes do have some things in common. Both use elaborate period costumes, by Drake University’s Josefa Poppen (RTI) and by Mell Ziegenfuss (Shakesperience™ Fest). Both encourage audiences to come early and picnic in beautiful venues.

Last year’s Salisbury production brought together family reunions and multiple generations, including babes not yet out of swaddling clouts. Sarah Ekstrand and Kirk Martin said they both began attending Shakespeare plays at around age eight but they wanted Lola Plum Martin to have an earlier start. She was six months old when their family watched last year from a discrete distance on the lawn of the magnificent garden.

At Simon Estes, prizes are given for the most elaborate tailgating displays. In fact, SF even persuaded the city of Des Moines to grant a festival exemption to allow people to bring their own bottles of wine. Their free shows attracted a wide eyed, multicultural audience. Edwina Brandon, Ellen Yee, Tim Hickman, Margaret Rubican and Frank Vaia came to deconstruct Coriolanus’ “love of a cup of hot wine.” Their soup swapping club held a monthly meeting at the Shakespeare event last summer where they enjoying borscht, cherry soup, cucumber soup and crème de Crecy - with room temperature wines.
“Wine’s a good familiar thing when well used,” they quoted from Othello.
Central Iowa’s different theatrical companies are showing audiences that the plays of the man who created Othello are at least that too, if not yet immortal.

2011

Shakesperience™ Festival
July 23 - August 2
“The Regina Monologues”

Shakespeare on the Lawn
July 21-24, 2010
Repertory Theater of Iowa‘s “As You Like It”.

Travis Rice Has Serious Fun

July used to be the dead month for Des Moines fine arts. Not any more. This year the kind of big brilliant shows that galleries used to hold back until autumn are opening this month at four different venues.

Travis Rice’s exhibition “Contamination” is the largest one person show ever at Moberg Gallery, taking up the entire gallery plus an outdoor wall. It’s inspired by a 1980 Italian cult film of the same name. That sci fi classic was about alcoholism, green eggs and coffee with the green eggs plotting to take over the world. I don’t make this stuff up. You can leave all expectations at the door of the exhibition.

“I’ve always had issues with germs and bacteria. I became interested in the way they move and multiply. I observed some bacteria that expanded into aerial routes, detracting and retracting to new hosts. That’s the way they are. That’s what I tried to capture in my prints, then in the paintings. Those are my ideas about what a 3D diagram of a sneeze might look like,” Rice explained.

Rice’s meditations on bacterial growth also include neon sculptures, 3D paintings, video monitors, and several metal sheds filled with fluorescent lights and props one might use in decontamination zones. Some of those are covered with metastasizing green eggs. All are covered with textured fluorescent film and separated from each other with shredded colored paper, a Rice trademark. This show is serious summer fun. Through August 20.

Gleeful Cynicism at Surface Value

During the last five years Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) exhibitions have been drawing the largest crowds ever to the institution. By no coincidence, these shows have also consistently celebrated aspects of art that stimulate our zygomaticus major, the muscle most responsible for making us smile, while also opening our eyes to somber realties. The three young artists represented in the museum’s new exhibition, Surface Value, do those things on several levels while mimicking classical art with both respect and irony.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor is a child of Las Vegas - the peripheral Las Vegas rather than mirage of neon, fountains and faux cities that attracts tourists to the Nevada desert. She simulates painting in marquetry and intarsia, which involve the cutting and piecing of wood and wood veneer to form designs. Taylor’s wooden narratives meditate cynically upon the culture of the most treeless landscape in America. Two works in the DMAC show are set in Bombay Beach, an infamous “oceanfront property” in the Colorado Desert that is half sunk in salt or dried mud.

Another work, “Roadside” studies two “hunters” shooting deer in the suburbs with automatic rifles from their woodie station wagon. “The Breeder” is a portrait of a character from the pages of the dark humorist T. Coraghessan Boyle. A sinewy man stands before used furniture he has converted into kennels for chinchilla, the breeding of which became an impractical effort at self employment during Las Vegas recent employment crisis.

In Boyle’s story, the breeder flees his rental when his inventory dies after the air conditioner stops working. A small air conditioning vent appears in Taylor’s work, looking quite inefficient as her human subject gulps Corona wearing a wife beater. Two other works in the DMAC show inhabit more darker haunts. In “Tap Left On” and “Multiple Shots with Knife Slashes” Taylor portrays houses vandalized by their owners, after Vegas‘ worst-in-the-nation mortgage crisis.

James Gobel is a child of the other Las Vegas. He credits his high school and college years amongst the kitsch icons and neon mirages for forming his aesthetic which found its true milieu in San Francisco’s bear culture. Bears are hyper masculine gay men, fond of dandified beards and long eye lashes, flannel shirts, boots, leather and alcohol. In “The Problem with Leisure; What to Do for Pleasure,” three stylish bears play musical chairs with earnest intentions. Gobel, a constituent of Nancy Pelosi, compares his sub culture to that of Weimar Republic Berlin, fostering a “golden age of open and radical dialogue before the rule of the Third Reich.” It’s hard to tell how serious he is. He “paints” his subjects in felt, “a cuddly material for a cuddly subject,” and exhibits nothing more radical than clashing argyle with camouflage.

Mickalene Thomas’ preferred medium is rhinestones. She clashes those with textiles and patterns in an unbearably gaudy manner that comments on the “power and convolution of fashion and aesthetics.” Her subjects, thrust into classical poses reminiscent of Matisse and Manet, are highly stylized African-American women, many family members. In “Sweet and Out Front” she mimics Andy Warhol’s Marilyn (Monroe) prints, by featuring the women from the film “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,” the original blaxplotation movie that celebrated militant black men but did little for black women.

Open House

James Ellwanger, sculptor of Shattered Silence on the state capitol grounds, is busy designing interactive sculptures for Des Moines and its sister cities. With technology from Fair-Play scoreboards, visitors to town centers here and in Kobe, Japan or St. Etienne, France will be able to converse with each other by passing by his sculptures. You have to see the drawings to understand the project though, so Ellwanger will begin opening his studio one Friday each month for that purpose, and also for mini-exhibitions of his other works, which include multi-dimensional paintings and, for the first time in his career, traditional abstract paintings. The first open house exhibition is scheduled for May 20, at 304 15th St., Studio 100, (the former Fitch Gallery).

A Marvelous Month for Alternative Spaces

Alpha art collector Kirk Blunck explained his presence at a coffeehouse art show recently.

“Everybody starts out as a local artist. I bought an entire box of photographs once, mostly as a favor to a friend, for $100 a piece. The photographer was Anna Gaskell,” he said, alluding to an artist whose prints start now at around 75 times the price he paid and go up to $35,000.

This month Blunck purchased three works on paper at a Mars Coffeehouse exhibition of Jeremiah Elbel which runs through April. Elbel is a monstrously talented young artist who had a painting in a Saatchi Gallery show in London last year that drew the largest crowds of the year in the UK. He works in black and white, metaphorically and literally, painting with tar and drawing with charcoal. His subjects in the new show are portraits of decapitated humans - some Mexican drug war victims, some victims of Islamic terrorists, others of Shari'a, or French law. They are rendered in charcoal, with curved vertical lines dominating and reminding one of Egon Schiele, an admitted influence. Danny Pearl is one subject that didn’t make Elbel’s cut.

“I tried but I couldn’t. I watched the video (Al-Qaeda’s “The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl,” in which Khalid Sheik Mohammad saws off the head of the Wall Street Journal reporter) but it was too disturbing,” Elbel explained.

For now, Elbel remains a local artist. The father of two young children, he works a full time day job plus several nights a week bartending at Sbrocco. He still makes time to build a repertoire that continues to impress international collectors.

Other extraordinary artists are also showing in alternative spaces this month. Lindy Smith moved back to Iowa last summer after 35 years on the road. During the 1990’s, she documented the people and horses of the American west (“Straight West: Portraits and Scenes from American Ranch Life”) in photographs she took between the Mexico and Wyoming. In the last decade her work documented the flora of the American prairie.

For that, Smith revived Kallitype, a 19th century alternative photo process that involves iron salts and silver nitrates on paper exposed to ultraviolet light. Sometimes called “sun printing,” this process allows Smith to produce life sized images of native plants in a range of tones partially created by sunlight interacting with decomposing plants.

“I rarely know what the end result will be and that in itself holds my interest,” she explained.

Smith has done quite well in galleries of Santa Fe and New York City. She has also completed commissions for Neal Smith Wildlife Refuge in Iowa and similar places in Illinois and California. This Friday, she opens an exhibition at The Mansion with Madai Taylor, an original Iowa artist who paints with dirt, mixing different soils with gesso and scratching layers as they dry. Both artists work large. Each will show around twenty big works requiring a massive amount of wall space. With over 3000 square feet in several rooms, The Mansion has more than many galleries do.

In more traditional galleries this month, Chris Vance’s annual exhibition continues in, and outside, at Moberg Gallery. This year’s Senior Thesis Exhibition at Drake’s Anderson and Weeks galleries is the strongest in many years: Lucca Wang and Rachel Crown translate big personalities into paintings and Hannah Bloom demonstrates stunning mastery of several different media.

At Heritage Gallery “Lovers, Mothers & Their Dreams” features two sculptors, Annick Ibsen and Linda Lewis, who channel whimsy into profound, ironic statements about the human condition. That show opens April 25 with a reception on April 28. At Olson-Larsen Galleries, public art specialist Mike Baur shows small scale works along with clay vases and clay paintings by John Beckelman, and abstract landscapes and still lifes by Stephen Dinsmore.

Painting Grace

Michael Brangoccio and Madai Taylor find motivation in grace - not the kind that evolved from Greek mythology to represent elegance and beauty, but the theological-philosophical grace of The Enlightenment that allowed kindness to soften moral and legal codes. Though their symbolism and media are utterly different, these two Iowa painters are kindred in this common enthusiasm.

Over two decades, Brangoccio has created a post-quantum universe of alternate realities and small miracles where fish, bears and elephants fly while birds are grounded. He has however separated himself from surrealists and tromp d-oeil artists who play with similar symbolism by consistently affirming that grace is transcendent even in secular terms. No matter how precarious the situations his subjects confront, hope always trumps despair. In his new exhibition at Olson-Larsen Galleries, Brangoccio’s stressed acrylics suggest forms of grace that are more obvious than anything in his previous shows. “High Rise” employs Biblical atmospherics where seas roil under both stormy and sunny skies. “Two Thoughts” similarly confronts flying elephants with both blue and dark skies. “Shining” suggests something extraterrestrial while “Passing Thought” welcomes blimps somewhere over the rainbow. “Drift” presents an engaging puzzle in which saucers and dishes fly off into a consuming enlightenment. Call it Brangoccio’s light period but do not read anything more into the heavenly luminescence. These paintings are still about conundrums and possibilities.

Fort Dodge painter Madai Taylor also believes that his art is a measure of grace. For this pastor though, grace is more religiously charged right down to his choice of media. Taylor paints with the earth. He gathers red dirt in the South and black loam in Iowa fields, sifts it to fine grains and mixes it with gesso. He applies that paint in layers which he scratches while they are drying, much like the plows of agriculture scratch at the same dirt in its natural environment. He considers his process is a unique form of shorthand - a primitive scripture. For both media and inspiration, Taylor goes to a childhood comfort zone.

“As a child, without shoes on my feet I would jump off the front porch of the dilapidated old house where I lived to play in mud puddles… I can still feel the thick soft earth gushing through my toes,” he recalled.

Taylor says he uses dirt to create a vocabulary that symbolizes his ideals and values. “Dirt intrigues me as a medium because it has unique characteristics, rare tones, gradations and textures that lend themselves to an immense, versatile range of possibilities. It allows me to express infinite space and spiritual universes that exist beyond the visible world in a medium that is timeless, and of the soul,” he explains.

Taylor says his manipulations of paint are intentionally vertical. “The natural material from which I made these images reminds us surely and absolutely that we are part of nature. Their verticality symbolizes the link between God and man. Horizontal compositions represent what comes to humanity out of the earth realm, or that which can be ascertained by the mind. Square composition represents neutrality that believes nothing. I believe my work is about the vertical relationship I have with God.”

Art Touts

Tim Frerichs exhibits a three year study of industrial agriculture transposed with native grasses at Olson-Larsen through April 9. Collages, digital prints, ink and graphite gesso are assembled to study the relative merits of differing uses of land in the prairie... James Ellwanger is working on a spectacular sculpture for downtown that will also provide video connections to people in town centers of Des Moines’ sister cities. Also, Ellwanger’s new eight dimensional Plexiglas exhibition at the Iowa Historical Building considers six landmark civil rights decisions in Iowa history.

International Times

Future is Now in Two Brilliant Shows

Two local exhibitions show off the talents of innovative young international artists staking out territory in Post Modern history. Anselm Reyle and Jesse Small both work dialectically, creating a new kind of art by pushing old icons and clichés into seemingly disparate contexts.

Forty year old German Anselm Reyle, whose exhibition plays the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) through April 17, is a new kind of German artist who is proud to be part of the rising art scene of Berlin.

“Cologne is the past. Berlin is the future now,” he explains.

Reyle mentions Americans such as Jeff Koons, Barnett Newman and Gene Davis as influences while distancing himself from superstar German artists like Anselm Kieffer. Although one “Untitled” Reyle piece resembles a Kieffer masterpiece in the DMAC permanent collection, Reyle disavows any connection and points out differences - mainly those of mood. He is a rather gleeful German artist and no one ever accused Kieffer or his generation of much projecting much glee. Reyle admits to other contrary attitudes.

“In my painting education, painting for effect was completely discouraged but I always liked such tricks. As a child my mother prohibited me from using paint by numbers formats. Now I use them for effect. As a child I was only allowed to play with hand made wooden toys. Now I play with all kinds of flashy toys and neon games,” he said.

Reyle frequents flea markets in search of materials and thinks the next big new thing might be an old thing with a new paint job. DMAC Director Jeff Fleming calls him “a taxidermist breathing new life into exhausted or dormant visual motifs.” Reyle’s art in DMAC’s exhibition includes chrome, bronze, piano lacquer, plinth, aluminum, glass, neon, electric cables, rust, plastic, LED lights, and wood veneer - as well as more traditional Modernist media.

“I am particularly interested in typical things - clichés from another era of Modernism like African sculpture and cave paintings. I see clichés not as negative things but as connections,” he said.

Reyle says his mother has come around, somewhat.

“She accepts my work and is glad it is successful. But she only accepts it as irony,” he laughed.

Small’s exhibition reveals a distinct new phase of an evolving artist. The 36 year old now splits his time now between studios in Los Angeles and southern China. His earlier work resembled Reyle’s in the way it tried to squeeze playful new interpretations out of old humorless icons. Small built a reputation for embellishing weaponry with high gloss glazes that made objects of brutality into ornaments of frivolity.

Even today he says he can take his porcelain bombs through customs because the ornamentation disguises their identity.

Small no longer goes to flea markets though. He makes everything from scratch now, even plastic robots that might embellish his chandeliers. And everything he makes is now fully functional.

“Getting away from American culture, I realized that objects that are readily recognized in America, such as Jeeps and army helmets, have obscure meaning elsewhere. In China, people thought my army helmets were bicycle helmets and just thought it weird that anyone would make a bicycle helmet out of porcelain. So while working in China I got interested in more internationally recognized symbols and found that video games were pan cultural and pan generational,” he explained.

“Now I think I am going more for the throat of ornamentation. I am now actually making the items themselves - actual folding screens and chandeliers. They might be stylistically quite different but they are still functioning in their traditional fashion,” Small said.

That sets up a dialogue between the art and the gallery viewer.

“Is it a chandelier or a sculpture about a chandelier? And if it’s a chandelier, what is it doing in an art gallery?”

Go ask for yourself. Small exhibition continues at Moberg Gallery till March 18.

Beyond The Banjo Lesson

Con - Texting Henry Ossawa Tanner

As centuries go, 21 is an unlucky number for context. It’s ostracized as “off message” from the party line “talking points” that consume contemporary politics. It’s dying on cutting room floors wherever media sound bytes are edited. Twitter’s 140 character limit might as well announce “No context need apply.” If the medium is the message, then context seems doomed to the obscurity of art house cinema, obscure cable networks, and the side galleries of museums.

While the Des Moines Art Center (DMAC) received due kudos last decade for audience expanding contemporary shows, its side galleries provided a welcome refuge for context freaks. One extraordinary exhibition after another covered subjects from a range of perspectives while hardly ever drawing a sound byte hiccup from mainstream media. Henry Ossawa Tanner, the subject of the latest such DMAC show, would have understood.

Tanner was himself a stranger in strange and hostile lands. Born in 1859 of an escaped slave mother, he came of age during the golden age of African American culture between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the Jim Crow era which can be marked from the day in the late 1880’s when Des Moines Register Sports Hall of Famer Cap Anson threatened to boycott baseball unless his opponents got “the nigger off the field” and out of mainstream American culture. Tanner owned a gallery and taught art in the Deep South during the golden days but by 1893 he found that even Philadelphia had become too racist to tolerate. Happily for art history, he moved to Paris where he fit into a milieu that revolutionized painting.

The DMAC exhibition includes works of a painter caught between the two worlds - realism and expressionism. Some paintings contain both detailed brushstrokes of the former and the broad swaths of the latter. “Le Touquet,” depicts Pont-Aven, an art colony where Paul Gauguin and Émile Bernard worked and taught younger artists. Others show Biblical events through multi cultural eyes. A visitor to both North Africa and Holy Land, Tanner depicted Jesus in “The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water” with the reverence of an Islamic iconographer. Brushstroke blurs suggest a divine light while his disciples are painted realistically. In “Christ Learning to Read,” Tanner provides context for his iconic later painting “The Banjo Lesson.”

Paintings by Louis Ritman and Winslow Homer plus a bronze sculpture by Rodin are included for deeper context. Ritman was a contemporary of Tanner at Paris’ Académie Julian. Tanner particularly admired and was influenced by Homer’s presentation of black seafarers. Tanner helped Des Moines collector J.S. Carpenter purchase the Rodin sculpture. Tanner married a white opera singer from San Francisco and lived in Paris till his death in 1937. Because of Carpenter’s admiration, all but one the exhibition paintings became permanent parts of DMAC collection and Iowa’s penance for Cap Anson’s infamy. Some context just will not go away.

Touts

Self described “manic artist” John Baldwin shows at The Lift through February with homage to Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” and other great moments in the history of mania… Mathew J. Clark, Art Pimp’s 2009 Iowa Artist of the Year, signed with Moberg Gallery to exhibit his controversial (banned from Des Moines International Airport ) “Our Little Jimmy Can Do Anything If He Puts His Mind To It,” during their March show of Chris Vance… "Young Adult Identity and Consumption in Urban China" opens Jan. 25 in Cowles Library at Drake. The exhibit contrasts the consumption habits of Chinese born in the 1980’s and missed the Cultural Revolution with those of older Chinese consumers. In conjunction, R. Bin Wong, Director of the Asia Institute and UCLA History Professor (regarded as the top Chinese historian in America) will discuss reasons why China and Europe took different consumer paths, on February 25 in Olmsted Center.

An Irruption of Divas

Song Bird Watchers Flock to Indianola

My grandfather was never interested in clearing his woods to plant more fields. Because the migratory birds that returned to his farm each year feasted on bugs, he refused to spray insecticides in his orchard. But after most of his O’Brien County neighbors converted their woodlands to corn and bean acreage, the insect-eating birds stopped coming. Grandpa sold his farm and moved, saying that he would “follow the black-billed cuckoo, who is obviously smarter than the modern farmer.” He headed south to Central Iowa and the cuckoo migrated north, so Grandpa never found his black-billed friend again. He did, however, live to discover another kind of song bird that had also been diverted by human meddling.

Just as the cuckoo’s migratory habits were irrupted by two crop agriculture and the popularization of chemical pesticides, the opera diva began flocking to Marion County in 1973 after two visionary men enticed them to stray from their usual course. When Maestro Robert Larsen and the late Douglas Duncan founded Des Moines Metro Opera (DMMO), they entered un-chartered territory. At the time, serious opera companies were only found in great cities and famous resorts. Indianola, Iowa was hardly either. Yet, from day one, Duncan and Larsen designed their company on the cutting edge of the art form.

“Their first season was simply audacious and it established the reputation instantly. Think about it, a normal fledgling company will perform three audience-pandering classics. But they did Albert Herring by (Benjamin) Britten, The Medium by (Gian Carlo) Menotti and Prima Donna by Arthur Benjamin. They’ve had the respect of the opera world ever since. St. Louis Opera, for instance, was completely inspired by DMMO,” observed Florida State University professor Kyle Marrero, who served last year as director of DMMO’s apprentice artist program

“Conventional wisdom would be to start with the pops, not a challenging repertoire like they did. Another thing about the beginnings, it was 15 years before they ever repeated an opera. It’s astonishing for a regional company to have such breadth,” added Tom Smith, who last year became only the third executive director in the company‘s history.

DMMO almost didn’t happen. Larsen was teaching an opera workshop at Simpson College because Sven and Mildred Lekberg had endowed a special assistant professor position to attract the young piano wiz. Then in the early 1970’s, the pinnacle company in America, New York’s Metropolitan Opera, offered him a position. Larsen says it was incredibly attractive, but not tempting.

“If I took the Met post, I could see how my entire life would unfold. Far more interesting were the two prospects that staying here presented - teaching young talent and providing a stage for them, plus bringing opera to a part of the country that had never had it,” he recalled.

It takes more than cutting edge programming to lure brilliant song birds year after year. Larsen and Duncan carved a niche in the opera world by scheduling a summer season in Pote Theater’s 488 seat room. Great singers came, usually for less money than they could command elsewhere, because it was the family time of year. Pote’s friendly confines symbolized what is best about life in Iowa -- whatever might be lacking in frequency of cultural attractions is compensated with intimacy. Their plan irrupted the migratory pattern of the diva.

“The summer season allowed me to spend more time in residence in Iowa than I spent anywhere else in a given year, including home,” explained Southern Californian Evelyn de la Rosa, who sang more leads than any DMMO diva since the 1980‘s.

“It’s like no where else in the opera world for its sense of family,” said Janara Kellerman, a Cedar Rapids native who returned from New York to sing the lead in Carmen last year.

“This is my oasis in the dessert. For two months a year, I hear robins, I have friends who are like family. It’s such a respite from the hard part of an opera life. Too often we just do our jobs without an opportunity to make connections with the community or with our colleagues. This is the best sense of the phrase ‘the opera family,’ explained Gwyndolyn Jones, a five time DMMO leading lady from Louisiana.

All the divas we spoke with cited DMMO’s apprentice program as a big part of the family atmosphere and the opera’s international reputation. In its 33rd year, the program saw 850 young singers audition from around the world last season, for just 42 positions.

“I began here as an apprentice. It’s an extraordinary program, the best anywhere. The apprentices are not just selected to fill out the choruses, they are a main focus of the festival. We all go to their concerts and support them. That’s part of the thrill, to hear the young voices coming up,” explained Kellerman.

The apprentice program is the result of across the board success. DMMO got out of the red ink by its second season and made a profit every year since, a winning streak unmatched in the opera universe. Between a fifth and the fourth of the audience comes from outside Iowa, from more than 35 different states and 5 countries each year. That probably makes it the most cosmopolitan attraction in the state. More than 85 per cent of the ticket holders renew each year too. Even within Iowa, ticket buyers came from 66 different counties last year. Any way you look at it, DMMO is a serious tourist attraction.

“This is a small family business only in spirit. The company has a $2 million seasonal budget and a $12 million endowment. Our stage is the same width as that of the Met (Metropolitan Opera in New York). The small house is exciting to sing in, but it’s not forgiving. It’s not for beginners. We applaud ourselves as a house that has launched so many careers,” said Larsen.

The small house is always packed. DMMO’s summer festival program has varied between 95 per cent and 105 per cent “sold out” (some tickets are returned and resold) each summer for the last several years. That allows the company to produce an unusually high percentage of earned income for such a small house. And that helps fund the educational mission - DMMO spends nearly a fourth of its budget on the Apprentice Artist Program, OPERA Iowa and Operation Opera.

The intimacy of the theater is a remarkable asset. The worst seat at Pote is closer to the singers than the best seat at the biggest opera houses in America. Such “opera in your face” is not something the critics are used to and they have responded quite well to it.

“We get more New Yorkers every year, in our audience as well as our apprentice program. They are overwhelmed by our production values. Everyone who wants to make it in opera goes to New York, but outside of The Met and (New York) City Opera, the opera companies there are pretty bare boned. If not for having so many great singers around, their productions are pretty dubious. When these singers see what’s going on here with costumes, sets, camaraderie, interchange with other artists, et cetera, they are blown away,” observed Larsen, with a smile.

Divas blend into Indianola, frequenting places like Cafe Beaujolais, Crouse Café and the Sports Page Lounge.

“We almost all furnish our homes here completely by shopping at Goodwill. Then we donate everything back at the end of the season. First one here gets first pick of the furniture,” laughed Jones.

Sometimes, divas don’t blend in enough. In many other opera houses, a “Green Room” backstage permits fans to wait to mingle with singers after they have changed clothes. In Indianola, the cast comes to the lobby after performances, still in costume, to visit with fans. That can be confusing. Jones and Kellerman frequently play classic characters of loose or tragic moral circumstances. Both divas tell stories about being called “slut” or “tart” or being confidentially told that the men they are “fooling around with” on stage are married. Jones joked that this doesn’t ever happen to Jane Redding, a buddy-diva from Florida.

“I play all the sweet roles,” Redding sighed as her husband Kyle Marerro joined the kidding.

“We call Jane ‘Miss Indianola.’ She even gets invited to sing at the local churches,” he said.

Over the years, DMMO has attracted an impressive list of singers to Indianola. Yet, one singing discovery that Larsen rates with “the best ever,” was already living in Indianola, and was never to be heard elsewhere.

“This company owes its existence to Carol Stuart. She is one of the greatest singers I have ever heard - to this day. But she was not going to leave Iowa to pursue a career. So, we provided her only stage. She was our first Magda (La Rondine), our first Cio-Cio-San (Madam Butterfly), our first Violetta (La Traviata) and so many others (Stuart premiered a record ten lead roles altogether at DMMO),” Larsen recalled.

Stuart was also my grandfather’s favorite song bird, so much so that my mother and her sister both teased him about having a crush on her. Hearing Maestro Larsen recall her history reminded me of one of Grandpa’s favorite quotations, from Charles Lindbergh.

“If I had to choose, I’d rather have birds than airplanes.”

Fortunately, DMMO doesn’t have to choose.