Gallery: Teresa Sullivan

FIRST THURSDAY OPENING July 5, 6-8 pm

Artist Teresa Sullivan is this month’s featured artist in The Gallery.

Teresa Sullivan creates intricate and monumental sculptural jewelry from humble materials using the ancient technique of beadweaving, revealing her love of the surreal and the irreverent.  The stories she tells in her beaded tapestries, jewelry, and sculpture are about the power of people discovering their abilities; from super heroines of comics and science fiction to the real mentors of her life. The tiny beads are transformed from something delicate to bold, dense, self supporting artworks.

Although she has an idea for a particular piece before she even strings her first bead, her mode of working allows for discovery throughout the weaving process. Insights develop with the creation of each piece, allowing her to work through the difficult stages and solve the aesthetic and technical problems of making artworks with beads.

Teresa turns this medium, long marginalized as safe/rote/escapist, on its head. Intricate, repetitive weaving techniques give these tiny components structural integrity. The intensely methodical pace of the work allows her to flesh out ideas as she works. With iconic imagery and symbolic use of color, she encourages discussion and even dissent.
      
The untitled “Ropes” are a post-apocalyptic take on Victorian-era bell pulls. An art world still striving to assert its relevancy in a postmodern/post-everything setting has ever more rigid rules. The heads in these “ropes” call attention to the real people behind the roles they’re assigned and the groups into which they’re lumped—-or pulled.

The untitled “Heads” and “Stacked Heads” satirize the deference given to hierarchy, ancestry and other forms of intimidation—-they’re hollow inside. This hollowness actually lends structural strength to the pieces. With a wooden or other solid core, the beads would be more likely to break in a fall.

Please visit Teresa Sullivan’s website to learn more.

— Posted on 06/27 at 05:51 PM

Feves Music Events in July

The Museum honors Betty Feves’ life as a ceramicist and musician with two music themed events in July: Celebrating Betty Feves Through Music and Music of Many Lands.

Music was as vital a foundation in Betty Feves’ upbringing as was art. She began music lessons at the age of six and studied classical violin all throughout high school. In some of her early sculptures, her work sometimes covered musical themes, in pieces such as Musician (1949), Two Musicians (1954), Harmonica Player (1955), and Chorus (1958).

— Posted on 06/25 at 12:52 PM

Wiggers Delivers Keynote at Zimmerhof

Director and Chief Curator Namita Gupta Wiggers delivers the keynote address at the Schmucksymposium Zimmerhof Thursday, June 7. In her talk, titled “Treasure House and /or Pleasure House: Democratizing Experience in Museums,” she will discuss how museums today, particularly in the United States, are expected to fabricate experiences. Generally speaking, however, art museums tend to employ display strategies drawn from the “white cube,” retail environments, or those used for anthropological artifacts.

For the exhibition Touching Warms the Art, artists responded to the Museum’s challenge to create deliberately non-precious and durable works, each of which was available for visitors to: handle freely, view themselves in mirrors, capture a photograph for an online Flickr site, and use as inspiration for making work of their own at an Art Bar. While centralizing the experience of wearing contemporary art jewelry occupied institutional focus at the time, re-examination now reveals additional complexities with regards to jewelry, museums, artists and audience.

For Zimmerhof, Wiggers extends a previously published paper, available on the Art Jewelry Forum Blog, to consider the project from the perspective of the other participants: artist, curator, collector, and institution. How does the project critique preciousness, operate at a level of spectacle, and delineate the limits of dialogue as objects move between private and public spheres?

— Posted on 06/07 at 03:13 PM