Partner Program: “think like the river" at the Figge Art Museum -- August 4.
Thursday, August 4, 6:30 p.m.
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
With the August 4 event taking place in collaboration with River Action and the Native American Coalition of the Quad Cities, Davenport's Figge Art Museum invites patrons to explore the history of the Mississippi River in our region in connection with the venue's Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot, the collaborative exhibition currently teaming the talents of a noted artist with those of a noted writer.
Though traditionally defined as works on paper, in recent decades drawing has become a field that uses a broad spectrum of formats. Lindberg’s work embraces this freedom. While she does make drawings on paper, she also works three-dimensionally and understands her room-scaled installations as immersive drawings in space. This summer, she has created an ephemeral tonal landscape of color and light by casting thousands of threads across the span of the Figge’s fourth-floor gallery. She has also invited poet Threefoot to collaborate on this conceptually rich project centered on the subject of water, conceived with an awareness of the museum’s location along the Mississippi River.
As she describes her works as "immersive installations and drawings that tap a non-verbal physiological landscape of body and space, provoking emotional, visceral and perceptual responses," Lindberg's chromatic thread installation occupies the central open space of the gallery, rising and falling in its distance from the floor, and encouraging visitors to walk around and under the work. It is accompanied by a multi-panel, 25-foot-wide drawing at one end of the gallery and Threefoot’s poetry on the other, with the drawing and the text guiding and mirroring each other as they converse across the space.
References to water and the river became a focus for Lindberg when she read Threefoot’s poem “think like the river,” a piece that entertains a possibility of union with the natural world. Across cultures, the river is a metaphor for the constancy of change and uncertainty in both nature and the human condition. Ideas of water lines, currents, flow, and immersion provide points of departure for this dialogue between art and poetry. Consequently, Anne Lindberg: think like the river invites an interactive bodily experience for museum visitors as they traverse the gallery space. Lindberg’s use of tactile materials and indexical handmade marks have a visceral effect, and the confluence of visual art and language stimulates a fluid dialogue of ideas about the inner and outer worlds of mind and landscape.
The think like the river partner program begins at 6:30 p.m. on August 4, admission to the event is free, and the Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot exhibit itself will be on display through September 4. For more information, call (563)326-7804 and visit FiggeArtMuseum.org.
