The Merwin and Wakeley Galleries

Galleries closed for summer

Fall 2024

September 9 – October 16

(Galleries closed for fall break 10/11)
Saturday Homecoming reception 10/5, 1-3PM in the galleries

MERWIN – Embroidering Histories. The Chilean Arpilleras  1973 to 2023
WAKELEY – Too Familiar Tim Kowalczyk (trompe l'oeil ceramicist)

Reception and artist talk: Tuesday, September 24, 3PM

 

Merwin Gallery
Embroidering Histories. The Chilean Arpilleras 
1973 to 2023 
- From the collection of Marjorie Agosin - 

Arpilleras are a powerful Chilean art form - so much more than a "charming" or quaint appliqué. Layers of sackcloth or burlap fabric (arpillera) were joined, principally through appliqué, to create multi-dimensional (in layers and meaning) works of protest and resistance. 
More than 50 years ago, the armed forces of Chile overthrew the administration of Salvador Allende. That day, September 11, 1973, created the necessary conditions in which this art form known as arpilleras was born. 
Soon after, these textiles became the most visual, poignant, and widespread manifestation of violations of human rights, the disappearance of loved ones, opposition to authoritarianism, all things associated with the military government that ruled Chile until 1990. 
Marjorie Agosin, world renowned Chilean poet, has loaned IWU’s Merwin Gallery a selection of arpilleras from her personal collection. All the pieces are anonymous for the sake of security of the artists at the time of creation. These arpilleras are part of the collective of the Association of the Detained and the Missing.  - University of New Mexico. Latin American & Iberian Institute.  "Stitching Resistance: The History of Chilean Arpilleras"

“The Arpilleras are story tellers, for it is through them that these women have recorded and preserved the memory of a period of Chilean history that many others have chosen to forget” 
 - Marjorie Agosín’

Marjorie Agosín is a poet, human rights activist, and literary critic. Marjorie is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Professor of Spanish at Wellesley College.  She is interested in Jewish literature and literature of human rights in the Americas; women writers of Latin America; migration, identity, and ethnicity. In recognition of her corpus of poetry, fiction, memoir, and literary criticism, Agosín has earned repeated literary awards, including the Letras de Oro Prize, the Latina Literatura Prize, International Latino Award, Mexican Cultural Institute Prize, and Peabody Award, among others. She has also "won numerous honors in recognition of her work as a human rights activist, including the United Nations Leadership Award for Human Rights, the Jeanette Rankin Award in Human Rights, and years after she left her homeland the Chilean government honored her with the Gabriela Mistral Medal for Lifetime Achievement" (UMass Boston)

 

Wakeley Gallery
Too Familiar
Tim Kowalczyk

Tim Kowalczyk was born and raised in Morris, IL. He was the first college student in his
immediate family. He attended Joliet junior College and transferred to Southern Illinois University Carbondale to complete his BFA in Ceramics and Art Education with a minor in Art History. Tim obtained his MFA from Illinois State University in Normal, IL in Ceramics.

Tim has been in national, invitational, and international group and solo exhibitions since 2009.  He is currently represented by Companion Gallery and Black Book Gallery. He is part of a 3 man ceramic group making trompe l’oeil work called the Mo Fauxs. Tim does a variety of demonstrations and workshops around the United States and Virtually. He has been featured on several podcasts, websites, and is featured in books and magazines. Tim currently lives in Minonk where he has a home studio and works as an Art teacher at Fieldcrest High School. 

"Using clays, slips, underglazes, and glaze I use various handbuilding, slipcasting, underglaze and glaze applications to create trompe l’oeil objects. Sculptural objects to functional items I try to blur the line between overlooked ordinary objects and my ceramic objects. Using ceramic materials and ceramic techniques with a variety of applications I mean for my objects to look like garbage. Through faux marks, tapes, labels, stains, paint splatters, and a myriad of other rips, tears, and cuts I am trying to construct an fictitious narrative of the objects I create. These
narratives refer to the usage of the recreated materials or objects and their new purpose."
- Tim Kowalczyk

October 21 – December 5
(galleries closed for Thanksgiving recess November 26- December 1)

Reception and artist talk with Holle Brian and Sara Sally LaGrand on Thursday, December 5th at 3PM

 

Merwin Gallery

Fred Brian: Lake Gogebic Memories and Myths 
DeVos Art Museum Director and Curator Emily Lanctot and DeVos Collectons Curator Sydney Sarasin curated this exhibition with production assistance from Philip Kucera and Holle Brian.

“You can never really know what a big lake and a trackless wilderness contain — sun blazes and black patches of shadow, the distant thunder breeding wind and wreckage, the massive cloud mountains and swirling brushstrokes of sky, clinging fog. And then the march of seasons, breaking down the weak and strong together, grinding rocks, corrupting old trees, crushing limbs and roots, leaving rotting logs and stumps with fox fire will-o-the-wisps and strange sounds breaking out in the form of cracks and whispers, all muttering about the old lives and actions, shadows of the fleeting presences of those who led the lives and performed the actions. These are what the lakes and woods contain.”

— Fred Brian, from the introduction to his suite of wood engravings, “Shadows & Images”.

BROCHURE FOR THIS EXHIBIT

Fred B. Brian was born in Normal, Illinois in 1924; he was raised in Bloomington, Illinois, and in during the summers in the Ottawa National Forest in Gogebic County, Michigan. Fred’s parents had begun spending summers in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 1916, and in 1923 they purchased land and built a log house on Lake Gogebic. Throughout his adult life, Fred spent summers at the lake with his wife and two daughters. The house is still in the family and is being enjoyed now by the fifth generation of Brians. Much of the area is still a wilderness, with thousands of square miles of pine and hardwood forests and impenetrable tamarack and tag alder swamps.

After serving in World War II as a pilot, Fred began studying printmaking; in 1950 he enrolled in the University of Iowa, where he studied the craft with Mauricio Lasansky and James Lechay. He began teaching painting, printmaking and art history at Illinois Wesleyan University in 1952, and spent his entire career there until his retirement in 1984. He was voted “Distinguished Teacher of the Year” in 1979, and in 2000 the University hosted an emeritus exhibit of work produced during his retirement years, which ended too soon with his death in October 1999.

Even Fred’s closest friends in the art school were not aware of his prolific output: in addition to annual faculty shows at Illinois Wesleyan University, Fred exhibited in nearly 150 regional, national and international shows during his 32-year tenure. The roster of venues includes New York’s National Academy of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago. He received awards at many juried exhibitions and has work in 19 public collections in the U.S. and Canada, including 11 universities and the U.S. Foreign Service in Washington, DC.

 

Wakeley Gallery

She/Her  Sara Sally LaGrand - sculptural glass portraits

Closing reception and artist talk for both exhibits: Thursday, December 5th at 3PM

A collection of works, all created in the span of August 216 to date, reflect my
hopes for a new generation of women. As the year 2017 progressed from post-
inauguration with open attacks on the vulnerable were then followed by
resistance. It spawned the #MeToo movement and a new wave of feminism.
I grew up in the era of Gloria Steinem and the ERA movement. To me, the young
women in my life deserved to feel that sense of personal empowerment that I
was able to embrace when I was a young woman. I wanted them to see
themselves as iconic women of history and to paint them with moder elements in
heroic poses from Italian Renaissance Art.
These pieces are very personal to me but also to the women I photographed and
later painted. I painted them embracing who they are, making their own choices
and exercising their personal power, I am honored to have had the opportunity to
sit with their faces, holding daggers and swords to represent their own power but
also understanding that theirs is not limited to old fashioned ways. I use symbols
of uniting in real time and online through devices but also through music, art and
performance. All powerful forces of modernity. I grew up with the strong
examples of the saints and martyrs, the one part of the church where strong
women were allowed an equal voice. These mystical and sometimes fantastical
women stand strong with their empowered Greek and roman goddess
counterparts. Enjoy the show! "- Sara Sally LaGrand

Sara Sally LaGrand, award winning artist and author, has had the great fortune to study glass
with many gifted teachers both in America and Italy.  She holds a BA in Glass Formation from
Park University, Parkville, MO. She divides her time between creating and teaching glass in her
Kansas City studio as well as writing for publications Glass Art Magazine and Flow Magazine.

Honors include awards from Art Westport, Kansas City, State of the Arts, Prairie Village, KS,
Bead Museum of Washington, DC, Bead and Button magazine, Images Art Gallary, and the
Kansas City Artists Coalition, Best in Show, Molten, a National Glass and Metals Show,
Chicago, IL.   She has taught flameworking all over the world.
Her work has been published in many books and magazines including The Flow, Bead and
Button, Glass Art Magazine. 
Her work can be found in public and private collections around the world.

 

Click here to visit iwuart and see what our students have been making recently.

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Gallery Hours 

Monday - Friday 12-4PM
Tuesday Evening 7-9PM
Saturday & Sunday 1-4PM

Location

Ames School of Art and Design
Illinois Wesleyan University
6 Ames Plaza West
Bloomington, Illinois 61701-2900

Artists interested in showing at our galleries click the link below for more information

All events are free and open to the public

 

About the Galleries

The Merwin and Wakeley Galleries provide exhibition schedules that support our curriculum, the University community and the general public. These exhibitions mostly consist of contemporary artworks in all media. Each exhibition is meant to suggest the variety of visual approaches one may choose to present an idea. Student exhibitions include the Annual Juried School of Art Student Exhibition, the B.F.A. Candidate Exhibition and the B.F.A. and B.A. Degree Exhibition.

About the Galleries / Artist Submissions