In Conversation: Jane Gilmor and Joy Sperling at the Figge Art Museum -- January 27.
Thursday, January 27, 6:30 p.m.
Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA
Held in conjunction with the Figge Art Museum's current exhibition Breakfast on Pluto, art historian Joy Sperling and exhibit creator Jane Gilmor will discuss the artist's career and how her work “bounces off” the world around her, the January 27 conversation topics extending to current events and the opportunities for dialogue, exploration, and connection that thrive in Gilmor’s artwork.
As stated at her JaneGilmor.com Web site, “Gilmor is an intermedia artist and Professor of Art at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She has a BS from Iowa State University, an MAT and MFA from the University of Iowa and additional graduate work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past 35 years and has been awarded NEA Artist’s Fellowships, a McKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, London, and at the McDowell Colony among others. In 2004, she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Portugal. Her most recent solo exhibitions were at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, Long Island University in Brooklyn. In 2010, she completed a yearlong community-based project and major installation, Un(Seen) Work, funded by an NEA grant to Grinnell College in 2010.”
"She has also recently exhibited at Performa Gallery in Lisbon, Portugal, A.I.R. Gallery in New York, and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha. She is included numerous books including Barbara Love’s Feminists who Changed America 1963-1976; Lucy Lippard’s OVERLAY, Contemporary Art & the Art of Prehistory; and Broude and Gerrard’s The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History & Impact. Her work is in numerous collections including the Des Moines Art Center, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art library, the Bemis Foundation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. She is affiliated with A.I.R. Gallery in New York and Olson Larsen Galleries in Des Moines and has been included and reviewed in numerous journals including Cabinet, the New York Times, the New Art Examiner, and the Chicago Tribune.”
In her Artist Statement, Gilmor writes, “My latest work presents, walk-in books covered with etched metal notes, room-sized installations of wearable structures activated with robotics and embedded with writings on metal and video. Extending from previous work in my Containers for the Self series, these situations further explore those psychologically and culturally based entanglements of image, language and space through which we try to locate our own identity. For the past 30 years, then, my practice has been concerned with social issues, found situations, and psychological narrative. From The 1976 All-American Glamour Kitty Pageant to my '70s and '80s photo tableaux of cat-masked Isadora Duncans in the ruins of Greece and the bowling alleys and laundromats of Iowa, to my 20 years of community-based public work in shelters and hospitals, my search is for some unspoken connection in these random collisions of objects, images, and voices.”
A Professor Emerita at Ohio's Denison University who literally wrote the book on Gilmor’s work (2012's Jane Gilmor: I’ll be back for the cat), Joy Sperling will lead the artist conversation with Jane Gilmor at 6:30 p.m. on January 27, and the program will be held both in-person at the Davenport venue and virtually, with online registrants receiving a Zoom link two hours before the presentation begins. Participation is free, the exhibit Jane Gilmor: Breakfast on Pluto will be on display through February 6, and more information on the event is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.
