Phillips Museum of Art Rothman and Gibson Galleries
Caitlyn Bishop Kevin Brady Linda Cunningham Carol Hickey John Holmgren Bill Hutson Richard K. Kent Magnolia Laurie JunCheng Liu Virginia Maksymowicz Jeremy Moss Jason ThompsonThe Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin and Marshall College is honored to present the artwork of faculty, staff, and emeriti from the Department of Art, Art History, & Film in the biennial exhibition, Resurgence. Each of the 12 artists were invited to present newly created work in a variety of media from drawing, painting and printmaking to sculpture, photography, and film. Several of the works presented were completed during the height of the pandemic and reflect on emotions experienced during this period of isolation, while other artists felt that the solitude provided additional time to explore new topics in their artforms. Landscapes and natural materials are a recurring theme in Resurgence, providing the visitor the opportunity to engage with a reimagining of the world outside the gallery’s walls. The Phillips Museum is pleased to celebrate our colleagues as well as provide an opportunity for the campus and greater Lancaster community to preview the work of artists who dedicate their time, scholarship, and talents to Franklin & Marshall College.
Lindsay W. MarinoFRANKLIN
I explore the physical world by creating sculptures inspired by plant forms. Most everyone can identify a number of trees or flowers, but few of us are aware of the hundreds of species of fungi and myxomycetes (mik-so-mahy-seet), more commonly known as slime molds. These overlooked organisms possess a surprising beauty and exhibit a diverse range of form and color. Though individual slime molds are no bigger than a toothpick, these diminutive plants can multiply and become a dense mass several inches in size. They are also the only of their kind to possess both characteristics of animal and fungi, giving them the capability of locomotion. In my work, I try to give the viewer a sense of the visceral pleasure I enjoy as I study these organisms. My sculptures, from tabletop to architecturally scaled, are not scientific models, but fictionalized interpretations of natural forms.
I use a wide range of mediums. I like to use non-traditional materials and I use what I think will achieve the surface I am looking for. For this work I started with a welded metal understructure and built from there. I manipulated an old linen curtain and then covered it with pigmented epoxy resin. After creating the ‘panels’ I attached them to the welded structure using an epoxy putty. The side with no resin has a wash of gouache. I used a brighter yellow to show a different growing stage of this particular slime mold and wanted it to contrast with the rest of the sculpture.
I always like to tell young artists not to be afraid to experiment and to fail. The art making process is full of ups and downs, it’s just part of the learning experience. Young artists today tend to seek an immediate result which is not always the case when making art. Take your time, think about the process, and play.
Caitlyn Bishop
Crusty Cushion, 2022 Wood, fabric, water putty, and pigment
10 x 12 x 2 1/2”
Image courtesy of the artist
The scrap metal yard is basically a playground of drawing material for me. I first gained access to one on the day after a blizzard. The lake-effect snow had buried much of lower Michigan, and I ran around snapping pictures until my camera froze. It was that cold.
As I studied the photos later, I thought of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (1979), in which the camera moves in long, lingering shots over an industrial wasteland, overgrown and littered with matter. The sheer profusion of forms delivers us into the slowness of time.
In my photos, I found a mountainous landscape of disorienting scale and heightened contrasts: smooth and jagged, hard and soft, clean and dirty, opaque and yielding, surface and interior, brilliance and darkness. It brought together a whole vocabulary of abstract forms.
These are oil paintings on canvas. I work from my own photos and a laptop, primarily to map out the composition, but also to open up the darks and compress lights as needed to draw forth and enhance certain information selectively – for example, the distribution and patterning of a particular color. Some of the paintings from this series are digital composites from multiple photos.
What advice would you give to young artists within the F&M and Lancaster community?
Consider the long term and set goals accordingly. Be patient. Focus on preparing yourself well with a foundation in drawing, color, and material study. Art is something that might happen to you if you’re lucky. Read broadly and deeply. Make works of the past your own as a means of understanding the present more fully. Cultivate curiosity as an end in itself, and not just a means to short-term goals. Eat well, sleep right, and get some exercise. Three cups of coffee per day have been shown to help with longevity.
Kevin Brady Scenes from a Scrapyard 13, 2022
on canvas
x
Image courtesy of the artist
Compelling environmental concerns frame the content of my current work. This new series was initially inspired by a series of pen and ink studies in Leonardo’s Notebooks investigating the force of water and storms that I have always been drawn to. Leonardo’s themes are echoed in the intensity and scale of contemporary weather patterns caused by global warming and I am moved by their deceptive beauty. The torn edges and severed forms reflect the incomplete future and uncertainty and the unknown impact that can not be contained in an image.
When did you start creating this work? Do you work on multiple projects at the same time?
The paintings were both done during the time when the pandemic was still a threat and I enjoyed lots of studio time. I generally only work on one painting at a time, but when one is almost complete or I am not certain if it’s finished I often start something else and give myself some distance and distraction from the final very careful last additions. The etchings were both done earlier after I had worked on a very large painting and wanted to return to a process I had worked with many years earlier. I needed to work in a different process on a manageable scale that produces quite different results.
I find that my work is compelled by intense concerns, now the existential crises humanity faces to keep the planet a place humans can survive in. The hurricane Sandy that shockingly inundated New York following the increasingly intense hurricanes that regularly wipe out areas of Florida and the Gulf states focused my attention on weather patterns and their sources.
The process is labor intensive and begins with a painting with a sugar filled ink on a metal plate. The plate is then covered with a thinned asphalt that will not adhere to the sugarink but will protect the metal when immersed in an acid bath, or etched. The sugar ink lifts or washes off and the acid bath bites the painted image into the plate.
TOP: Linda Cunningham Maria, 2019 Sugar lift etching, artist’s proof, on archival Rives BFK paper 17 x 23”
Image courtesy of the artist
BOTTOM: Linda Cunningham Sandy, 2019 Sugar-lift etching, edition of 15 on archival Rives BFK paper 20 x 27”
Image courtesy of the artist
I was born in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and lived early years in Hempstead, Long Island, New York. I received a Bachelor of Architecture from Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C. in 1977. I moved to Lancaster to work for a local architectural firm, after living on a communal farm in Vermont, and working as an architect in Washington, D.C. I am a registered architect in Pennsylvania, a member of the American Institute of Architects, a founding partner in two previous firms in Lancaster, and currently have an office in Mt. Gretna, Pennsylvania, Hickey Architects, where we do a variety of projects, from documenting historic stone cabins for shipment to Ireland, to local residential and commercial projects. The approach behind all of our projects is to listen carefully, observe and absorb the clients’ intentions and goals, the site and surrounding conditions, let inspiration follow, and be willing to offer the unexpected, and as much natural light as possible. I am a senior adjunct instructor with Franklin & Marshall’s Art, Art History, and Film Department where my courses introduce students to the basics of architectural design and sustainable design.
When did you start creating this work? How long did it take to complete? Do you work on multiple projects at the same time?
Annville Free Library: We started working on this project in 2019, we just completed the design and construction documents, drawings and specifications, (so say it took about 2.5 years) the project is out for bids now and expect to start construction in August or September 2022, and completion is expected in fall of 2023.
Hess Agency: We did some initial studies in 2019-2020, helping the owner to decide on a direction for their needed expansion. We started working on the design for this project in 2021. We completed the design and construction documents in February 2022 and the project is currently under construction. Completion is expected December 2022.
Yes, we work on multiple projects at the same time: typically we have 5-6+ projects in various stages of research, design, and/or construction.
What advice would you give to young artists within the F&M and Lancaster community?
Take as many varied classes at F&M as you can—expand your interests. Go to all the arts oriented events available: exhibits, films, etc. Visit other places: museums, galleries, buildings, natural places. Sketch everywhere you go. Take photos. Observe. Seek out special commissions, participate in volunteer community arts activities—this will give you memorable personal connections, valuable challenges, and experiences.
Carol HickeyAnnville Free Library (design presentation boards), expected completion August 2023
Printed digital images on Foamcore
1. Exterior and interior perspective views and floor plans with key
2. Exterior Elevations- 2D drawings, rendered Image courtesy of the artist
Hess Agency Farmhouse Renovations (design presentation boards), expected completion December 2022
Printed digital images on Foamcore
1. Exterior Elevations, 2-D CAD drawings, and Exterior perspective views
2. Floor Plans – 2-D CAD drawings
Image courtesy of the artist
HOLMGREN
Intersections of Culture Geography Place Landscape
John C. Holmgren, 1969, St Cloud, MN
When did you start creating this work? How long did it take to complete? Do you work on multiple projects at the same time?
I started working on this piece in the late Fall of 2021 and completed it in February of 2022. I always have multiple projects going.
What was the inspiration behind this particular work? Did COVID influence or affect your work in any way? What materials and processes did you use?
The maps are the inspiration for this new work, this is a brand new project and the first few pieces are my exploration of where this work may go. COVID did not influence this work. I use original USGS maps and screenprinting.
What advice would you give to young artists within the F&M and Lancaster community?
Explore, play and make lots of mistakes, because when you push your work that is when the breakthroughs happen.
ABOVE: John Holmgren
Thirteen, 2022
Found Maps and Screen Printing 83 x 69”
Image courtesy of the artist
LEFT: John Holmgren
Thirteen (detail), 2022
Found Maps and Screen Printing 16 1/2 x 21”
Image courtesy of the artist
Abstract image of auspicious symbols # 1 and #2 are the first completed of eight paintings based on ‘Auspicious Symbols’ of Tibetan Buddhism. I am waiting for ‘permission’ to complete the other six paintings.
What materials and processes did you use?
I’m a creative visual artist who makes abstract paintings with traditional material, paints, brushes and so forth on transitional supports like paper and canvas.
What advice would you give to young artists within the F&M and Lancaster community?
Young artists wherever they are, should, in my view, beware of stepping in the footprints that they find on any path or trail that calls them or they choose to take.
Hutson
Abstract image of auspicious symbol #2, 2021
on linen canvas 33 1/4 x 27 1/4”
courtesy of the PMA
As an artist, I make photographs that echo and extend my concerns as a writer. Several ongoing series document places and their transformation over time. Until the large, conceptual series Lessons in Recursion, I solely made black & white photographs (often toned) in a darkroom. I still make such prints.
After a decade mostly working on a large landscape project driven by a well-defined concept, I recently returned to documenting a far more varied kind of landscape for a new series entitled American Neighborhoods. The series is my way of trying to come to terms with and reflect—sometimes obliquely—our society’s oddity, the collision of differing ideals, and ongoing, disturbing undercurrents or outright, rancorous divisions that inform the current American body politic. The pictures occasionally require careful reconnaissance. I see this series as participating in the tradition of American documentary photography. I present visual facts, but selected for their implications. The submitted images speak to the present moment’s frequently devastating ironies, evident in the fact that the two images from Lancaster County are from places separated by only a small tract of public woods.
Pictures in the series are from either medium-format positive film frames or digital captures. The images are sized 16 x 20” and printed on 17 x 22” sheets of matte paper.
When did you start creating this work? How long did it take to complete?
The pictures in the exhibition are from a new series entitled American Neighborhoods I’ve only just begun to exhibit work from it in various juried shows around the country (Annapolis, Seattle, etc.). I started to make prints for the series this past year.
When I notice something that I’d like to document, it can take weeks or even months for the right light to occur; then I must be able to get to the place in time to record it.
Combined with careful reconnaissance (especially for some pictures in the series), there is much happenstance involved. If I capture digitally or on film what I’m hoping for, it may be months later that I have the opportunity to try to produce an effective print.
I made far fewer prints. At the height of Covid and before the vaccines, I was without access to the digital lab on campus. In addition, teaching remotely in the module system left little time to think in a sustained way about much of anything else but my classes.
If one is going to make art for a lifetime, one has to be intensely persistent and willing to accept a fair amount of rejection—from submission to juried exhibitions, applications for grants or residencies, etc. That goes with the territory of being an artist, no matter what one’s medium may be. One also has to negotiate the extent to which one is willing to participate in the marketplace of art.
Richard K. KentBicyclist & Shops, Lancaster, PA; from the series, American Neighborhoods Digital capture 2021; printed 2021. Archival pigment print. 16 x 20” image (on 17 x 22” sheet); framed 23 x 27” Image courtesy of the artist
My creative practice is centered in the field of painting yet incorporates drawing and sculpture to create visual haikus and allegories about our complex relationship to the land. Building on the tradition of landscape painting, I take the awe and terror associated with the philosophy of the sublime and reframe these perspectives within a 21st-century context.
These new paintings started with an interest in the duality of the horizon line as both a means of orientation and a dividing point. The horizon line reveals a viewer’s vantage point, implying their relative position and connection to the landscape. It also carves through space, delineating between land and sky, here and there, now and then, us and them. Compositionally, the horizon lines in many of the paintings are roughly aligned, although the climate and quality of the landscape change from one to the next. Like so much in the last few years, this body of work has paused, pivoted, adapted, and then continued along an altered course. Some horizon lines were repositioned, some slipped out of sight entirely, and an exploration of orientation and vantage point gradually evolved to reflect a condition of disorientation. These works are about the landscape, the environment, and our disorienting distance and proximity to a quickly changing horizon line.
Yes, Covid and the chaos of the last few years were hugely disruptive. This body of work evolved much slower than others have and, in many ways, is a different body of work than it would have been.
Magnolia Laurie
was there on the horizon, 2021 Oil on panel
x 48” Image courtesy of the artist
When did you start creating this work? What was the inspiration behind this particular work? Did COVID influence or affect your work in any way?
The idea came to me not long after the college decided to switch to remote teaching mode in the middle of spring break 2020 when Covid-19 was spreading rapidly worldwide. One early evening I took a walk in the neighborhood where the roads were basically empty. I passed by a falling tree branch which could have been broken by the gusty wind the night before, lying on the edge of the road. Some of its smaller branches stretched out upward, weaving gently in the wind. After several steps further away, I returned to the broken branch, appreciating its elegance, wondering about the possibility of using it as a drawing class prop. Finally I decided to take it home.
In order to transport it to the college in my Prius, I started to tie up all the outward spreading branches with strings. As I was carefully negotiating with those unruly branches to make sure they would bend without being broken, I suddenly saw that I, and so many of us at that time, was experiencing the similar squeeze as the branch was enduring, restricted, pushed inwardly in isolation and fear of uncertainty by the pandemic. The idea of broken branches was born.
The first bounded branch took me rather several months as I was learning through trials and errors in searching for proper materials to treat the branch, and ways to install the branch onto the wall, for it was important to me that the branch should not appear dead or abandoned on the floor, it ought to be alive, or resurrected.
The five broken branches are the survivors of many attempts. In some cases a branch might have a great potential in terms of the formation and physical appearance, but somehow it failed to reach the final finish because either some branches simply refused to bend or I made some operational mistakes. Of these completed ones, each of them took me a lot of time in initial search of it (naturally available on the ground) and patiently testing the potential of transformation. In order to stabilize the branch, I treated it with wood hardener wherever needed, and with hot paraffin wax overall as a final finish, then let it dry naturally in the summer heat. To install each of them onto the wall, I inserted into the base trunk a shaped metal rod with its exposed end connected to the base holder made of square or round tube welded onto a shaped metal plate.
Some branches, from some trees, otherwise would live or die in nature free, are gathered near and far, resurrected from ground up, and Sacrificed
In suffocating constriction, to embody the sufferings that so many so many were forced to endure during the year of 20 20.
Broken branches, 2022
Tree branches, twine, and metal 9 x 10’ (installation)
Image courtesy of the artist
Mascaron—a word that literally means “big mask”—is the architectural term for an ornamental face peering from the façade of a building. These faces are usually, although not always, human, sometimes, they can be grotesque and frightening, meant to scare away evil spirits.
On a trip to Buenos Aires in the summer of 2019, I began photographing the many caryatids around the city. As my husband/photographer, Blaise Tobia, and I walked throughout the city, I began to feel like I was being watched. Looking up, we saw the faces of women looking down at us.
We also met up with our friend, Sergio Kiernan, a journalist and architectural historian. He presented me with a copy of his book, Las máscaras de Buenos Aires, an exquisite document published by the city’s Commission for the Preservation of Historical and Cultural Patrimony. Sergio’s research was especially focused on the faces of these women, many of whose visages were based upon real people—often the wives and daughters of the architects and builders.
Architectural Bodies is a series that began with a submission to the 2020 Lucca Paper Biennial in Italy, which had as a theme, “Fear and Desire,” a reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s words as he stood at the mouth of a cave.
My work was not chosen for the show, but da Vinci’s iconic Vitruvian Man got me thinking about the body and architecture, in new ways. How, I thought, might we see the Woman?
In these two selections, casts of a female body are decoupaged with prints of architectural details, taken from my photographic archive. From the zaftig figures atop the columns of Santa Croce in Lecce, to the birthing mothers on the pilasters of the Lateran courtyard in Rome, to the “Demeteresque” acanthus spreading with abandon onto the walls and capitals of buildings nearly everywhere. . . she is there. Look for her.
As my good friend, the photographer Marilyn Nance, aka Soulsista, says, “Don’t give up! Don’t give up! Don’t give up! . . .”
Virginia Maksymowicz Mascaron, Entre Rios 1521 (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 2020-2021
Print of original drawing: inkjet and charcoal on rag paper 14 x 17”
Image courtesy of the artist
Virginia Maksymowicz
Architectural Bodies, 2022 Handmade cotton paper, tissue paper, inkjet, gesso, matte medium, and printed images from the artist’s photo archive 24 x 17 1/2 x 7”
Image courtesy of the artist
Moths mindlessly go to the light. Lácrimas explores the melodrama of nature gazing and nostalgia for home while scrutinizing the gender binary and heteronormativity. The film is a sensory symphony of sparrows, cicadas, shadows, streams, and towering trees. The plants, they shine at night.
When did you start creating this work? How long did it take to complete? Do you work on multiple projects at the same time?
I started filming this work in the summer of 2019 in southern Utah and also here in Lancaster. I didn’t deal with the footage until the summer of 2021. Once I started editing, I completed it in two weeks. Yet that is in addition to many days of filming, gathering, and devising before I went into the editing tunnel.
What was the inspiration behind this particular work?
When I started filming this project, I wanted to deal with landscapes of my two homes: Lancaster (deciduous forests) and Utah (the desert). But with a two year gap between starting and finishing, I became interested in melodrama in Hollywood cinema and how that connects to nature gazing and nostalgia.
Did COVID influence or affect your work in any way? What materials and processes did you use?
Yes. COVID made me less interested in myself and my thoughts before the pandemic. I worked in both 16mm film and 4K digital video. The 16mm footage is both color (and lab processed) and B&W (and hand-processed by me in the darkroom).
Can you tell us more about your role within the arts community at F&M and the Lancaster community?
I am involved with a local Harrisburg-based media arts curatorial collective. We program the annual Moviate Underground Film Festival in addition to regular screenings, events, and workshops.
What advice would you give to young artists within the F&M and Lancaster community?
Keep on filming.
Jeremy Moss LÁCRIMAS, 2021 16mm and digital video
Color, black and white, and sound
Duration: 13:40 minutes
Images courtesy of the artist
For me, making guitars is an act of unification. It brings together one of my most powerful childhood desires with my focus on artistic-craftsmanship processes. As a child, I always wanted a guitar but a “recreational” object like this was out of reach for my family. Learning to craft guitars, then, allowed me to explore the incredible number of crafted details that underlay that dream. In this case, those details are utilitarian: guitars are created to do something. This relationship, between the processes of making and understanding of the nature of the object from the ground up, is an important piece of the teaching philosophy I bring to my work with students.
When did you start creating this work? How long did it take to complete? Do you work on multiple projects at the same time?
My first guitar was in 2018—these are the first three I’ve made. The process for a single guitar takes anywhere from a month to six months, depending on the number of details I fabricate and the timing of all the steps. It’s important to me to maintain a consistent level of art-making throughout my days. This usually means that I work on many projects at once, since some making processes require periods of waiting before moving onto next steps. The process of finishing each guitar, for example, takes more than two weeks.
I started making guitars because I wanted to learn to play—for me, crafting by hand is about a process that guides me toward understanding the essence of an object. A guitar is an especially interesting object to create, because the object (how it feels, how it sounds) shifts completely as a result of tiny details.
Yes. COVID resulted in isolation. Crafting and playing guitars became a way that I ordered my days, a way that I occupied my mind and my artistic impulses.
I use different types of tonewood, which is wood that carries sound waves well: maple, mahogany, violin-grade cedar. The structure of a guitar is complex, so many processes and materials are required: everything from basic woodworking to fabricating mechanical metal parts.
Jason Thompson N.A.R., 2020 Wenge, maple, mahogany, alder, and various other components 38 x 13”
Divine Dragon, 2021 Maple, cedar, and various other components 42 x 15”
Ororo, 2021 Maple, cedar, brass, and various other components 38 x 12”
Image courtesy of the artist
Jason Thompson N.A.R., 2020 Wenge, maple, mahogany, alder, and various other components 38 x 13”
Image courtesy of the artist
LINDSAY W. MARINO Director & Collections Manager
JANIE M. KREINES Curator of Exhibitions & Engagement
CHAD M. CHANEY Preparator & Exhibitions Specialist
TIM J. COLEMAN Museum Assistant
BABS A. SMITH Office Coordinator
JASON KLINGER
Senior Director of
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MICHAEL FINK