Art in the Norris Underground
Aztec Circle
Gabrielle Brille, 1973
Gabrielle Brill is a Postwar & Contemporary artist. Born in Germany, she fled to the USA in 1933 as a Jewish refugee. Being fleeing Europe, she was educated at Academies in Berlin and Vienna. She spent the bulk of her career in Hollywood, California. Her etchings often reflect embryonic life and visuals, a stylistic movement of the 1970s in which she involved herself in. She exhibited widely, mostly on the west coast.
Speaking on her work, Brill said she “makes prints and drawings and compositions in many media of the Unborn growing, pushing into form and shape and of the Old melting reluctantly and with sadness into the ultimate resolution–and between the beginnings and the endings one reaches across…”
Honk 2 End the Blockade
Kevin Lyons, 2003
Lyons’ photograph on the basement floor of Norris is a stirring example of the political photographic form. The subject of the photo, the backside of a truck, reads with a poster “CHAPEL HILL NC TO CUBA” “HONK 2 END BLOCKADE.” The solidarity between the American left and Cuba, especially signaling the solidarity movement of the American student body with the global Communist cause, is displayed here in full effect. The words on this truck mince no words. The photograph acts as a lasting reminder of the power of the American youth in swaying public debate.
Untitlted (Red Ladder)
Charles Seton, 1978
Untitled (Red Fence)
Charles Seton, 1978
Archaic Rhinoceros
David Holmes, 2006
David Holmes was born and raised in Newark, New York. He attended the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. For the next few years, he taught children with cognitive disabilities at an institution in upstate New York. Then, he moved to Wisconsin to attend the University of Wisconsin – Madison for his M.F.A. In 1974, Holmes began working as an assistant professor of painting, drawing, and design at UW Parkside in Kenosha. By 1977, he became a full professor and by 1978 he stood as the Art Department Chair, a position he held until 1980 and then again from 88 to 90 and 98 to 2006.
Speaking on the development of his artwork, Holmes said, “I was trained as a painter but moved into sculptural forms to expand my creative possibilities. I have always felt the concept comes first and then you seek the media to articulate that idea. Therefore, I am a painter- sculptor who loves to draw and does occasional print.
Holmes displayed this work along with a series of others at Norris’s Dittmar Gallery in 2006 in the exhibit Mystical Mechanical Menagerie.
