ArtSmart: Indiana

September 20, 2008 through December 20, 2008

Art Smart: Indiana, an AMGL and Children’s Museum program, provides state-wide access to the history of Indiana and makes the history of Indiana come alive for the students by using art as a focus; students learn through examining art, how the earliest settlers existed and how they persevered from life in a wilderness in 1800 to present day living. The Art Smart:Indiana program has always been well regarded among Indiana 4th grade teachers and helps teachers to meet the State of Indiana Academic Standards.

The Art Museum of Greater Lafayette is open Tuesday through Saturday from 11am - 4pm, and closed Sunday and Monday.

Art Museum of Greater Lafayette
102 South Tenth Street
Lafayette, IN 47905
(765) 742-1128

Paint-Out at the Wabash

LAFAYETTE-WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. — On Saturday, October 11th, artists from all over Indiana and the general public are invited to draw and paint the beautiful fall landscape along the Wabash River. Spectators are also invited to wander through the area to see how paintings are created, and listen to acoustic music by local musicians. The event will be centered at the Train Depot in Riehle Plaza, but artists will be working along the Wabash in Tapawingo Park, on the Pedestrian Bridge, and in Riehle Plaza or nearby the trains. This is a free event and open to the public.

Beginning with the famous Indiana Impressionist painters of the turn of the century, people from far and wide have loved to interpret the Indiana landscape by sketching and painting outside in oil, watercolor, pastel, and graphite. During the past twenty years or so, plein air painting events, called “Paint-Outs”, have become a favorite of artists, collectors, and spectators. They give artists an opportunity to meet other artists and collectors while they enjoy the great out-of-doors. They also give everyone, including the public, an opportunity to watch the artists at work as they bring the landscape to life on canvas and paper.

OTHER EVENTS DURING THE DAY:

PLEIN AIRE PAINTING SALE in the Train Depot from 9am to 5pm
The Art Museum will host a sale of framed paintings by the artists who are participating in the Paint-Out. Artists will bring their paintings to the depot between 8-9am. People who purchase a painting will support both the artists and the art museum. This year’s event will also have Purchase Award Sponsors for the first time, and their pledge will be publicly recognized at the sale. Anyone interested in sponsoring a Purchase Award should contact the Art Museum or Kathryn Clark, chair of the event.

WORKSHOPS IN WATERCOLOR, PASTEL, SKETCHING, and ONE FOR CHILDREN
At last year’s event, many people expressed an interest in painting and drawing from nature but didn’t know how to get started. This year they can take a workshop to learn how. The Art Museum will offer workshops at the paint-out for the public. Prize winning artists Jeannie McLeish from Mooresville (watercolor), Carol Strock-Wasson from Union City (pastel), James Werner(sketching), and Cindy Krulitz (children) from Lafayette will teach these workshops along the Wabash. There will be a fee, and the number of participants is limited. For more information call the Art Museum at 742-1128.

FREE OIL PAINTING DEMONSTRATION AT RIEHLE PLAZA
For curious spectators, Lafayette’s well known painter, Jeff Klinker, will explain how he creates an oil painting as he paints the Train Depot during the event.

PLEIN AIR PAINTING RAFFLE
The Art Museum will raffle a painting of the Wabash River by Jeannie McLeish which she painted at last year’s Paint-Out. Tickets will be sold at the Art Museum and other local businesses. For more information on this, call the art museum or Kathryn Clark, chair (563-3210).

4PM GATHERING OF “WET” PAINTINGS
At 4pm, the artists will gather at Riehle Plaza to exhibit the paintings, pastels, and drawings they created that day. The public can meet the artists, enjoy the paintings, and purchase one directly from the artist if they wish.

RECEPTION FOR THE ARTISTS AT THE TRAIN DEPOT 5-7pm
After the “4pm Gathering” at Riehle Plaza, artists and those who purchased paintings will have a chance to meet at the train Depot Reception.

For more information including digital photos of last year’s paint-out, call Kathryn Clark, volunteer chair at 563-3210 or e-mail her at kclark@twinrocker.com, or call the art Museum 742-1128 (Glenda McClatchy at ext. 102).

Art Museum of Greater Lafayette receives beautification grant

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette awarded a Community Beautification Field of Interest Grant, in the amount of $1,800, to the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette. The funds will be applied to landscaping the Art Museum grounds.

John Collier, Director of Campus Planning for Purdue, has volunteered to design a new landscaping plan for the museum on the Ninth Street hill, in Lafayette. Master Gardener, David Lahr volunteered to oversee and direct the installation and maintenance. This grant, combined with a $5,000 grant received from Tipmont REMC, in August, will fund the materials and labor necessary to complete the project. Work will begin this fall and be completed in spring, 2009.

Audrey Rossmann Exhibition

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — The Art Museum of Greater Lafayette presents an exhibit of pottery and ceramic artwork by Audrey Rossmann of West Lafayette. “A Tribute to Audrey Rossmann: Realizing Excellence” features both functional pottery as well as one of a kind sculptural vessels from the collections of several Lafayette area residents. An iconic figure in the Lafayette area pottery community, Rossmann, through her efforts as a pottery teacher at both the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette and the Morton Community Center, has introduced hundreds of area residents to the pottery art-form over the span of a 40 year career. The exhibit is a tribute to an excellent artist who has given much to our community.

See the work of one of Indiana’s finest potters from August 15 to September 29.

Art Museum of Greater Lafayette
102 South Tenth Street, Lafayette, IN
Admission is FREE
Gallery Hours - Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4. pm.
765-742-1128
www.artlafayette.org

Akeley Lecture, Una Herencia Mexicana

LAFAYETTE, Ind. — Ellen E. Fisher, Director of the Littleton Collection, will present the Akeley Lecture, Una Herencia Mexicana, at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette, on August 26 at 7:00 pm. Fischer’s lecture will focus on an overview of the Akeley Collection, with specific emphasis on the artist (Leonora Carrington, 1917 -) a British born Mexican Surrealist. The Art Museum’s painting, The Annunciation, by Carrington, was acquired by Anna and Edward Akeley and selected by Fischer as a gift from the Akeleys for the art museum’s permanent collection. Ms. Fisher will also include a discussion of works by the artist, Gunther Gerszo, as well as Remedios Varo, the Spanish-Mexican Surrealist painter and will conclude with time for Q & A from participants.

The Akeley Lecture is funded by gifts from the late Anna and Edward Stowe Akeley, both members of the Physics Department at Purdue University. Edward spent his retirement years teaching Physics in Mexico City and collected the works of Modern Mexican artists including Diego Rivera, Rufino Tamayo, Carlos Merida, Jose Clemente Orozco, Raul Anguiano, Roberto Montenegro, Gunther Gerzo and Leonora Carrington.

The Akeley Lecture is free and open to the Public. Community residents, high school, college and university students are welcome.

Una Herencia Mexicana is the focus of a keystone exhibition of Mexican Heritage works by Mexican Modernist Artists, drawn from the permanent collections of Purdue Galleries and The Art Museum of Greater Lafayette. The show is sponsored by Eli Lilly, Tippecanoe Labs and the Purdue University Latino Culture Center and was curated by Michael Atwell, Curator of Exhibitions, Wabash College and Craig Martin, Director of Purdue University Galleries. The exhibition runs through August 29.

Fisher received her BFA from the Herron School of Art, studying with Richard Emery Nickolson, and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She served as the Curator at the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette from 1987-1997, before moving to Vero Beach, Florida. She served as Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Vero Beach Museum of Art, where she curated an exhibition of Modern and Contemporary Mexican Art from the Prensky Collection, which was later donated to the Naples, Fla. Museum of Art.

She currently serves as Director of the Littleton Collection and Gallery in Fort Pierce, Florida. The gallery is the creation of Harvey K. Littleton, the renowned glass artist, who has been called the father of the American studio glass movement. The Littleton Collection specializes in art glass. The artists whose work is represented includes Harvey Littleton’s former student, Dale Chihuly, as well as works by Rick Beck, Ken Carder, Kyohei Fujita, Pavel Hlava, Robert Levin, Joel Philip Myers, Stephen Powell, Mary Shaffer, Therman Statom and Yan Zoritchak. Works by Harvey Littleton and by the artistic team of John Littleton and Kate Vogel are also shown.

While working at the Littleton Collection, Fischer is also a free-lance writer for the Vero Beach Magazine, specializing in feature articles on art and artists.

Fischer writes “Leonora Carrington was never a Surrealist. At least, that’s what she says now. Born in England in 1917 to a wealthy industrialist and his wife, she was sent from the age of nine to a succession of private Catholic boarding schools where she was expelled from one after the other. She was not interested in school and couldn’t have cared less about pleasing her teachers, or going along to get along. She was headstrong, self-assured, and imaginative. Her insistence on writing backwards, from right to left, drove the nuns crazy. Inevitably, she would be returned to her parents with the verdict that she was ineducable. Her exasperated parents finally sent her to Miss Penrose’s school in Florence, where she stayed for about a year. While she thought the subjects taught there were as useless as those at any of the other schools, she was in Florence after all, and she soaked up the Renaissance art that she saw there and on trips to Padua, Venice and Rome. After a stint at finishing school, she was presented at the court of George V. The next step for a young lady of good social standing would have been marriage to a suitably well-off young gentleman, but Leonora had other plans. Against her parent’s wishes she went to London to study art . . .

Leonora was influenced neither by the style nor the indigenous subject matter of the Mexican artists she met; she continued to develop her own vision based in European painting, myth and alchemy. But Mexico itself influenced her artistic outlook by way of its outdoor markets where, alongside a plethora of foodstuffs and ordinary household goods, wondrous things were sold - including mysterious potions and charms guaranteed by their hawkers to cure ills both physical and spiritual. She was fascinated by the curanderos, healers who mixed herbal knowledge with indigenous Mexican folk magic and Spanish Catholicism. Although she did not embrace Mexican art in her work, by 1964 Mexico had embraced Carrington as a Mexican artist with the inclusion of her work an exhibition of contemporary Mexican art in Mexico City’s National Museum of Modern Art.

Because she did not expect her work to be appreciated by an audience beyond her small group of sympathetic friends, Leonora Carrington has always painted for herself. But in 1948, the year after she painted St. Anthony, she had a solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York that was reviewed in Time Magazine and Art News. Her first one-person show in Mexico, in 1950, received raves in the Mexican press and opened the way to her wide appreciation there.”

Art Museum of Greater Lafayette
102 South Tenth Street, Lafayette, IN
Admission is FREE
Gallery Hours - Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 4. pm.
Phone: 765-742-1128
www.artlafayette.org

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