• » Elementary Schools: Apr. 27 - May 14
• » Senior High Schools: Apr. 27 - May 14
• » Junior High Schools: May 6 - May 14

The Lawrence Public Schools will present the Annual Art Students Exhibition in the galleries of the Lawrence Arts Center. "This annual exhibition is the best way I know to show the community how accomplished the art students of Lawrence are", says Rick Mitchell, gallery director at the Arts Center. "I always appreciate seeing the work, and I especially appreciate the skill and guidance that the art teachers offer to these students. It is quite an exhibition."

Prairie River:
Paintings and Prints
by Lisa Grossman

• » Exhibition: June 1 - July 16
• » Public Reception: Friday, June 4, 7 - 9pm
• » Gallery Talk/Panel Discussion: Tuesday, June 8, 7:30pm

Lawrence painter and printmaker Lisa Grossman will show new landscapes of the Kaw River Valley in the small gallery of the Lawrence Arts Center beginning June 1. Grossman is well known in the region and across the country for her evocative and, in some cases, nearly abstract depictions of Flint Hills prairies.

Recent exhibitions include Plainscapes at the Ruth Morpeth Gallery in Hopewell, N.J.; Prairie Reverie at the Strecker-Nelson Gallery in Manhattan, Kan.; Twilight and Reverie at the Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City, Mo.; and Kansas Plein Air at the Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, Calif.

Grossman is using the Arts Center exhibition as an opportunity to explore both new subject matter and new techniques. For the first time she has video-recorded images from an airplane, breaking from her traditional plein air method of painting on location and adopting a new "plane air" method (she jokes). The video images and digital stills were shot at low altitude traveling 170 miles along the Kaw River Valley from Kansas City to Junction City before sunset. She watches the video in her Lawrence studio, pausing the tape when the composition suits, and works quickly from the displayed image before it moves on.

She also is exploring printmaking techniques that utilize woodcuts, relief rolling on thin Japanese papers, and collage. "Having had three major shows last year, I decided to give myself a couple of months this year to explore things I've wanted to do for a long time. Using dark, monochromatic color, duotone effects, multiple images, details and water media on paper are some examples.", she says.

Since moving to Lawrence eight years ago, Grossman has painted the Kaw River many times but first thought of depicting it from the air during a commercial flight from Los Angeles to Kansas City. As the plane passed over the Kansas River at Lawrence near sunset, she was struck by the sight of the river, calling it a "shining ribbon, ... a line coming through the prairie." Since then she has been studying the river's transformations and speaks of the "spirit of the living river that is still there, despite everything we've done to it." She adds, "There is beauty close at hand but we don't always see it."

While her work is inspired by the landscape, it rarely is a direct representation of a particular location. Grossmanís practice is to overlook - or, more accurately, to look through - at least some evidence of the human-made, focusing on the sense of space, light and color before her. Kansas City Star art reviewer Kate Hackman writes, "A sense of timeless essence is furthered by the fact that Grossman leaves out any evidence of human presence. Telephone wires and architectural structures are overlooked in her desire to focus exclusively on the natural landscape" ("Room to soar among spacious skies, Lisa Grossmanís In the Open affirms relevance of simple landscape paintings," Nov. 3, 2000). While this statement feels true, Grossman's recent river work does show subtle signs of human impact, including urban and agricultural patterns, roads and bridges as a result of her shift in focus from the sky to bird's-eye views of the land. Increasingly, Grossman's work is becoming a poetic advocacy for environmental awareness and stewardship.

Grossman explains, "I see my work as a sustained meditation on open spaces, as a celebration of their sublime beauty, as an expression of my deep concern for their survival."

Photographs by Peter Thompson

• » Exhibition: June 1 - July 16
• » Public Reception: Friday June 4, 7 - 9pm
• » Gallery Talk/Panel Discussion: Tuesday June 15, 7:30pm

(Accompanying essay by Professor Charles Eldredge available in the gallery.)

"For many years as a drawing teacher, I have implored my students to be more open to what is there. Now I find myself constantly challenged by the camera to follow my own advice. If you go out looking for a rabbit, you will walk right past the snake ..."
~ Peter Thompson

Many people in the region know Peter Thompson as the former dean of the School of Fine Arts at The University of Kansas. He was the dean who, among many other accomplishments, was instrumental in the planning and building of the Art and Design Building, the Lied Center for the Performing Arts, and the Bales Recital Hall on the KU campus. Others recognize him as a visual artist who continued over the years to practice his art even while meeting the considerable demands of university administration. At times, the roles met. As part of the unique Bales Organ Recital Hall project, Thompson designed both the ornamental woodwork for the 35-foot pipe organ and the towering stained glass windows in the rear of the hall.

Now retired from his position as dean, he carries a light teaching load of studio art classes and spends his time making images with his Canon digital camera. Thompson is a deft imagemaker, steeped in color theory and possessing a mature modernist sensibility. He uses the camera to capture changing conditions in the everyday world - the way light falls on a textured wall or patio chair becomes mysterious by virtue of its fleeting nature, and interesting due to its formal beauty. The stark line of a Kansas horizon also is appealing for formal reasons - structure, color, relationships of scale - but becomes an emblem of a spectacular human capability: Awareness. We marvel at this simple image because it brings much to mind.

Over the years Thompson has been primarily a painter. He practiced process-painting, often making small marks on a surface until it was transformed by the density of texture and complex colors. The legacy of that approach is that his photographic work accrues through process. He builds a body of work with one simple impulse and gesture at a time. For Thompson, a photographic subject is simply something that is noticed and acknowledged, and his sure use of faculties and tools crystallizes it. The body of work that will be shown at LAC demonstrates a way to see - a process of looking - as well as offering compelling objects of art.

Thompson was educated at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Yale University, from which he graduated in 1965 with a Masterís of Fine Arts degree. Thompson served as chair of The University of Kansas Department of Art from 1968 to 1975, as associate dean of the School of Fine Arts from 1975 to 1980, and as dean of the School of Fine Arts from 1986 to 1999. His work has been shown in the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City.

We’re All Mad Here:
Paintings and Doll Sculpture
by Margaret Meyer Schultz

• » Exhibition: July 21 - Aug. 27
• » Public Reception: Friday, July 23, 7-9pm

Margaret Meyer, now Margaret Meyer Schultz, lived in Lawrence a decade ago and remembers it with affection. She writes, "In 1995, I graduated from KU with a BFA in painting and moved to Kansas City. Though I currently live and work in Chicago, part of me has never left Lawrence. The patina of time has only added to its mythological status in my mind, yet every time I visit, it stands the test. I am never disappointed. Its citizens seem to live one step outside of the ordinary and perhaps that is why Lawrence is where I learned how to make manifest a separate world of creatures and characters in paintings."

Schultz describes the content of her exhibition: "Paintings of imagined characters and locations, rich in texture ... some whimsy with some dark. Some of the characters in the paintings inspire dolls. Some of those, in turn, evolve into shadow boxes. In some instances, the three-dimensional figure evolves from an interesting bit of wood or metal. I never plan these things; they are discovered. Iím not going through some deep psychological exploration (at least, not consciously!). I just create things that make me happy because they arenít anything youíd see in real life."

Schultz recently was head of fabrication for Permavision of Los Osos, Calif., where she designed, built and maintained puppets for stop-motion animated film. She also has worked as a marionette painter in Prague, and in costume and wardrobe design for Northwestern University and for Brush Creek productions in Kansas City which created clothing for actors in Robert Altman's film Kansas City. She recently has been accepted into the experimental animation graduate program at California Institute of the Arts.

Del Christensen Paintings

• » Exhibition: July 21 - Aug. 27
• » Public Reception: Friday, July 23, 7-9pm

Del Christensen has lived and worked in a variety of places - Berkeley, Calif.; Bozeman, Mont.; Madison, Wis.; Santa Fe, N.M. He has exhibited in painting and sculpture and taught art at the University of Montana, the University of Wisconsin and San Diego State University.

Christensen's paintings to be featured in his exhibition at the Arts Center are large in scale and executed in black-and-white alkyd enamel paints. They are inspired by landscapes and imaginary landscapes, but dwell on the edge of abstraction in that "place" the eye loves - fields of high-contrast dream imagery with surfaces rich in texture.

Christensen was born in western Kansas and was influenced early by, as he says, "big night skies, dramatic weather," and "sitting on a tractor watching the land, grasses and erosion." He spent four years in the U.S. Navy as a photographer where he "fell in love with black-and-white images." Later, in art school, he worked with earth/ land-based conceptual pieces, which he documented photographically; sculpture that explored landforms, watercourse paths and erosion; and gallery installations on the same themes.

After earning MA and MFA degrees, he took a teaching position in Bozeman, Mont., where he was impressed by rugged terrain and high mountain waterfalls, and where he witnessed and was deeply impressed by a full solar eclipse — the image of which recurs in his current work.

At times during the '80s and '90s Christensen served as artist-in-residence in Roswell, N.M., and spent time in Oakland and Berkeley, Calif., where he showed his work in warehouse art spaces. During the last decade, up until a couple of years ago, he spent his time remodeling houses and building hot rod cars (a long-time passion of his). Now living in Lecompton, he is painting again and has created a body of new work that reflects his experiences of the land over the years.