Wriston Art Center galleries

Chicago photographer Liese Ricketts delivers the opening lecture Friday, Jan. 22 at 6 p.m. for the latest exhibition at Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center galleries. A reception with the artist follows the address.

The exhibition, which runs through March 7, features Ricketts photography in the Leech and Hoffmaster Galleries and “The Theory of the Meat Machine,” a collection of digital prints by Gina Rymarcsuk, in the Kohler Gallery.

With an artists’ affection for the human face, Ricketts specializes in photography that documents an individual’s sense of identity and place. Inspired by 19th-century itinerant photographers who roamed the countryside, setting up portable photo studios to make images of local residents, Ricketts has made similar trips to Peru. In her portraits, she allows her subjects to decide how they present themselves, photographing them with pets, objects associated with their trade or dressed in a favorite article of clothing.

The Ricketts’ exhibition also features a story based on a box of old glass plate negatives documenting a pair of dogs that she found. Her story includes characters based on photo theorists Jacques Lacan and Roland Barthes and American essayist Susan Sontag.

Ricketts, who earned an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has taught photography for more than 30 years, including at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools since 1988.

Rymarcsuk, also a photographer, works with digital media, specializing in the way artists deal with the evolving intersection of technology and nature. Her “Theory of the Meat Machine” is a lengthy and elaborate narrative created by combining images of the human body with machine parts. She borrowed from surrealist artist Max Ernst’s pseudo alchemical and metaphysical ideas about nature, creating a series of linearly mounted digital prints, each of which acts as the page of an elaborate book.

“The Theory of the Meat Machine” earned Rymarcsuk “Best of Show” honors at the 2009 Southeastern Aviation Art Exhibition, Southern Museum of Flight in Birmingham, Ala. An assistant professor of photography at UW-Milwaukee, Rymarcsuk holds a M.F.A. in photography from the University of Washington.

Wriston Art Center hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10 a.m. – 4 p.m., Saturday-Sunday from noon – 4 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays.

A retrospective of Oshkosh painter Jeff Lipschutz’s expressionist style landscapes and a display of ancient Roman coins will be featured in the newest exhibition at Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center galleries. The exhibition opens March 31 and runs through May 14.

Lipschutz, professor of painting and drawing at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and director of UWO’s Allen Priebe Art Gallery, presents “Desert,” a collection of images primarily of the modern American West, in the Hoffmaster and Kohler galleries. Lispschutz opens the exhibition with a discussion of his work Friday, March 31 at 6 p.m. The address, followed by a reception with the artist, is free and open to the public.

Lipschutz draws inspiration for his paintings from his childhood home of tiny Eagle Mountain, Calif., an isolated iron-ore mining town on one of the most barren stretches of the Mojave Desert. Lipschutz says his paintings “tap into the desert’s dream life as a natural extension of my own; into the Mojave’s unconscious; its antediluvian beginnings, science fiction futures and contradictory presents.” While his depictions of arid wastelands share a bond with that of land use artists and conceptualists, his work “also has distinct philosophical underpinnings.”

The Leech Gallery will feature the show “The Women of the Augusti: Coins from the Ottilia Buerger Collection of Lawrence University.” The exhibit was curated by Lawrence student Jennifer Nummerdor, a senior art history major from Appleton, as part of her senior honors project.

The exhibit focuses on Imperial Roman coins featuring important women — wives, daughters, sisters and mothers — and why they earned the distinct honor of being cast on a coin in a world dominated by men. The exhibit details the background of these women as well as the culture and tradition surrounding imagery of women on coins in Ancient Rome.

The exhibit is drawn from the Ottilia Buerger Collection of Ancient and Byzantine Coins. The collection of more than 300 rare, ancient coins dating from the 6th-century B.C. to the mid-1400s, is widely regarded as one of the finest in the United States. It was assembled by Ottilia M. Buerger, a 1938 Lawrence graduate, who bequeathed the collection to the college in 2001.

Wriston Art Center hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., Saturday-Sunday from noon – 4:00 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays. For more information, call 920-832-6621 or visit http://www.lawrence.edu/news/wriston/.

Humorous sculpture, unsolicited suggestions for public art and whimsical prints will be featured in the latest exhibition at Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center galleries. The three-gallery exhibition opens Jan. 20 and runs through March 12.

Lawrence Assistant Professor of Art Rob Neilson presents “A Face in Time” in the Kohler Gallery and “Unrequested Proposals” in the Hoffmaster Gallery. Neilson will open the exhibition with a discussion of his work as a sculptor and public installation artist on Friday, Jan. 20 at 6 p.m. The address is free and open to the public with a reception to follow.

“A Face in Time” will include a series of sculptural self portraits which express a humorous commentary on otherwise familiar childhood and historical faces and characters, including Ernie from “Sesame Street,” John F. Kennedy and an “Irish” Buddha.
In “Unrequested Proposals,” Neilson showcases models and computer generated images of public art monuments he has proposed — tongue-in-cheek — such as a replacement for the Washington Monument, an artistic addition to Mao Tse-tung’s tomb in Tiananmen Square and an addition for St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City.

A native of Detroit, Neilson joined the Lawrence art department in 2003. He works with a variety of materials in composing sculpture and public art, including rubber, plastics and other exotic materials. His work has been exhibited in galleries and installations around the country. Last year Neilson installed a six-foot-tall, two-headed rubber ducky in front of Chicago’s Navy Pier.

In addition, he has received numerous public art commissions, among them works for the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Metro Transit Authority and the Long Beach Transit Authority, for which will he construct a steel sculpture of a figurative male stepping onto a bus while holding an armload of books. The sculpture will be erected at the transportation station in front of the Mark Twain branch of the Long Beach Public Library. Later this year, Neilson will spend five months as an artist-in-residence at the Kohler Company in Kohler.

He studied art at the College for Creative Studies and earned a master of fine arts degree from the University of North Carolina.
The Leech Gallery will host “The History of Printmaking: A Series of Prints by Warrington Colescott.” Featuring brilliant color and fantastical composition, each whimsical print in the 11-set series depicts an important event in the history of printmaking, beginning with the 15th century.

Colescott, a California transplant who taught art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for nearly 40 years, began the “History of Printmaking” series in the late 1970s and continued to work on it through the early 1980s. The 11 prints in the exhibit are part of the Wriston Art Gallery Permanent Collection and were donated by Dr. Robert A. Dickens, ‘63.

Wriston Art Center hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., Saturday-Sunday from noon -4:00 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays. For more information, call 920-832-6621 or visit http://www.lawrence.edu/news/wriston/.

An exploration of the organization of knowledge, a traveling display of photographs of Acropolis monuments and ancient pottery are featured in the latest exhibition at Lawrence University’s Wriston Art Center galleries. The exhibition opens Nov. 11 and runs through Dec. 18.

Chicago artist Antonio Contro presents “A to Z” in the Hoffmaster Gallery. Contro also will deliver the exhibition’s opening address on Friday, Nov. 18 at 6 p.m. The address is free and open to the public and a reception with the speaker will follow.

“A to Z,” a 27-piece, collage-based exhibit begun in 2003, features works on paper that merge drawing and Polaroid photography to recombine facts and information in ways other than alphabetical or disciplined. Collectively, the works become their own unique “encyclopedia.”

“Photographs of the Athenian Acropolis – The Restoration Project” will be shown in the Kohler Gallery. The traveling exhibition features large scale photographs by Socratis Mavrommatis, the chief photographer of the Acropolis Restoration Service and document the interventions and transformations of the Acropolis monuments since 1975. The exhibit opened in Athens in 2002 and has since traveled to Brussels, Paris, Rome and London. Lawrence is just the second venue in the United States to host the exhibit.

The Leech Gallery will host “Ceramics of the Classical World,” a selection of ancient Greek and Etruscan pottery from the Wriston Art Gallery permanent collection and from the Ripon College Classical Antiquities Collection.

Wriston Art Center hours are Tuesday-Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m., Saturday-Sunday from noon -4:00 p.m. The gallery is closed on Mondays. For more information, call 920-832-6621 or visit http://www.lawrence.edu/news/wriston/.