The Art Beat

You may wonder why a print by the great observer of the German proletariat, Käthe Kollwitz, is included in the biennial faculty show (Payne Gallery through Sunday, April 11).

The reason is that for the first time, the show includes not only work by the studio art faculty but pieces from the collections of the art history faculty. Hence the title: “The Faculty Creates, the Faculty Collects.” Martha Kearns, an adjunct lecturer from Philadelphia, has written a well-received biography of Kollwitz, and she has loaned her own print.

Diane Radycki, director of the gallery and assistant professor of art history, has contributed an 18th-century volume of the flora and fauna of Surinam by a French naturalist, Marie Sibylla Merian.

The studio art faculty often surprise you with the media they choose for their own work. Rudy Ackerman, retired chair of the department, is showing a beautiful ceramic frieze (created with Jenny Nahan Gidley) of sea creatures on a dappled ground called “The Minoans Meet Seurat.” Gerard Maynard, an experimental painter, ventures into photography with a huge aerial photograph—actually 320 digital images put together—of Ground Zero in its first stages of reconstruction. Anne Dutlinger and Lauren Nicholas ’01 have an installation that comments on graphic musical notation, using a score by a Japanese composer.

Most, however, work in their expected medium. Renzo Faggioli, ceramicist in residence, offers large graceful raku vases; Jan Ciganick, exquisite watercolors of historic buildings; Carol Heft, sensuous figure studies; Doug Zucco, elegant books and wall hangings of rich hand-cast paper. And new (in both senses) media instructor Krista Steinke takes us on a video tour of Europe. And much, much more!