Visiting the art gallery on the second floor
of the Illinois State Museum is comparable to discovering a cookie
factory in your neighbor’s garage, two doors away. It may be
the best-kept secret in central Illinois, thanks in part to the
much greater fame of the museum’s outstanding natural-history
collection.
ISM’s gallery currently features two
exhibitions: Carolyn Plochmann’s Between
Two Worlds” and A Tone Poem in Photographs and Verse, the work of 42 photographers displayed with
poetry.
First, Carolyn Plochmann. Born in Toledo but a
southern Illinois resident since 1949, the 78-year-old Plochmann is
an art ventriloquist whose “voice” seems to emanate
from where she is not.
“She is much better known in New York
City because she has shown primarily there,” says Kent Smith,
ISM director of art. (Kennedy Galleries Inc. has represented
Plochmann for the past 30 years.)
Smith credits Debra K. Tayes, assistant
curator of fine art at ISM’s Southern Illinois Art Gallery,
with pulling the show together and encouraging Plochmann to show
her work: “We knew we wanted to present her work, but it was
not a given that she [Plochmann] would agree.
Most of the Plochmann paintings on display are
from the last five years and have not gone to public or private
collections yet. They include still-lifes and shadowbox effects,
some of which imply narratives without telling a story. Some are
reactions to political events, including “The Invasion of
Kuwait,” which graced the cover of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“Our intention here is to show an
overview of what the artist has achieved and what is being done
now,” Smith says. “Carolyn focuses a great deal of her
energy on creating her work, and to have accomplished this body of
work is amazing. There are elements in these paintings that have been part of
her painting vocabulary for the past 30 years: the figures and the way
in which they are dressed. She adds layers of paint and sometimes takes
them away to reveal what’s beneath the surface. It’s part
of her process of coming to terms with ‘the true thing.’
She is mindful of Meister Eckhart, who said, ‘Only the hand that
erases can write the true thing.’ ”
“The fact she lives in southern
Illinois, in a country setting, gives her the peace and
‘apartness’ to devote the time she needs to the
painting,” Smith says. “In that sense, the paintings
are very much derived from her place in the world. It also has to
do with her richly embellished imaginative life that is fed by the
university community — friends and students from distant
countries attending school in Carbondale who make it a world
community, in a sense.” Eastern and Hebrew symbols, evident
in many paintings, demonstrate influences from beyond the land of
corn and coal.
The second ISM exhibit, A Tone Poem in Photographs and Verse, is a compendium of about 80 mostly contemporary
black-and-white photographs arranged with poems that share thematic
elements. Judith Burson Lloyd, based with the ISM Chicago Gallery,
curated the show. Photographers include Denise Abbott, Debra
Friedman, Duane Powell, and Springfield’s own Steve Ritchie.
The 17 poets include Emily Dickinson, Stanley Kunitz, Octavio Paz,
Gary Snyder, and Walt Whitman.
“Years ago I selected several poems for
a display which was never produced, but I kept them on hand,”
Lloyd says. “In 2003, I revived the concept and made several
trips to Springfield to select pictures appropriate for the nest
egg of poems already on hand and for an expanded display.”
More than 2,000 photographs are held in the ISM collection.
“The photographs, for the most part, were chosen first, but I
consider the poems equal elements in the display.” The result
opened to the public for the first time in Chicago in 2003.
Both shows run through Feb. 27.
In other art news:
¥
The work
of 12 seniors from the Springfield campus of Robert Morris College
was featured at a reception and showing Feb. 1 at the Hoogland
Center for the Arts. “The goal was to demonstrate the
students’ knowledge of composition but also technical
skills,” says Patrick Anderson, a part-time instructor who
arranged the event. “It was a great opportunity for the
students to not only show off their work to Springfield but to be
exposed to a larger metropolitan community where many of them hope
to continue their careers in visual arts.”
¥ From the UIS
Visual Arts Gallery comes news of Merge, a joint display by internationally known
photographers Bea Nettles and Fern Logan. The show, marking both
Black History Month and Women’s Heritage Month, runs Feb.
14–March 10. An artists’ reception, scheduled for 5:
30-7:30 p.m. March 3, will feature a presentation by UIS professor
and poet Marcellus Leonard and a musical interlude by UIS alumna
Denise Yates. For more information, call Emily Laverty at
217-206-6506.
This article appears in Feb 10-16, 2005.
