“You can’t talk about these things!” an artist replied in exasperation to a question I posed to him at the beginning of a three-hour panel discussion about portraiture. He then proceeded to talk about the issue for next 5 or 6 minutes, which afforded me ample time to frame an appropriate response to his response. [...]
Category Archives: Events
“What was still and dark and wakes up”
October 20, 2011, 7:25 am
I retrieved information about Laura Young’s first exhibit at Campbell Steele from a metal filing cabinet in the basement. Pulling a yellowed newspaper page from the folder, I marveled that The Gazette had devoted more than 25 square inches, in the Sunday, May 16, 1999 “Arts Section” to a color photo of the artist’s painting, [...]
Zero to Sixty at the Speed of Steele
August 3, 2011, 8:33 pm
Starting at zero On the sauna-like evenings this past week, Craig and I dug out our bathing suits and went off to the Marion Municipal pool. Initially, we both admitted some predictable trepidation – worries over exposing all that imperfect flesh and our merely adequate swimming skills, but all that dissipated with the first restorative [...]
19th annual Marion Arts Festival!
May 19, 2011, 7:32 am
I confess that I burst into tears when I drove past a billboard in downtown Cedar Rapids heralding the first Marion Arts Festival. Hard won, the product of a Herculean effort on the part of an intrepid core of believers, the festival had become a reality. Since 1993, during this week in May, I have [...]
“This is who we are.”
April 12, 2011, 7:45 pm
As I talked with John Beckelman about the arrangements for a hands-on demonstration to be given by artists from the Ceramics Center during the upcoming gallery tour, we laughed at the shared memory of an audience member in a gallery talk that John gave many years ago. This woman had the bravery to verbalize her [...]
Native son
February 8, 2011, 8:26 am
“…it is the complex, flesh and blood man who has been removed from sight, while his all-too-familiar imagery has remained uncannily resistant to change. If we are to summon Grant Wood from behind that darkened Gothic window, we will see this painting— and all his remarkable work—- deepen before our eyes.” – R. Tripp Evans, [...]
Thieves Market … or “Mom! We made thirty-six hundred dollars!”
December 6, 2010, 11:20 pm
In her high-pitched, four-year-old, most excited voice, Maggie Campbell crowed to me through the phone receiver, “Mom! We made thirty-six hundred dollars!” The year was 1984. I was in Omaha, and I had sent Craig and Maggie off to the Thieves Market in Iowa City with a Datsun pickup loaded with my engravings. I was [...]
Stan Fellows
November 29, 2010, 10:41 pm
Heading Off / Stan Fellows / Watercolor on paper / 16 x 20 / $395 “Oh look, this isn’t right.” And with that statement, I watched Stan Fellows’ thumb smear the color that he had just brushed in as a reflection in a bottle. He was painting during our Music in the MUD event on [...]
Dave Gordinier & The CR Metro Gallery Tour
September 24, 2010, 3:15 pm
“Priscilla, are you with a customer?” This is how every conversation with my friend Dave Gordinier has commenced since he moved to Mesa, AZ over a decade ago. Dave wouldn’t dream of putting himself ahead of anyone else. That excruciatingly unassuming aspect of Mid-western courtesy remains decidedly in tact, despite Dave’s now long-term residence in [...]
Introducing Thomas Agran
July 8, 2010, 7:09 am
Thomas Agran, working in his studio I remember instructing Thomas Agran to look for a small, gray-haired woman at the Grinnell College’s Bucksbaum Center for the Arts opening for the summer of 2009’s exhibit. I had a few pieces in the show, and I wanted to meet Thomas and visit his studio during the same [...]