Carleton College’s Perlman Teaching Museum opens the 2012-13 academic year with an exhibit highlighting new works by six studio art faculty members. Ibid. (Referencing Carleton Collections) will be on display in the Braucher Gallery in the Weitz Center for Creativity from September 14 through November 14, 2012. Entry to the exhibit is free and open to the public.
Ibid. (Referencing Carleton Collections) presents new works by Carleton art faculty Daniel Bruggeman, Kelly Connole, Fred Hagstrom, David Lefkowitz, Stephen Mohring, and Linda Rossi. The pieces are inspired by or reference various College collections—from Gould Library books to biology department specimens to Cowling Arboretum trees. The end result features newly-created prints, artists’ books, furniture, drawings, sculpture, installations, and mixed media work.
“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,” explains Perlman Teaching Museum director and curator Laurel Bradley. “By inviting faculty artists to seek inspiration from 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.”
Printmaker 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, Bruggeman turns his collection of student drawings into a life-drawing installation replete with his own drawn figures. Connole and Rossi are both drawn to the pedagogical resources in the biology department, including animal and botanical specimens, skeletons, and historical lantern slides. Connole creates a cabinet to present poetically rendered specimens in ceramics and other materials; Rossi responds with complicated book objects, hand-crafted specimens, and light-boxes illuminating found and original photographs. 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. And 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.
Idid. (Referencing Carleton Collections) officially opens on Friday, September 14 with a reception and brief commentary from the artists themselves. The opening is also taking place in collaboration with nearby St. Olaf College —“Creativity and the Colleges: An Art Crawl” encourages participants to seek out the new exhibitions at the two Northfield colleges, both of which are focused on works by art faculty. The opening reception for St. Olaf’s Flaten Art Museum exhibit, Artists on the Hill: Department of Art and Art History, takes place from 6 to 8 p.m., and the opening reception at Carleton will be held from 7 to 9 p.m. (with brief remarks by the artists at 7:30 p.m.).
“This is a wonderful way to welcome a new season with faculty exhibitions at both Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges,” says Bradley.
Ibid. (Reference Carleton Collections) will be on display through November 14, 2012. Also on display in the Perlman Teaching Museum’s Kaemmer Family Gallery is Art Treasures/Curricular Resources, which is an extension of courses in history and French. For more information, including disability accommodations, contact Laurel Bradley at (507) 222-4342 or (507) 222-4469 or visit online at http://go.carleton.edu/museum.
The Weitz Center for Creativity is located at 320 North Third Street in Northfield. Hours for the Perlman Teaching Museum are: Monday-Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Thursday-Friday 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Saturday-Sunday, 12 p.m. to 4 p.m.; the Museum is closed on Sundays. Enter the Perlman Teaching Museum, Weitz Center for Creativity, at Third and College Streets.