Community Calendar

The new BNYMCA has a new art gallery! Jan Brandt curated the exhibition which will be on permanent display. It was a challenge to decide who to ask for this first phase because we have so many talented artist in our community. Using local artists seemed important to strengthen the message of community which is so important to the Y. The artists represented range in age from 13-60 plus. There are collaborations between a professional artist, Danell Dvorak, and Avah Waldschmidt, a neuro-diverse, non verbal, autistic teen. There is an intergenerational collaboration between a 13 year old artist, Ada Stojentin, and her great aunt, Jan Brandt. Two paintings include the theme of water, with scenes of swim instructors, by Danell Dvorak, and water aerobics, by Sheila Lamberson. One painting has a humorous tone, by artist Jeff Bess. A punch needle piece by Camila Marienela, broaches the topic of immigration services in McLean County. These will be on permanent display at the YMCA. I have attached a recording by Avah Waldschmidt done on her assistive device. I would love to attach more images of the paintings, or meet with a reporter and the artists about the work. The artists names again are: Danell Dvorak, Jan Brandt, Avah Waldschmidt, Ada Stojentin, Jeffrey Bess, and Camila Marianela. Hours of Operation are 5 am -10PM M-F 6AM-8PM Saturday and Sunday. Curator Jan Brandt of Jan Brandt Gallery 309 287 4700

Chase away the winter blahs at the Normal Public Library, where you can see beautiful pictures of birds taken right here in Central Illinois. The exhibit was juried by Doug Johnson, the Executive Director of the McLean County Arts Center, who narrowed down the submittals to 30 photographs for display. This exhibit will run through the end of February.

simplenothingsimplesomething comprises several new works on paper and a large-scale installation. This exhibition is the most recent iteration of Bawa's experiments with construction scaffolds, which began in 2012 and have spanned several formats. Compelled equally by their geometrical elegance and their passive ubiquity in daily life, Bawa has revealed scaffolds to be a surprisingly rich sculptural medium. She has eked novel designs out of their crossbars and rectangles on salt flats in India and fields in Oregon, as well as in gallery interiors across the United States. She has also miniaturized her scaffolds using 3D printers, and used them as matrices to create embossed prints, demonstrating how slight adjustments to a consistent form's scale, color, surroundings, and means of presentation can beget a large range of visual effects. This exhibition, which presents both a new series of relief prints and a network of jet-black scaffolding, shows a progression in Bawa's approach to her signature material.

The relief prints in simplenothingsimplesomething, which Bawa executed during her time at Watershed Print Residency, are continuations of a series of embossings that she included in a 2021 exhibition at the University of Kentucky Art Museum. Like those, these are nearly colorless, the plain white or gray of their paper decorated by faint impressions from a scaffold-derived matrix. In each case, the smooth surface of the paper hums with the textures pressed into it. These prints, however, are both bigger and quieter than the Kentucky embossings: the sheets stand almost ten feet tall and, on each, just a few impressions combine to form commanding images. The prints in this exhibition have turned their predecessors' rhythmic energy into a quiet grace.

The title for this exhibition was adapted from a 2011 interview of the sculptor John McCracken (whose brightly colored leaning planks Bawa cites as an enduring influence). “With many Minimalist [artworks],” he said, “one could be tempted to think [that the work is] merely a simple nothing, but it's really a simple something.” A push and pull between “something” and “nothing” — always executed through the simplest of means — is consistently the source of meaning and power in Bawa's art.

simplenothingsimplesomething is curated by Troy Sherman, Curator at University Galleries. This exhibition is supported by University Galleries’ grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Harold K. Sage Foundation, and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund.

Encompassing astronomy, history, materiality, attention, and labor, Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World presents drawings and textiles made by artist Anna Von Mertens from 2015 through 2022. She writes, “I think objects can absorb time, absorb our physical presence. That is why I make detailed drawings; that is why I sew quilts by hand.” The artist’s close observation and meticulous making are evident in the three discreet (yet in dialogue) series on view: Remnants, Measure, and Objects (100 Emojis).

This exhibition premieres Von Mertens’s Remnants drawings, for which she finds inspiration in the formation of precious metals through exploding stars. To acknowledge the chain of cosmic processes, the artist developed her own complex process. First, she gathered gold and silver necklaces and arranged them on light-sensitive paper in swirling forms that recall a nebula or supernova. Then, she exposed them to sunlight to complete the cyanotype process. The three-dimensional tangles of jewelry created both points of contact on the paper, and slippages into shadow, which she scanned and projected onto black paper. She then painstakingly drew the forms with metallic gold and silver pencils. Von Mertens writes, “A necklace might simply act as reminder of someone, the bestower of a gift. These elements are a connection to others. Here, in my drawings, they indicate the connection to all things. These elements came from cosmic events so far from our reality, so physically distant—and yet, here they are; here we are.”

The exhibition includes the entirety of works that comprise Von Mertens’s research on American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921). Leavitt was a Harvard “computer” who studied photographic glass plate negatives of the stars. Her observations and calculations of cycles of brightness in variable stars gave astronomers the first tool to measure the distance to faraway stars. Leavitt’s discovery led to those by other scientists who have become household names, including Edwin Hubble. Von Mertens celebrates Leavitt’s contributions with graphite drawings of some of the original glass plates that Leavitt studied, which the artist accessed through the Harvard College Observatory during the formation of her research-based exhibition at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Von Mertens also used software to determine the position of stars above Leavitt’s birthplace on the day she was born and above the location of her death on the day she died. She hand-stitched the arcing star trails for each date into large black textiles, which are installed with a distance between them to represent Leavitt’s lifespan.

Colored-pencil drawings from Von Mertens’s Objects (100 Emojis) series animate the symbols we view on our phones using patterns that reference traditional quilts. In giving a different kind of attentive awareness to these objects, Von Mertens brings the virtual world into contact with our physical world, a revealing and enriching act.

Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World is the center point of multiple educational programs. Anna Von Mertens will give a public artist lecture and meet with students. University Galleries’ staff will lead art-making workshops for ISU students, families, K-12 students, and community members. University Galleries continues collaborating with the Children’s Discovery Museum for Art Around You, a series of exhibition tours and workshops for children ages 7 through 10. Free virtual and in-person curator-led tours are available by appointment for the duration of the exhibition.

Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World is organized by Kendra Paitz, University Galleries’ director and chief curator. This exhibition and programming are supported by University Galleries’ grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Harold K. Sage Foundation, and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund.

"Wolf’s Clothing" presents selected works from the permanent collection of University Galleries of Illinois State University. Artists include: Robert Donley, Peter Bodnar, Krys Hendren, Miyoko Ito, Ben Mahmoud, Gladys Nilsson, William Otton, Ed Paschke, Seymour Rosofsky, Barbara Rossi, and Joseph Yoakum.

The few decades following the Second World War saw a flowering of the visual arts — particularly drawing and painting — in and around Chicago. In the 1950s, a group of artists known as the Monster Roster made freaky, psychological pictures inspired by their experiences in the war and the paintings of Jean Dubuffet. The following decade, several artists associated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited together under the group name the Hairy Who. When they disbanded, their loud graphic style influenced a more diffuse set of artists who came to be known as the Chicago Imagists. Frequently, artists associated with all three of these movements are lumped together under the banner of the latter. “Imagism” has become a label of convenience for anything made in Chicago around 1970 that displays an interest in stylized organic forms, cultural reference, and playful, often perverted, content.

The works in this exhibition demonstrate a range of techniques and approaches used by mid-century Chicagoans. Between Miyoko Ito's lithe, muted compositions and Ed Paschke's wily portraits, for instance, there may seem to be little common ground. What connects their work, as well as that of all the artists in this exhibition, is a coy approach to the relationship between abstraction and representation. Just as there are landscapes latent in Ito's designs, Paschke's figures emerge from skeins of indulgent patterning.

The art critic Roberta Smith once called Paschke “a formalist in wolf's clothing”: the photographic precision of his representations belies the delight they take in tricks of ornamentation, framing, and perspective. Likewise, the works in Wolf's Clothing demonstrate how, circa 1970, Chicago artists thematized the tension between what an image shows and how it does so.

Encompassing astronomy, history, materiality, attention, and labor, the exhibition "Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World" presents drawings and textiles made by artist Von Mertens from 2015 through 2022. She writes, “I think objects can absorb time, absorb our physical presence. That is why I make detailed drawings; that is why I sew quilts by hand.” The artist’s close observation and meticulous making are evident in the three discreet (yet in dialogue) series on view: "Remnants," "Measure," and "Objects (100 Emojis)." On Tuesday, January 31, Von Mertens will give a lecture about her work at University Galleries.

The new BNYMCA has a new art gallery! Jan Brandt curated the exhibition which will be on permanent display. It was a challenge to decide who to ask for this first phase because we have so many talented artist in our community. Using local artists seemed important to strengthen the message of community which is so important to the Y. The artists represented range in age from 13-60 plus. There are collaborations between a professional artist, Danell Dvorak, and Avah Waldschmidt, a neuro-diverse, non verbal, autistic teen. There is an intergenerational collaboration between a 13 year old artist, Ada Stojentin, and her great aunt, Jan Brandt. Two paintings include the theme of water, with scenes of swim instructors, by Danell Dvorak, and water aerobics, by Sheila Lamberson. One painting has a humorous tone, by artist Jeff Bess. A punch needle piece by Camila Marienela, broaches the topic of immigration services in McLean County. These will be on permanent display at the YMCA. I have attached a recording by Avah Waldschmidt done on her assistive device. I would love to attach more images of the paintings, or meet with a reporter and the artists about the work. The artists names again are: Danell Dvorak, Jan Brandt, Avah Waldschmidt, Ada Stojentin, Jeffrey Bess, and Camila Marianela. Hours of Operation are 5 am -10PM M-F 6AM-8PM Saturday and Sunday. Curator Jan Brandt of Jan Brandt Gallery 309 287 4700

Chase away the winter blahs at the Normal Public Library, where you can see beautiful pictures of birds taken right here in Central Illinois. The exhibit was juried by Doug Johnson, the Executive Director of the McLean County Arts Center, who narrowed down the submittals to 30 photographs for display. This exhibit will run through the end of February.

simplenothingsimplesomething comprises several new works on paper and a large-scale installation. This exhibition is the most recent iteration of Bawa's experiments with construction scaffolds, which began in 2012 and have spanned several formats. Compelled equally by their geometrical elegance and their passive ubiquity in daily life, Bawa has revealed scaffolds to be a surprisingly rich sculptural medium. She has eked novel designs out of their crossbars and rectangles on salt flats in India and fields in Oregon, as well as in gallery interiors across the United States. She has also miniaturized her scaffolds using 3D printers, and used them as matrices to create embossed prints, demonstrating how slight adjustments to a consistent form's scale, color, surroundings, and means of presentation can beget a large range of visual effects. This exhibition, which presents both a new series of relief prints and a network of jet-black scaffolding, shows a progression in Bawa's approach to her signature material.

The relief prints in simplenothingsimplesomething, which Bawa executed during her time at Watershed Print Residency, are continuations of a series of embossings that she included in a 2021 exhibition at the University of Kentucky Art Museum. Like those, these are nearly colorless, the plain white or gray of their paper decorated by faint impressions from a scaffold-derived matrix. In each case, the smooth surface of the paper hums with the textures pressed into it. These prints, however, are both bigger and quieter than the Kentucky embossings: the sheets stand almost ten feet tall and, on each, just a few impressions combine to form commanding images. The prints in this exhibition have turned their predecessors' rhythmic energy into a quiet grace.

The title for this exhibition was adapted from a 2011 interview of the sculptor John McCracken (whose brightly colored leaning planks Bawa cites as an enduring influence). “With many Minimalist [artworks],” he said, “one could be tempted to think [that the work is] merely a simple nothing, but it's really a simple something.” A push and pull between “something” and “nothing” — always executed through the simplest of means — is consistently the source of meaning and power in Bawa's art.

simplenothingsimplesomething is curated by Troy Sherman, Curator at University Galleries. This exhibition is supported by University Galleries’ grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Harold K. Sage Foundation, and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund.

Encompassing astronomy, history, materiality, attention, and labor, Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World presents drawings and textiles made by artist Anna Von Mertens from 2015 through 2022. She writes, “I think objects can absorb time, absorb our physical presence. That is why I make detailed drawings; that is why I sew quilts by hand.” The artist’s close observation and meticulous making are evident in the three discreet (yet in dialogue) series on view: Remnants, Measure, and Objects (100 Emojis).

This exhibition premieres Von Mertens’s Remnants drawings, for which she finds inspiration in the formation of precious metals through exploding stars. To acknowledge the chain of cosmic processes, the artist developed her own complex process. First, she gathered gold and silver necklaces and arranged them on light-sensitive paper in swirling forms that recall a nebula or supernova. Then, she exposed them to sunlight to complete the cyanotype process. The three-dimensional tangles of jewelry created both points of contact on the paper, and slippages into shadow, which she scanned and projected onto black paper. She then painstakingly drew the forms with metallic gold and silver pencils. Von Mertens writes, “A necklace might simply act as reminder of someone, the bestower of a gift. These elements are a connection to others. Here, in my drawings, they indicate the connection to all things. These elements came from cosmic events so far from our reality, so physically distant—and yet, here they are; here we are.”

The exhibition includes the entirety of works that comprise Von Mertens’s research on American astronomer Henrietta Leavitt (1868–1921). Leavitt was a Harvard “computer” who studied photographic glass plate negatives of the stars. Her observations and calculations of cycles of brightness in variable stars gave astronomers the first tool to measure the distance to faraway stars. Leavitt’s discovery led to those by other scientists who have become household names, including Edwin Hubble. Von Mertens celebrates Leavitt’s contributions with graphite drawings of some of the original glass plates that Leavitt studied, which the artist accessed through the Harvard College Observatory during the formation of her research-based exhibition at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Von Mertens also used software to determine the position of stars above Leavitt’s birthplace on the day she was born and above the location of her death on the day she died. She hand-stitched the arcing star trails for each date into large black textiles, which are installed with a distance between them to represent Leavitt’s lifespan.

Colored-pencil drawings from Von Mertens’s Objects (100 Emojis) series animate the symbols we view on our phones using patterns that reference traditional quilts. In giving a different kind of attentive awareness to these objects, Von Mertens brings the virtual world into contact with our physical world, a revealing and enriching act.

Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World is the center point of multiple educational programs. Anna Von Mertens will give a public artist lecture and meet with students. University Galleries’ staff will lead art-making workshops for ISU students, families, K-12 students, and community members. University Galleries continues collaborating with the Children’s Discovery Museum for Art Around You, a series of exhibition tours and workshops for children ages 7 through 10. Free virtual and in-person curator-led tours are available by appointment for the duration of the exhibition.

Glass, Metal, Thread: Building Our Observable World is organized by Kendra Paitz, University Galleries’ director and chief curator. This exhibition and programming are supported by University Galleries’ grants from the Illinois Arts Council Agency, Harold K. Sage Foundation, and the Illinois State University Foundation Fund.