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Upcoming Exhibitions
Brandt & Armstrong Galleries
Holiday Treasures Exhibition and Sale & Artisan Workshop Residents 2018
New for our Holiday Treasures Festivities includes a weekly residency of artists making exciting works in the Sales Gallery during open hours! Come in each week to talk with the artists and see their unique creative process in action.
Thursday, Nov. 1st – Saturday, Nov. 3: Mandy Roeing (pastel)
Wednesday, Nov. 7th – Saturday, Nov. 10th: Kara Kirchner (felting)
Wednesday, Nov. 14th – Saturday, Nov. 17th: Natalie Wetzel (encaustic/mixed media painting)
Wednesday, Nov. 21st – Wednesday, Nov. 28th: Heather Evert (temari Japanese embroidery)
Friday, Nov. 30th – Saturday, Dec. 8th: Krystal Lyon (mixed media sculpture)
Tuesday, Dec. 11th – Saturday, Dec. 15th: Whitney Johnson (mixed media painting/collage)
Brandt Gallery
Megan Kathol Bersett and Tyler Lotz
January 11– February 15, 2019
Artist Reception: Friday, January 18, 5-7pm
Megan Kathol Bersett uses paint and collage to visually process her experience of altered perceptions in a continual attempt to grapple with conflicting elements in daily life. She evokes these types of experiences in the work by creating relationships of abstract pattern and space that shift, merge, and collide often stemming from her interests in camouflage, geology, instability, and mindfulness.
Tyler Lotz Ceramic works are about abstraction, a longing for wilderness, and failed attempts at conjuring personal experiences he has had in the landscape. He uses a playful variety of glazes and application techniques to create a surface that alters our perception of the angular and organic ceramic forms. Incorporating both casting and hand forming techniques, the sculptures have the sensibility of synthetic, fabricated and built objects and environments.
Thank you to Susan Emerson for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
Armstrong Gallery
Jeff Bess
January 11– February 15, 2019
Artist Reception: Friday, January 18, 5-7pm
Jeff Bess designs spaces with a simplicity that resonates with a sense of volume, drama, power and many times, humor. He emphasizes the luminosity found in our surroundings and emboldens the discarded or overlooked of the everyday. Bess finds success in helping others see and appreciate some of this intimate beauty.
Thank you to Gay Dolan for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
Brandt Gallery
92nd Annual McLean County Amateur Art Exhibition
February 22 – April 5, 2019
Awards Ceremony: Sunday, February 24, 2pm
The 92nd Annual McLean County Amateur Art Exhibition features high school, college/university, and adult artists. Juried works of painting, graphics, photography/new media, and sculpture will be selected for cash merit awards in each category and division. The Merwin Medal ($300) will be awarded to the most outstanding artwork and the Ashely C. Ritter Most Promising Art Award ($150) to the artwork exhibition the most future potential. Andrea Ferrigno, a painter and instructor at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois will be jurying the exhibit and concurrently featured in the Armstrong Gallery.
Armstrong Gallery
Mary F. Coats, Andrea Ferrigno, & Mariko Brown Harkin
February 22 – April 5, 2019
Artist Reception: Friday, March 1, 5-7pm
Andrea Ferrigno’s work is inspired and informed by systems of science and mathematics, and how it relates to natural phenomena. Mary F. Coats is interested in the constant repetition, echoing and color play that is occurring in the work. Through these repeated forms a larger, more complex environment is coming to exist, only reachable through recollection. Mariko Harkin Brown looks to nature, especially the textures and contours of leaves and flowers, for inspiration. She tries to connect the viewer and creator, even if only for a moment through the experience of beauty, design,tactility and comfort.
Viewed together, the works bridge 2-D and 3-D space by connecting the physicality and structure of paint to the surface design and flat patterning of the ceramics.
Thank you to Kevin Kuebler of New Perspectives for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
Brandt Gallery
Emerging Illinois Artist 2019
April 12 – May 24, 2019
Reception and Awards Ceremony:Friday, April 26, 5-7pm
This triennial exhibition features artwork by MFA students currently enrolled or recently graduated from an Illinois university. The juror Tempestt Hazel, an independent curator, writer and director of Sixty Inches From Center, an arts publication and archiving initiative, will undoubtedly select works that wrestle with contemporary ideas in art making. The various painting, sculpture, video, and installation works will challenge and expand expectations of a gallery experience.
Armstrong Gallery
Through rhythm and ritual Cathy Hsiao weaves together narratives that are personally intimate and art historically evocative. These narratives are mostly accurate, somewhat fictitious, always woven together in a syncopation of languages. Her practice is deeply rooted in a hybrid inquiry between material making and conceptual thinking. Hsiao constructs parallels between her affective mental landscape and the larger natural and built environments. Much of her techniques re-use distinct craft practices from Asian textiles such as weaving and natural dyeing iterated into a vocabulary influenced by the history of Western abstraction.
Brandt Gallery Split Exhibitions
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David Stratton makes landscapes based in gestural ink line or mixed media paint applications, experimenting within each composition by varying visual depth from flat to photographic. The work is based on photographs taken while hiking. The duo will exhibit in half of the Brandt Gallery alongside the Illinois Prairie Pastel Society.
Thank you to Mike and Alexis Kalish for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
Illinois Prairie Pastel Society Juried Member Exhibit
May 31– July 12, 2019
Artist Reception: Friday, June 7, 5-7pm
In 2006, six Springfield, Illinois pastel artists joined together to form the Springfield Area Pastelists. By 2009 the group had grown to 20 members and formally organized as the Illinois Prairie Pastel Society, establishing By-Laws to guide the organization, and affiliating with the International Association of Pastel Societies. The Illinois Prairie Pastel Society celebrated its 10th anniversary in 2016 with over 40 members and seeks to expand public understanding of the medium. Works from the members will be juried and hung in half of the Brandt Gallery with a coordinating duo of oil paintings and pencil drawings in the other half of the gallery by Deana Moore Schoolcraft and David Stratton.
Thank you to Yvonne and Brian Hoop for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
Armstrong Gallery
Paul Klee Permanent Collection Prints
Featuring Sculptures by Nisa Blackmon
May 31– July 12, 2019
Artist Reception: Friday, June 7, 5-7pm
Every three years we take the opportunity to highlight our permanent collection. We are delighted to feature seven original prints from Paul Klee, a Swiss German artist. His iconic style was influenced by movements in art that included Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism.
Blackmon is a small metals and jewelry artist. She will be building sculptures and brooches inspired by Klee’s works.
Brandt Gallery
Madcap Mayhem
works by Michael Amis, William Butler and Dominic Henkelman
July 19 – August 30, 2019
Reception: Friday, August 2, 5-7pm
This exhibit combines the artwork of three artists to engulf the gallery with abstract, hybrid constructions and compositions that mimic the real world. In their studio practices, Michael Amis, William Butler, and Dominic Henkelman allow the sub-conscience to inform the process of creating. The resulting artworks are playful and imaginative, while still retaining sophistication in skill, to exist somewhere between tools in a chemistry lab and an animated sitcom.
Armstrong Gallery
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Elaine Rexdale
July 19 – August 30, 2019
Reception: Friday, August 2, 5-7pm
Rexdale defines herself as “an abstract painter concerned more with the story and feelings of a piece than with objective reality.” Her greatest inspiration came from working thirty-five years in early childhood education. Her work is most identifiable by bold lines with intense and bombastic colors. She adds free movement and detail to fill the canvas with symbolic stories. A dash of humor and tongue-in-cheek approach means everything is a possibility to use for painting. Her tendency to break the rules gives these works an outsider art sensibility.
Brandt Gallery
Richard Finch: a retrospective
September 6 – October 18, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, September 6, 5-7pm
Throughout history, works of art have investigated and established ideals of beauty, pictured religious deities and iconography, provided social commentary and criticism, and otherwise communicated ideas both universal and particular to the human condition. Finch’s research and creative work in the visual arts reflect an understanding of these functions of art. His works draw upon many traditional means and forms as he attempts to extend these traditions and develop his own voice and fulfillment in the making of art. The subjects for his artworks—temporality, the human figure, and still life objects—connect with subjects that have served many artists, cultures, and historical periods, even from antiquity.
This exhibit will feature a booklet of biographical and exhibit information.
Thank you in part to Sarah Smelser and Jonathan Higgins of Manneken Press for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
Armstrong Gallery
Tara Wray
September 6 – October 18, 2019
Artist Reception: Friday, September 6, 5-7pm
Tara Wray’s photographs from the series Too Tired for Sunshine comprises a photobook that confronts struggles with depression by documenting the beauty, darkness, and absurdity of everyday life. The photographs are made largely in her adopted home of Vermont from 2011 to the present. They offer a deeply personal interpretation of the Green Mountain State, juxtaposing familiar and picturesque tropes with more surreal, sometimes disquieting, subjects.
Thank you to Paul & Sandra Harmon for generously sponsoring this exhibition.
