Recent Acquisitions: Gifts for our Community | 2023

Untitled by Daniel Ingersoll

Fairytale by Cara Tomlinson

RECENT ACQUISITIONS

Gifts for our Community

LAURIE BIEZE GALLERY

June 30 - August 27, 2023

The legacy of an artist is found through exhibition of their artwork. Families, artists, and businesses gift works to our collections so that future generations will gain an appreciation of art. Join Pablo Center in celebrating the newest contributions to our Laurie Bieze Permanent Art Collection.

WELCOME

At Pablo Center at the Confluence, you will view artwork that gives you a sense of place, artwork that is thought-provoking and examines our humanity, artwork that continues the artistic legacy of our community. Within Pablo Center’s galleries, you will encounter depth, emotion, and grace.

Annual favorites weave through Season Six with a flash of color and a trace of familiarity. We look forward to favorite exhibits such as Reflected Light: The plein air art of GO Paint, Confluence of Art Annual, and Fabulous Florals & Fine Art to provide touchstones of shared experience.

At Pablo Center, the visual arts serve to amplify voices in our annual Indigenous Art Exhibit featuring Weeya Michelle Calif, and the expressive High School Art Exhibit featuring talented youth from across the Chippewa Valley. Creative Power, A Traveling Exhibit from Arts for All Wisconsin will shine a spotlight on Wisconsin children and adults with disabilities. Expect challenging and innovative art. Explore the imaginations of our region’s talented creators. Believe in the power of the arts to move and inspire our community.

ARTISTS STATEMENTS & BIOGRAPHIES

Statements and biographies are written by the individual artist and are published with their permission. The views expressed are their own.

Thank You.

GOOD TO KNOW

PLEASE KEEP A SAFE DISTANCE FROM ALL ARTWORK AND PEDESTALS

Be conscious of backpacks or strollers that may bump into walls, pedestals, or artwork. Do not touch artwork on display unless a label tells you specifically how to interact with the artwork.

SUPERVISE CHILDREN AT ALL TIMES

We strongly encourage children viewing the artwork on display. Please instruct children to not touch artwork on display, to not run in the gallery, and to be kind and respectful of other people viewing the artwork by viewing artworks quietly and keeping a safe distance from others. Children must be supervised by their guardian at all times.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Pablo Center at the Confluence encourages personal photography of our exhibits and permanent art collection. Please use care both for the artwork and the people viewing it. Please no flash.

SKETCHING

Yes, please. You may certainly sketch in our facility. We ask that you use a lapboard or clipboard. Please only use lead or colored pencils. Please do not use the walls or pedestals as supports for sketching.

Untitled by Christina Yocca

ROSE DOLAN-NEILL, CURATOR

Assistant Director, Visual & Literary Arts

Pablo Center at the Confluence

There is so much beauty tucked away in our art collection. We are proud to offer you a glimpse into the Laurie Bieze Art Collection. Pablo Center prides itself on it’s permanent art collection filled with works of art that inspire, educate and provide insight into the human condition. There are currently over 300 works of art in Pablo Center’s Permanent Art Collection.

Named in honor of artist, Laurie Bieze whose personal motto was Shakespeare’s famous words, “To thine own self be true,” we at Pablo Center feel it is our responsibility to take on her legacy, to acquire artwork that not only reflects our community, but enhances the community; artwork that inspires, delights, questions the status quo, takes risks, gives a sense of place, explores human nature and provokes dialogue; these are the works of art that we seek for our collection.

Pablo Center collects and displays a variety of artistic mediums, styles, prints originals, sculptures, pottery, and some artifacts that bare significance to the arts in the Chippewa Valley.

This collection is displayed throughout Pablo Center in it’s traveled hallways, busy classrooms, high-traffic office spaces and conference rooms. It is used to inspire touring artists by gaining an appreciation of the Chippewa Valley’s natural beauty, history, and current creative culture. We consider all of Pablo Center as a work of art.

The Laurie Bieze Gallery on the second floor serves as exhibition space for themed exhibits culled from our collection.

Contributions to the Laurie Bieze Permanent Art Collection enrich the art experience for anyone who walks through the doors of Pablo Center. To make a monetary contribution please visit: www.pablocenter.org/support/donate.

DANIEL INGERSOLL

Eau Claire, Wisconsin

UNTITLED Pottery

While I love the conceptual potential of art, most of my work in this show is functional in nature. I love the idea of taking raw materials that are perceived to have little value and shaping these materials with heart, hand, and head into objects of beauty and pleasure. A special handmade cup can transform the everyday experience of drinking coffee into a ritualistic, aesthetic experience. The process of working with clay is both simple and complex. Simple materials of clay, minerals, and fire present endless challenges and possibilities creating a deep well of desire for greater understanding.

Dan Ingersoll spent 30 years in Eau Claire classrooms teaching students the skills that would enable them to explore the infinite possibilities for expression through art. Seventeen of his thirty years was spent teaching ceramics and sculpture at Memorial High School. Throughout his time in Eau Claire, Dan has partnered with David Caradori to Fire David’s wood kiln located on his property 15 miles north of Eau Claire. Dan furthered his ceramic skills through his association with David as well as taking workshops with Randy Johnston, Jan Mckeachie Johnston, and Mike Weber. Dan’s work has been shown regionally and nationally through his inclusion in the “Strictly Functional National” pottery show in Pennsylvania. In retirement from teaching, Dan has enjoyed writing articles for Pottery Making Illustrated and Ceramics Monthly publication.

MARK RUDDY

Eau Claire, Wisconsin

LUNA 1983

Ash, recycled redwood, walnut, pine & silk | 24x36

This cabinet was inspired by the book-matched walnut pieces on the door which I read as female. The rest of the piece plays with the feminine theme with references to the goddess Diana and the Virgin Mary. Diana was considered the patroness of the moon and goddess of fertility and childbirth. The church took some symbols associated with Diana and incorporated them in depictions of the Virgin Mary. The church I grew up in had a stained glass window showing Mary with her heel holding down a crescent moon. The crescent moon here is represented by a pine wedge, found at a log cabin construction site. The door handle suggests the ancient figurine, the Venus of Willendorf, thought to be a fertility figure or mother goddess symbol. The soft edges of the wood and the use of silk add to the feminine resonance of this piece. My choice of recycled redwood for the inner cabinet is a reference to the work of the activist, Julia Butterfly Hill, who in the late 1990s lived in a redwood tree she named Luna for over 700 days to save it from being cut down. The tree is still standing.

I am a self-taught furniture artist who was welcomed into the Chippewa Valley arts community by Laurie Bieze and others in 1988. I look for projects where I can use a slice of wood from bark edge to bark edge (a flitch) to make unique functional furniture inspired by my reading of the wood. My goal is to create something elegant that uses organic features like the natural log edges without becoming rustic. This way of working allows me to retain more essential “treeness” while still creating a refined piece of furniture.

I was born in 1946 to a farm family in North Dakota. After graduating from college, I found my way to the Chippewa

Valley after a year-long “economy tour” of Europe and time spent in Maine, Toronto, Duluth, Ann Arbor, and New Auburn, WI, honing my woodworking skills. Along the way, I earned a master’s degree in Vocational Rehabilitation. I have one son, Timothy.

CARA TOMLINSON

Portland, Oregon

FAIRYTALE

1996

Monoprint, chin colle, walnut ink, type on paper

Cara Tomlinson is an Oregon-based artist whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures focus on ecological systems and their relationship to human/nonhuman bodies. Tomlinson’s work explores tensions between simplicity and complexity, order and entropy, and inside and outside. Her recent paintings present bodies as verbs and processes, exploring heredity, vision, metabolism, waste, and sedimentation.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and supported by numerous grants and residency awards including the Ucross Foundation, Millay Colony for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Willapa Bay Artist Residency, Ford Family Foundation Grant, and an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently an Associate Professor of Painting at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.

Donated to the Laurie Bieze Art Collection by Christina Yocca.

CHRISTINA YOCCA

Eau Claire, Wisconsin

UNTITLED

Found natural materials

I revere the stuff of nature-both the detritus and the wonders. While transforming earth, fibers and branches into mysterious vessels and sensual objects, I seek to relay messages heard only by the ear of the heart. Forces and forms f nature act as metaphors for the bare bones of the human condition. I borrow building techniques from past cultures and the natural building movement. These include structures from Native American architecture and Japanese fence building, natural clay plasters, and straw-clay building. My work poetically combines disparate images. The earthen materials mimic landscape textures. The surfaces evoke rocks, fields, or outcroppings. In the Forked Branch Series, I start with a forked branch then form a vessel. The vessels relate to the human form and have bellies or lungs and lips. They sit, stand, or envelope space like embracing arms. The adobelike walls vibrate when the air of a voice passes into and through the contained volume. This invisible force of breath and wind is a main element of the piece. Many cultures and religions have concepts about wind and breath. James Kale McNeley has written about the Navajo concept of Wind. “That which is within and that which surrounds one is all the same and it is holy.”

Christina Yocca has received commissions for site-specific works from The City of Philadelphia; the Fairmount Park Commission in Philadelphia; the

Cheltenham Art Centre; The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and Muriel and Phillip L. Berman. She is the recipient of grants from the Midwest New Partnership, the Ruth Chevon Foundation, Inc., and the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. She received an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. From 1987-1995, she taught in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, heading the fiber program.

Donated by the artist to the Laurie Bieze Permanent Art Collection.

CHASM WITH WING

Found natural materials

ENVELOPE

Found natural materials

MUNDUS

Maple branch, abaca paper, flax and ramie fiber, clay pigments

SWING

Kudzu vine, flax and ramie fibers, clay, beeswax, linseed oil

UNTITLED

Charcoal drawing

Mundus

LAURIE BIEZE

“Fire in the belly,” is that quality of mind which has guided Laurie Bieze, stained glass and multimedia artist, from the beginning. She never really wanted to do anything else but create, and that intense dedication to her craft led her on a merry chase as something of a gypsy, until she landed in Eau Claire. After completing her studies at the Colorado Institute of Art, she took various jobs across the US, as well as abroad, doing art for movies, TV and print media, as well as other design work.

While she was working at the University in Oregon, her skill as an artist who could actually draw, loved to sketch, and produce original designs, opened the door to getting involved with designing stained glass windows for other glass artists. Her subsequent study of the art of stained glass processes gave her the confidence to think that she could work for herself and actually make a living as a stained glass artist in Eau Claire.

She began designing for homes, as well as producing windows, doors, sculptures, mobiles and other spectacular stained glass art for churches and restaurants, CVTC, the IBC, Luther Hospital, among many other clients. One can follow Laurie Bieze’s footsteps as an artist, by traversing the Chippewa Valley from one glistening shimmer of evocative color to another.

She had a studio at Banbury Place for over fourteen years. The ambiance seemed to attract a broad spectrum of creative tenants, who of course come and go, but mutually benefit from the eclectic mix. Laurie Bieze described the energy in downtown Eau Claire as wonderful… “positive and forward thinking.”

Laurie Bieze passed away at the age of 70, on June 22, 2014 after a 3-year battle with breast cancer. Throughout her life and even through cancer, she strived to live her life according to one of her favorite quotes, “To thine own self be true”. Listening to her inner voice, pursuing her love of art, and finding the light in others were values she held dear to her heart.

This content was taken from a November 2011 interview of Laurie Bieze from chippepedia. org and from Laurie Bieze’s obituary in the Leader Telegram on June 29, 2014. This gallery and Pablo Center’s Permanent Art Collection are named in her honor.

LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We acknowledge that Pablo Center at the Confluence occupies the sacred and ancestral lands of Indigenous Peoples. We honor the land of the Ojibwe and Dakota Nations.

INCLUSIVITY STATEMENT

Pablo Center at the Confluence will not remain silent when what the community needs is for its local organizations to represent them. Pablo Center at the Confluence, while listening to and learning from the community, pledges to address structural and historical inequities in the arts, identify and address implicit biases and practices through the organizational structure of Pablo Center, and respond to the events of our time that test relationships within the community through dialogue, educational and artistic programming, and care.

Our first act towards this pledge is the creation of the Committee for Inclusive and Just Engagement and Practices, which is dedicated to the resolution of issues and the creation of opportunities related to social justice.

EXPLORE OUR EXHIBITS

REFLECTIVE LIGHT

May 12 - Aug. 6

BRADY & JEANNE FOUST GALLERY

The Art of GO Paint!

SAPIRA CHEUK

Jun. 8 - Sept. 10

JAMES H HANSEN GALLERY

Movement, Action, Location

DAVID BROCK

Jul. 28 - Oct. 1

BRADY & JEANNE FOUST GALLERY Places