Art Exhibitions Closing Reception
The 18 artworks in Grounds were selected from the permanent collection of University Galleries. With dates ranging from the early 18th century to the early 21st, these prints, paintings, photographs, and sculptures inform viewers about the multiple meanings of the term “ground” with respect to works of visual art. Artists include Terry Adkins, Nicolas Africano, Walter Bock, Robert Colescott, Mike Disfarmer, Jeanne Dunning, John Himmelfarb, Tom Hoadley, William Hogarth, Richard Hunt, Suzanne Jackson, Anita Jung, Dennis Kowalski, Henri Matisse, Deborah Muirhead, and Ann Purcell.
University Galleries’ Teen Art Group, composed of students from Bloomington High School, developed the concept, theme, checklist, and layout of the exhibition Reflection. The Teen Art Group invited regional artists to submit artworks that interpret the theme of reflection. In the selected paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, mixed-media works, and video, reflection suggests the act of looking forward or backward, inward or outward. It also addresses the mirroring of reflective surfaces.
Born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1899, Ilse Bing was among the most inventive photographers of the 20th century’s first half. She spent her most artistically productive decade—the 1930s—in Paris. In the early 1940s she was displaced by the Nazis and moved to New York City, where she continued making and exhibiting photographs. Equally a commercial and a fine art photographer, Bing produced magazine commissions and hazy atmospheric scenes, professional portraits and near-abstract formal studies. While she was never exclusively connected to a particular movement or group, she associated with and was influenced by several: the Bauhaus, New Photography, and Surrealism.