ART MOVES: 2003

Department of Art Faculty Exhibiton catalog
University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN USA

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
mosher@svsu.edu
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA.

In the work exhibited in fall, 2003, the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis’ Department of Art appears to boast a strong ceramics tradition in Margaret Bohls, Curtis C. Howard, Thomas Lane and Tetsuya Yamada. In the exhibit are paintings by Christine Baeumler, David Fineberg. Lynn A. Gray, Joyce Lion and an ornately patterned one by Clarence Morgan. Sculptor Susan Lucey exhibited a paper "Crown for Vivi's Sixth Birthday", and Wayne E. Poratz provided a sculptural assemblage of cast iron decoys and perforated oars, stone and twigs. The kinetic sculpture of Guy Baldwin, whose motorized example in the faculty exhibition rolled upon the gallery floor, sported a calligraphic brush that made a surprisingly deft mark.

This is a seasoned department. By my count, 14 out of 25 faculty were born in the 1940s. Screenprinter Karl E. Bethke and draftsman (maker of drawings) Thomas Cowette were born in the 1930s. Yet contemporary artmaking techniques and technological tendencies are represented--as is one disturbingly globalist one.

An excerpt of an essay by the late Christine Tamblyn cites the inspirational effect of "The Cyborg Manifesto" by Donna Haraway upon Marjorie Franklin, who is represented here by stills from what appears to be a fly-through of a 3D virtual world called the "Garden of Primitive Ideas". Gary Hallman's pigmented ink print is a digitally manipulated photographic print, but the delicate parrot feathers and ornithological feet that emerge from its besuited businessman could have been painted by hand, perhaps by a contemporary urban John James Audubon.

This exhibit is the first that the Department held in the new Katherine E. Nash Gallery, and the university evidently saw it as an occasion to celebrate. The catalog comes with a CD of photos of the Regis Center for Art. The catalog production was coordinated by the Department of Art's performance artist Diane Katsiaficas, and was designed by Visual Options of Thessaloniki, Greece and printed by Charis Doukas of Athens. That this fine document of an exhibition at a publicly-funded university was produced overseas might raise some eyebrows among the graphic arts and printing concerns of Minneapolis and nearby St. Paul, as well as those of their local trade unions.