University of Iowa Museum of Art

Wrapping up my visit to Iowa, below are some images from my visit to the University of Iowa Art Museum:

There's not much better in the world than Jackson Pollock's "Mural" from 1943 and a pair of super comfortable chairs. If you've seen the movie "Pollock" with Ed Harris, this is the large mural painting that Peggy Guggenheim commissioned for her entryway. She donated it to the University of Iowa Art Museum and for a while in the 60's in hung in the school cafeteria.

The next 5 images are from a small show about appropriation in art:

Peter Feldstein: Drawings 2000-2006

Peter Feldstein draws and paints marks, symbols, and icons on sheets of film, then scans them and uses software to manipulate them on the computer into complex systems of pattern. Feldstein is interested in creating a visual cultural language that people might recognize as connected to past memory or experience. Through this process he engages in a personal quest to understand his physical and psychological place in the world.

Professor Feldstein recently retired from the UI School of Art and Art History after teaching photography for over 30 years. He is an Oxford, Iowa, based multi-media artist.

Mauricio Lasanksy

Lasansky apparently was a professor of printmaking for 39 years at the University of Iowa. In an out of the way gallery the museum showed a wide selection of his prints. Below is my favorite (one image by me, the other from his site).

Sol y Luna (1945)
Edition: 25 (first state)
15.87 x 20.87 in.
40.1 x 52.9 cm.

Intaglio: engraving, gouged-out white areas, etching, soft ground, aquatint, scraping, burnishing.
One plate: one copper plate. Printed in black.

[from Lasansky's Web site]

Comments

[JAbbott]

It is hard for me to justify a trip to Iowa just to see a painting, but I want need to see "Mural" in person.

[S Klindt]

I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa and worked in the museum, I assisted the conservator who restored the Pollack mural in 1969. The painting hung in the University library in the 1960s before the art museum was built, not in a "cafeteria."

[J.T. Kirkland]

I believe you S Klindt. I'm trying to remember where I read that though. For some reason I'm thinking it was in a Peggy Guggenheim biography. And I remember seeing a picture of students seated in front of the painting... they looked like they were eating, but maybe they were reading.

Thanks for sharing your experience!