Art on the Second Floor
Boomerang
Alexander Calder, 1973
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor from Pennsylvania. He was the son of well-known sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder, and his grandfather and mother were also successful artists. Alexander Calder is known for inventing wire sculptures and the mobile, a type of kinetic art that relied on careful weighting to achieve balance and suspension in the air. Calder’s work in mobiles and large scale sculpture work shaped the course of the modern art world in the 1960s, and continues to hold an influence stake in the how sculpture is presented in the art world.
Text provided by the Whitney Museum
Chicago Sings
Carlos Cortez, 1984
Carlos Cortez was a poet, graphic artist, photographer, muralist and political activist, active for six decades in the Industrial Workers of the World. As an accomplished artist and a highly influential political artist, Cortez is perhaps best known for his wood and linoleum-cut graphics.
El Orgulla Del Siglos
Carlos Cortez, 1984
Odalesque
Margaret Burroughs, 1994
Margaret Taylor-Burroughs, also known as Margaret Taylor Goss, Margaret Taylor Goss Burroughs or Margaret T G Burroughs, was an American visual artist, writer, poet, educator, and arts organizer. She co-founded the Ebony Museum of Chicago, now the DuSable Museum of African American History.
The oldest museum dedicated exclusively to African American art and history, the DuSable now occupies a complex of buildings in Washington Park in Chicago and is affiliated with the Smithsonian.
Professor
Eduardo de Soignie, 2006
Eduardo De Soignie was born in Havana Cuba in 1970. In 1988, he began his art education at Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) but had his studies interrupted after receiving an exit visa to immigrate to the US the following year. De Soignie moved to Miami, Florida, where he resided for three years.
In 1992, he received a scholarship to go to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago graduating in 1996. Since then, De Soignie has been exhibiting in Chicago and the Midwest and had participated in symposiums and residencies in Canada, Spain, Poland, and England.
Transitions
Mitchell Melson Jr., 2004
For over two decades, Melson JR. has used the fruits he gleans from yard sales and flea markets to create tribal masks he believes represent a modern urban tribe. Melson Jr. is the founder of UTRIBE, “an artistic approach to remembering the past, knowing the present and implying the future.” He leads workshops on the craft of African mask-making using 21st-century concepts and recyclable materials.
The Peach Blossom Paradise
Okju Chun Oh, 1995
Chun Oh’s The Peach Blossom Paradise visualizes a story of Chinese poet Tao Chi’en.
As the story goes, a poor fisherman was fishing down the river early one morning. Everything around him was peaceful as he rowed his bamboo skiff smoothly over the still pearl-grey water to a stretch of the river he has never seen before. As he rowed on, something drew him as if by magic towards the
rosy line of the peach blossom forest. The peach trees were in full blossom, their boughs trembling in petals. A path scattered with a thousand falling petals wound its way among the trees. Like a man in a dream, he begun to follow it.
There, in the magic forest, the fisherman was mesmerized by the beauty of the surroundings, engulfed in the aroma of the fragrant peach blossom. He no longer felt the pain and burden of the world. He wanted to stay there forever. However, he had to go back to his world and not mention what he had seen. Upon his return to the village, he told the villagers about the magic forest, unable to keep his secret. When he returned, this time with the town people, the peach blossom paradise was nowhere to be found.
Text provided by Okju Chun Oh
The Mosaic of Community
Students of Nichols Middle School, Evanston Township High School, and Northwestern University, 1998-2002
The Mosaic of Community is a collaborative art project thought up by Northwestern students Rebecca Laks and George Newman to foster a social and artistic relationship between Northwestern students and students at local Evanston public schools. Each student who participated was based to create a smaller mosaic that represented their individual personalities. Put together, this large-scale mosaic collage represents our community as a whole, from a range of schools, ages, and background comes to a dynamic vision of who we are.
Norris University Center
Timothy McCarthy, 1994
Tim McCarthy’s career in art began to take shape at the University of Illinois where he earned his bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts in Painting in 1989. His first teacher, however, was his mother, who is also an artist. His first commercial art experiences were commissioned portraits of the U of I sororities. This was his initial thrust into portrait commissions. After graduation, Tim went to work for an art gallery in downtown Chicago. Tim continues to live in Illinois and work full-time in the freelance arena where he has built up his name and clientele.
Thikahr Thahn
Anthony Lee O’Neal, Unknown
O’Neal began his career inspired by clay figures, heads, busts, and masks.
Nearing the age of ten, his father recognized his fascination with his art collection from various corners of the globe and gave him his first oil painting supplies.
His father’s paintings from France and Haiti along with crafts from Africa were the most influential. As well as his father’s childhood Native American Indian artifacts, crafts, and cultural influences from India, China, South America, and Japan made an impression.
This childhood influence is strongly seen in this work, a Motif and imagery inspired by the Goode homolosine projection.
Untitled
Megan Chiou, 2006
Chiou’s work was purchased to be a part of the Norris permanent art collection from Northwestern’s Senior Undergraduate Art Majors Exhibition, “Inside|Out: Art Theory and Practice Senior Exhibition” in 2006. The exhibition was meant to display these students’ “bridging of the realms of the public and private.” The ethereal self-reflection in Chiou’s work merges the physical body with a self-reflective perception of it.
Musicous Delas Feistas
Maria Alexandra Carles, 2008
Carles’ work was purchased to be a part of the Norris permanent art collection from Northwestern’s 2008 Senior Undergraduate Art Majors Exhibition. The vibrant, visceral aspect of bodies in motion in Carles’ work brings the unmitigated joy of music, community, and passion into a full, boisterous reflection.
The Ceremony
Anisha Nadkarni, 2005
Nadkarni’s work was purchased to be a part of the Norris permanent art collection from Northwestern’s 2005 Senior Undergraduate Art Majors Exhibition. The stilled focus on the female figure in Nadkarni’s work acts as a penetrative meditation on an excursion in daily life. An excursion was necessary to be seen. If she were standing, her face would not fit in the frame.
The blurred figure behind the female also engaged in a bending tells the viewer that this excursion is a communal one, and endless in its variation. We do not see what they are retrieving from the ground. This unknowing allows the goal of this bodily effort to be open-ended. And asks the viewer, what do you reach for?
Title Unknown
Lisa Brown, 1979
Brown’s etching presents the mountainous landscape of rural America in such aesthetic proportion that its compelling nature outlives trends in visual culture. It is a meditation on the atmosphere beyond trends, beyond conversations, buildings, campus, and roads, where the only structures are the primitive ones, the mountain, the rock, and the water. The calming beauty their rhythms may bring. The moments of stillness their commemoration offer.
May 28th Roll Semi-Transparent and All At Once
Jenna Fugate, 2012
NFugate’s work was purchased to be a part of the Norris permanent art collection from Northwestern’s 2012 Senior Undergraduate Art Majors Exhibition. The wide and disorienting chromatic mirage of shadow and light brings the viewer into a window of abstraction that is neither welcoming nor turning us away. The title, MAY 28TH ROLL SEMI-TRANSPARENT AND ALL AT ONCE, plays with this abstract landscape by referencing a specific date as both an opening and an overwhelming wave. The answer to why this date, why these emotions will only ever be answerable by the artist but may ask, when would this date be for us?
Woman Bathing Her Feet in a Brook
Cheri Fakes, 2006
Fakes’ work was purchased to be a part of the Norris permanent art collection from Northwestern’s Senior Undergraduate Art Majors Exhibition, “Inside|Out: Art Theory and Practice Senior Exhibition” in 2006. The exhibition was meant to display these students’ “bridging of the realms of the public and private.” The simple, domestic act of cleansing in Fakes’ piece romanticizes the often mundane act of taking care of our bodies while destigmatizing the act of caring for non-normative bodies. The pointillist strokes lend a nostalgic, warm node to the impressionist bathing scenes of Georges Seurat.