Art exhibits contrast two creative stages at FLC and DAC

Friday, Dec 13, 2019 12:33 PM

Artist Louise Grunewald’s show, “My Beloved West,” is currently on exhibit at Durango Arts Center.

Courtesy of Louise Grunewald

“Love” is a woodblock by Deryk Trujillo, which is on exhibit at Fort Lewis College Art Gallery.

Courtesy of Judith Reynolds

Walk upstairs in the Durango Arts Center and you’ll find an intimate, carefully observed exhibition by a mature artist. “My Beloved West” features 20 solar-plate prints and two artist’s books by Louise Grunewald, one of the Southwest’s most gifted practitioners.

Concurrently, the Fort Lewis College Art Gallery features works by seven graduating seniors in communication design. Packed with class projects, the space is filled with posters and branding schemes for real and imaginary clients, labels for wine and beer products, a few paintings, three-dimensional works and some free-floating whimsy – Matt Valdez’s Calderesque ski boot and Deryk Trujillo’s embroidered hoodie.

If possible, plan to view the two exhibits concurrently and think about the contrast between free-wheeling experimentation and a mature body of work that springs from a single inspiration.

Fort Lewis College Art Gallery’s exhibit, “We are designers: It’s in our bleed,” by senior communication design majors.

Courtesy of Judith Reynolds

Beginner’s luck

The student exhibit at FLC covers a lot of territory and contains many different class projects. Among the most interesting are Alexis Blosser’s posters and large street banner for a music festival in Washington state. Blosser combines stylized canyon shapes with an abstract rendering of sound signals to entice people to the outdoor festival. Blosser thoroughly merges text, image and symbols in a fresh design package.

Cassidy Brunson uses different design templates for her “clients,” delicate snowflakes with embedded books for the Brooklyn Book Fair, and whimsical montages for the 2020 Seattle Olympics.

Spencer Ashton has crafted an elegant oak wine chest surmounted by “Kumiko,” a clean, geometric wooden wall piece.

Kacey Diehl’s many projects illustrate a wide design vocabulary. A Constructivist-inspired poster recalls early 20th century Russian practice where intersecting diagonals create a dynamic composition. Diehl’s Downsider beer labels are sleek and contemporary, and “Tango” adds an elegant non-objective image to the show with an homage to abstract surrealist Juan Miro.

Carissa Hewitt presents a sales scheme for “Fitbit,” and in a small, saturated orange print titled “Remember When,” she offers a visual puzzle. Look long, and the image of an old dial phone may emerge. Maybe Hewitt will embark on a deeper investigation of this theme and create her own body of work.

Mature exploration

In a short artist’s statement, Louise Grunewald describes what inspired her to begin a new series of prints and artist’s books. Apparently, while outdoors, she was struck by the beauty of a small blooming plant, a claret cup. Sketches, drawings and prints followed, and the small, red blossom eventually triggered a fascinating body of work titled “My Beloved West.”

You’ll see several iterations of the claret cup in Grunewald’s show of solar plates, some combined with beautifully rendered text, and also presented in an artist’s book. Note that some prints include silk as a surface, presumably to intensify the redness of red.

Grunewald’s project evolved and includes other imagery under the umbrella title: delicate closeups of aspen bark, abstractions of water and deserts. And in a second book, Grunewald uses exuberant design motifs through leaping lines and joyous color.

This is what it means to explore an art idea. This is what “a body of work” looks like, and for 20 years, the DAC Art Library has been the perfect place for such exhibits.

Judith Reynolds is an arts journalist and member of the American Theatre Critics Association.

A different direction for DAC Art Library?

“My Beloved West” will be the last exhibit organized for the Durango Arts Center by Friends of the Art Library. Members include: Mary Ellen Long, Deborah Gorton, Barbara Tobin Klema, Leesa Zarinelli Gawlik, Louise Grunewald, Carol Ozaki and remembering the late Jane Steele.

“The FOAL group has elected to end their time at the DAC,” wrote Brenda Macon, executive director of DAC, in an email. No explanation was given, but Macon added: “We appreciate the shows and workshops they have presented to the community and wish them the best.”

In 1998, founding FOAL member Long brought the “Friends” concept to DAC. Since that time, a small circle of volunteers has changed membership only slightly, but throughout its 21-year affiliation with the center, FOAL has organized and curated six exhibits annually by a diverse professional group of local, regional and national artists from varying disciplines.

The DAC Art Library hosted intimate shows of new work. In addition, workshops taught by visiting artists enhanced the program. Kumi Korf, a printmaker based in Ithaca, New York, was among many notable workshop leaders.

Over the years, FOAL has also had a relationship with Fort Lewis College and has featured new works by art faculty members: Chad Colby, Tony Holmquist, Andrea Martens, Susan Moss and Amy Wendland. Last year, Jay Dougan’s experiments with 3D printing were of keen interest. In 2017, FLC and DAC collaborated in staging two concurrent exhibits by conceptualist Pat Hickman.

“Along with the amazing collection of books in the Art Library space, our primary focus has been education, offering viewers unusual forms of art, not always found in a frame,” FOAL member Leesa Gawlik said in a telephone interview. “Although exhibited artwork has sold, we never operated as a commercial gallery. Our workshops were unique, and we’ve offered more than 30 over the years, filling a niche in Durango.”

But a shift in DAC philosophy over the last year presented a conundrum for the FOAL curators. That shift will be made public Jan. 15.

Macon said in a telephone interview that she will announce an entirely new direction for the DAC and for the Art Library.

“We don’t want anyone to take the steam out of our sails now,” Macon said. “We have a new, exciting concept from an external group that will change the DAC. It’s entirely a new model, and it’s going to be wonderful.”

As FOAL concludes its 21-year history with the DAC, be sure to see the Grunewald exhibit – an intimate tribute to “My Beloved West.”