Studio art faculty members Linda Rossi, Kelly Connole, Fred Hagstrom, Dan Bruggeman, David Lefkowitz, and Stephen Mohring present new work inspired by College collections.
Carleton College abounds in research collections and other rich repositories. To render these collections visible and to reveal the creative process, the Perlman Teaching Museum presents Ibid. (Referencing Carleton Collections). Each faculty artist selected a collection or collections—from Gould Library books to biology department specimens to Cowling Arboretum trees—to mine for source material and inspiration. Source objects or collections seeded creative imaginings now embodied in prints, artists’ books, furniture, drawings, sculpture, installations and mixed-media work.
- Printmaker Fred Hagstrom, a Gould Library habitué, and regular traveler to the South Pacific, recycles rare and regular books into new prints and artists’ books on themes from the slave trade, to nuclear testing in the South Pacific, to a Maori family saga.
- After a decade of teaching drawing, Dan Bruggeman turns his collection of student drawings into a life-drawing installation replete with his own drawn figures.
- Kelly Connole and Linda Rossi are both drawn to the pedagogical resources in the biology department, including animal and botanical specimens, skeletons, and historical lantern slides. Connole creates poetically rendered ceramic and mixed-media “specimens” presented in cabinets, drawers and high on gallery walls. Rossi responds with elegant and complex book objects, hand-modified natural specimens, and light-boxes illuminating found and original photographs.
- Stephen Mohring, a sculptor who harvests downed trees from the Cowling Arboretum for use by Carleton art students, re-presents tree specimens as artistic material in mixed-media works.
- David Lefkowitz ignores the “teaching collections” stored in academic departments in favor of blueprints, plans, and architectural models housed in the Facilities Department’s plan room to create large or luminous drawings of fantasy campus buildings and plans.
Like every institution, Carleton amasses things. College collections comprise precious objects, preserved for their intrinsic meaning and instructional possibilities. In addition, the many mundane items held in storerooms and closets may gain value over time and come to embody aspects of college history. By inviting faculty artists to seek inspiration in college collections, the Perlman Teaching Museum aims to dramatize the transformative processes animating visual art-makers. In our increasingly virtual and digital age, a return to “real” things can focus the mind, animate the senses, and empower imaginative flights and serious learning.