• Also opening in January 2012 were an exhibit of works by artist Rashawn Griffin, titled a hole-inthe-wall country, and a film, Mound, by artist Allison Schulnik. Griffin employs everyday materials such as fabric, decorative tassels and other ephemera to create social landscapes and personal narratives. Drawing from his training in sculpture and painting, Griffin’s site-specific installations and assemblages investigate the capacity of materials with embedded histories to elicit new narratives. Schulnik’s short film features a ghoulish cast of more than 100 figures – mostly made of clay – that sway, melt and reappear. Schulnik spent nearly eight months creating the hand-sculpted and sewn puppets that wander on the screen and emit emotion. • Opening in April 2102 were exhibits of work by artists Zack Balber, Miami; Chris Biddy, New York; and Lauren Mabry, Lincoln, Neb. In Tamim, Balber uses portrait photography to uncover the camouflaged identity of some of Judaism’s most unconventional Jews. Balber, Jewish himself, connected with the men he photographed while rediscovering his own lineage. In Kids, Biddy turns Facebook photos of adolescent girls into meticulously rendered paintings. His subjects are self-represented, captured via their smart phones or digital cameras within the context of their respective lives. In Cylinders, Mabry applies layers of glazes to her ceramic pieces, giving them the flavor of an abstract expressionist painting. In a statement about her work, she says that she hopes it allows viewers to experience color, form and matter as a synergistic whole in a new, unexpected way.
• The exhibition .SUM opened at the museum in May 2012. For .SUM, the museum invited artists Matthias Merkel Hess, William J. O’Brien and Arlene Shechet to each create an installation in clay for one of the museum’s first-floor galleries. Merkel Hess’ work, Bucketry II, was composed of hand-built sculptures that faithfully mimic massproduced objects, ranging from trash cans to beverage coolers. The accumulation of objects in O’Brien’s work, Untitled (X), was an immersive installation – a complex arrangement in which sources such as African masks, funerary monuments, modernist sculpture and the more contemporary embrace of textiles and ceramics coalesce. Shechet’s works on view precariously defied their own weight while reaching in multiple directions at once. In addition, artist Brad Kahlhamer was the speaker for the fourth annual Jerome Nerman Lecture Series in November 2011 at the museum. Kahlhamer is known for mixing representations of the real world and the symbolic world into a visionary “third place.”
Beyond Bounds * BRILLIANT! In October 2011, Beyond Bounds * Brilliant offered a unique opportunity for artists and one-of-a-kind purchases for art patrons. International, national and regional artists were invited to create a work of art using select mediums (oil paint, pastels, watercolor, liquid acrylic, colored pencil, ceramic underglaze, enamel paint and textile dye) provided by the museum. The 154 works, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, ceramics, 45