pleased to attend / Elena Diane Curris Exhibition

Last evening, I had the pleasure of attending the opening of the 2024 Elena Diane Curris Biennial Design Exhibition the UNI Gallery of Art. Below is a two-part posting I uploaded to LinkedIn earlier this afternoon. Such a wonderful exhibition, as well as a pleasurable social event.

Writer Ruth Suckow / Cedar Falls Connection

The success of the Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibition is non-stop. It continues to travel throughout the state, to libraries, history centers, and other public venues. It has now been booked for exhibits through all of 2025. That’s pretty amazing.

It is currently on exhibit at the Cedar Falls Public Library (Cedar Falls IA), where it will remain on view through Sunday, August 4. Above is a view of a detail of the installation from a video on the website of the Waterloo Courier. In addition, just two days from now, there will be a program (free and open to the public) titled Iowa Writer Ruth Suckow: The Cedar Falls Connection, on Monday (July 8) at 6 pm at the library in the upstairs meeting room.

Ruth Suckow exhibition at Bettendorf IA Library

Good news! This is an installation view of the traveling exhibition about the life and work of Iowa novelist and short story writer Ruth Suckow (pronounced Soo-Co). It was organized and produced by Iowa writer Barbara Lounsberry (UNI professor emerita of literature), who is also the president of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association. I was fortunate to be asked to design the exhibition panels, the banner and the shipping crate.

The above is how the exhibition looks, as currently installed at the Bettendorf Public Library in Bettendorf IA. Bravo! What a neat, professional way of setting it up. 

This is hardly its first exhibition. The initial traveling show took place in January of this year at a location near the extreme western edge of the state, and it has now proven so popular among Iowa libraries and history centers that it has been booked for more than a year in the future. With each display, there are also various public events, such as a presentation at the Bettendorf Library on Thursday, April 18, at 1:30 to 2:30 pm, titled Profound Realism: The Rediscovery of Ruth Suckow, featuring Michael and Hedy Hustedde. The exhibition is on display at Bettendorf from April 14 through May 12. 

Other libraries or history centers who would like to host the exhibition in the future will find information here.

Ruth Suckow / most promising writer of fiction

Ruth Suckow (pronounced soo-co) (1892-1960), an Iowa-born novelist and short story writer, was at one time expected to become one of the most accomplished writers of the Modern era. She was, in the words of literary critic H.L. Mencken, “the most promising young writer of fiction, man or woman, now visibly at work in America.” It was not a light endorsement, since Mencken also had high praise for James Joyce, Eugene O’Neill, and Theodore Dreiser.

She lived until 1960, having published nine novels in which she invariably tried to convey the experience of living in the American Midwest. From her awkward family name, her roots are undoubtedly German, which may be one of the reasons why Mencken was drawn to her writing. But as she herself recalled, “There was nothing German in our home except noodle soup, a tree and frosted cookies at Christmas, and brown-covered copies of Die Gartenlaube [a popular German magazine].”

In fact, her origins also go back to Puritan New England, to the “different drummer” proclivities of Unitarians and Transcendentalists. As she was growing up, her father was a Congregational minister in Iowa, in the course of which the family moved from one community to another. In her own lifetime, Suckow lived in at least sixteen Iowa communities, among them Hawarden (her birthplace), LeMars, Paullina, Algona, Fort Dodge, Des Moines, Grinnell, McGregor, Manchester, Earlville, Bettendorf, and Cedar Falls. At other times, she also lived in Greenwich Village in New York, and in California.

In recent decades, there has been a focused effort, by writers who admire her work, to restore at least some portion of Suckow’s literary prominence, to encourage a new awareness and appreciation of her work. As a result, in 1966, six years after Suckow’s death, the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association was established. In the years since, that organization has gathered annually to share their findings about her work, while also enabling a range of events.

Under the leadership of Iowa writer Barbara Lounsberry, who is currently the president of the RSMA, funding support was obtained from Humanities Iowa, for the design, production and distribution of a traveling exhibition, titled Ruth Suckow: An Exhibition about Her Life. The exhibit consists of eight full-color printed panels, each measuring 24 inches wide by 36 inches high. Using photographs, book covers, and critical excerpts, the exhibit tells the story of Suckow’s Iowa childhood, the sequence of her published work, and assessments of her accomplishments by various writers and scholars.

The exhibit was completed in 2023, and was first exhibited at the public library in Hawarden IA (where Suckow was born) from January 1 through 28, 2024. It has proven to be popular, and current requests to host it (for one month) at libraries, historical centers, or other non-profit locations in Iowa have now been scheduled through the middle of 2025. The following is an incomplete listing of exhibition dates and locations:

February 4 - March 3, 2024 at Burt Public Library
March 10 - April 7 at Orange City Public Library
April 14 - May 12 at Bettendorf Public Library
May 19 - June 16 at Urbandale Public Library
June 23 - August 4 at Cedar Falls Public Library
August 11 - September 8 at Polk City Public Library
September 15 - October 13 at Robey Memorial Library, Waukon
October 20 - December 1 at Ruth Suckow Public Library, Earlville
December 8, 2024 - January 5, 2025 at Kendall Young Library, Webster City
January 12 - February 9, 2025 at Drake Community Library, Grinnell
February 16 - March 16 at Manchester Public Library
March 23 - April 20 at LeMars Public Library
Also scheduled in 2025 for Atlantic, and Shenandoah libraries

To apply to host the exhibit in 2025 or later, go to the RSMA website at <ruthsuckow.org>.

exhibition viewing tour at Jester Nature Center

Thanks to Lisa Cooper, above is a photograph of participants in a Drake University OLLI class, which this week traveled to the Jester Nature Center, near Granger IA, to view my exhibition of National Park and Monuments posters, including Mesa Verde (below). The exhibition, which is open to the public, will continue to be on view through August 28. 

The OLLI course exhibit tour was supplemented by in-person presentations about national parks and comparable locations by Jester Center staff members Lewis Major and Patrice Petersen-Keys. All posters in the exhibition can also be viewed online in this short video.

Mesa Verde Poster © Roy R. Behrens

 

Artist Dean Schwarz and Family and Friends

In the fall of 1963, I began my senior year at a high school in a small town in northeast Iowa. A new teacher had been hired to teach art, and I soon began to work with him. As an artist, he was a painter at the time, but he would soon become an important American potter. That teacher’s name was Dean Schwarz. He was a primary mentor for me—we launched an art gallery, hitchhiked to New Orleans in the middle of winter, and, in 1964, spent the summer in Northern California, studying at Pond Farm Pottery with Bauhaus artist and author Marguerite Wildenhain.

Dean is 84 this year, and I am 76, and our friendship (along with my great fondness for his wife, author Gerry Schwarz) has continued, uninterrupted, all these many years. Most recently, it was a pleasure to be asked to design the card invitation and a photographic film tribute for a new exhibition of pots and his other creations at the Hearst Center for the Arts, in Cedar Falls IA. Titled DEAN SCHWARZ AND FAMILY AND FRIENDS, the exhibition begins on June 4 and continues through July 17, 2022.

There is a public reception on June 18, from 10:30 am to Noon. It is described as follows: Visit The Hearst to experience the world of Dean Schwarz through his work and the work of some of his family and friends. Collaborative ceramics by sons Gunnar and Lane Schwarz and grandchildren Marguerite, William and Sophie are featured alongside Jeff Bromley’s boxelder and soft maple furniture.

Dean Schwarz (© Emily Drennan)

Ceramic Art by Dean and Gunnar Schwarz

 

New talks & posters soon at Hartman Reserve

The fourth and final installment in an on-going series of poster exhibitions will be on display during November and December 2019 at the Interpretive Center at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Cedar Falls IA. These new nature-themed posters (created by author and designer Roy R. Behrens) are intended as promotions for a series of informative talks on nature-related topics, one per month, always on the second Sunday.

The upcoming presentations include a program by Robert Pruitt, Executive Director of the Cedar Valley Arboretum and Botanic Gardens (Sunday, November 10, at 2:00 pm) on "Creating Monarch and Pollinator Zones in the Cedar Valley," and a talk on area water trails, titled "Paddling the Cedar Valley and Beyond," by well-known area naturalist Vern Fish (Sunday, December 8, at 2:00 pm). All presentations are free and open to the public.

Concurrent with the Second Sunday Speaker Series talks and other events at the Hartman Center during November and December, the poster exhibition will be on public view in the Interpretive Center. In addition, all items in the exhibit can also be viewed online.

New talks and posters soon at Hartman Reserve

Hartman Reserve poster exhibition and talks (2019)

A new exhibition of twenty-five posters pertaining to plants and other natural forms will be on display throughout September and October 2019 at the Interpretive Center at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Cedar Falls IA. They can also now be viewed online.

This is the third exhibition of posters in a series of four, intended as promotions for a series of informative talks on nature-related topics, one per month, always on the Second Sunday. The upcoming presentations include a program on dinosaurs (which kids and adults will both enjoy) by Sherman Lundy (Sunday, September 8, at 2:00 pm), and an illustrated talk about various prairie-based creatures that fly by photographer and writer Bill Witt (Sunday, October 13, at 2:00 pm). All presentations are free and open to the public.

The posters in the exhibition are focused on the forms of plants, some of which are native to a prairie setting, while others were among the plants that flourished in the age of dinosaurs.  All of the posters in this exhibit are derived in part from the black-and-white plant photographs of German photographer Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932).  His plant photographs were first published in 1928 in a book titled Art Forms in Nature, and are now in public domain. For these posters, graphic designer Roy R. Behrens has adapted the photographs by removing the backgrounds, zooming up on details, cropping, and adding color effects.

Talk on birds at Hartman Reserve Nature Center

Poster © Roy R. Behrens (2019)

Above One of twenty-five posters pertaining to birds, designed as promotions for a series of informative talks, one per month, always on the second Sunday. Coming soon is a talk about area birds by members of the Prairie Rapids Audubon Society (PRAS) (Sunday, August 11, at 2:00 pm) at the Interpretive Center at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Cedar Falls IA. All presentations are free and open to the public.

In connection with this presentation series (called Second Sunday Speakers), an exhibition of bird posters, designed by Roy R. Behrens, was installed at the center on July 1 and will remain on view during August. All the posters can also be viewed online.  This is the second in a series of four poster exhibitions on nature-related topics.

2019 Graphic Design Portfolio Night at UNI

Portfolio Night Poster by Madelyn Stillman, 2019

Above Each spring semester, the graphic design students and faculty in the Department of Art at the University of Northern Iowa celebrate the achievements of the graduating seniors. The event is the annual Graphic Design Portfolio Night, as announced by this exquisite poster, designed by one of those graduates, Madelyn Stillman.

On Friday, April 26, from 5:30 until 7:00 pm (drop by anytime, leave whenever you'd like), fifteen current BA Graphic Design Majors will be at tables in the hallway of the ground floor of the south wing of the Kamerick Art Building. Their print and online portfolios will be on display, with the students there to talk to visitors (parents, fellow students, faculty, professional designers, prospective design students, alumni, faculty emeritus, you name it—it's open to everyone, and on-campus parking is easy on Friday evenings) about the work that they've achieved.

The person on the graphic design faculty who tirelessly oversees this always impressive annual event is Professor Phil Fass. The works in these portfolios were produced by the students of Fass and his very capable colleague, Professor Soo Hostetler.

The student exhibitors this year are: Philip Adams, Jessica Allen, Kaitlyn Bown, Riley Green, Ellen Holt, Craig Johnson, Kumari Kincade, Josie Love, Mercedes Mancilla, Libby Schwers, Cameron Sievers, Kristin Stein, Madelyn Stillman and Carly Weber.

National Parks Posters | Roy R. Behrens 2019

National Parks Posters

In late December and early January 2018-19, we designed twenty-three posters to commemorate National Parks and Monuments. These are currently on exhibit in the interpretive building at the Hartman Reserve Nature Center in Cedar Falls IA. They will remain on view throughout March and April 2019. The exhibition is free and open to the public. It can be viewed any time during building hours (it's open every day but Saturdays).

As of today, they have also been posted on our website in an online virtual exhibition.

Dennis Ichiyama | Curris Endowment for Design

Dennis Y. Ichiyama

Above Graphic designer, typographer and teacher Dennis Y. Ichiyama will speak at the University of Northern Iowa at 6:00 pm on Monday, November 12, 2018. The presentation will take place in the auditorium (Room 111) of the Kamerick Art Building. It is made possible by The Elena Diane Curris Endowment for Design and the UNI Gallery of Art in conjunction with the endowment's inaugural biennial exhibition, titled THE REACH AND RICHNESS OF DESIGN, in which the work of Ichiyama and other designers is featured. The event is free and open to the public.

Professor Ichiyama is widely known for his work in publication design, typography, and his active interest in the renewed use of vintage wood type in printmaking. He was featured prominently in the documentary Typeface, which includes an account of his efforts as an artist / designer at the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers WI.

Ichiyama earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. He received his MFA degree at Yale University, where he studied with Paul Rand. He also studied with Armin Hofmann at Allegemeine Gewerbeschule in Basal, Switzerland. Before his retirement, he taught Visual Communications Design at Purdue University for many years.

Elena Diane Curris Design Exhibition | 2018

Opening on October 8, 2018, at the Gallery of Art at the University of Northern Iowa is the first of an on-going series of biennial design-themed exhibitions. Titled The Reach and Richness of Design: The Elena Diane Curris Biennial Design Exhibition, it consists of five components representing architectural design, editorial illustration, industrial design, information graphics, and wood type and typography. Included are works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Dennis Ichiyama, Ad Reinhardt and others, as well as historical artifacts from the collections of Jessica Helfand, and Paul D. Whitson. The exhibition is one part of The Elena Diane Curris Endowment, which also provides for the return to campus annually of past graduates of the UNI Graphic Design program, which is housed within the Department of Art. more>>>

Collections Posters | Rhiannon Rasmussen

Collections Posters © Rhiannon Rasmussen (2014)

Above Designs for a set of three posters for a hypothetical exhibition called Collections and Recollections: Arrangements of Related Forms: Thoughts on the odd things that people collect as well as the visual patterns that come from arranging things, designed by Rhiannon Rasmussen (2014), undergraduate graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design 2, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

Eric Morecambe—

Would you like to hear how I asked for his daughter's hand in marriage?…I said, "I would like your daughter for my wife." And he said, "But I've never met your wife. Bring her round and we'll talk about it." 

•••

Edward Marsh—

[Ned Lutyens] thought as a little boy that the Lord's Prayer began with "Our Father Charles in heaven, Harold be thy name."

Collections & Recollections 3 | Riley Place

Collections Poster © Riley Place (2014)

Above Design for a poster for a hypothetical exhibition called Collections and Recollections: Arrangements of Related Forms: Thoughts on the odd things that people collect as well as the visual patterns that come from arranging things, designed by Riley Place (2014), undergraduate graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design 2, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

Anthony Burgess, Little Wilson and Big God. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1987, p. 69—

Mr. Magoo bids the normally sighted, or the smug spectacle-wearers, laugh at uncorrected myopia. He shakes hands with a bear he takes to be Dr. Milmoss, thinks a skyscraper scaffolding a restaurant, believes the seabed to be a motorway, but he always comes through unscathed and disabused. My adventures have been less sensational. I once entered a bank in Stratford-on-Avon and ordered a drink. I have waved back at people waving at someone else. There was an electric sky sign in All Saints, Manchester, which read UPHOLSTERED FURNITURE and I read as UPROARIOUSLY FUNNY. In the army I failed to salute officers and, fiercely rebuked, then saluted privates. I have spoken to women in the streets I thought I knew and thus got to know them…The myopic eye is not lazy; it is too busy creating meanings out of vague données. Compensation for lifelong myopia comes in old age; presbyopia supervenes on the condition and cancels it. I am forced now into perfect sight and I am not sure like it.

Collections & Recollections 2 | Riley Place

Collections Poster © Riley Place (2014)

Above Design for a poster for a hypothetical exhibition called Collections and Recollections: Arrangements of Related Forms: Thoughts on the odd things that people collect as well as the visual patterns that come from arranging things, designed by Riley Place (2014), undergraduate graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, in a course called Graphic Design 2, as taught by Roy R. Behrens.

•••

Colin M. Turbayne, in The Myth of Metaphor. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971—

Naming, numbering, or sorting things is not just noticing what is out there fixed and settled. Nevertheless, there are arguments about sorting. These are mainly verbal. There are few about tigers and lions. There may be some about "tigers" and "lions." We do not remain in disagreement for long about the marks of the tiger, and that lion-like animal. Is it a sort of tiger or a sort of lion? Or is it a new sort? The convenient way chosen for the tigron was the last. We can make new sorts as we please. But those that we have grown accustomed to, we tend to think are determined and set out by nature. These also were grouped and named in an arbitrary manner. They might have been sorted in a different way.

Collections and Recollections | Danielle Shearer

Exhibition poster (2013) © Danielle Shearer

Above Promotional poster for a hypothetical exhibition called Collections and Recollections: Arrangements of Related Forms, designed by Danielle Shearer, graphic design student, University of Northern Iowa. Copyright © 2013 by Danielle Shearer.

••

Anne Brunson, quoted in Remar Sutton and Mary Abbott Waite, eds., The Common Ground Book: A Circle of Friends. Latham NY: British American Publishing, 1992, pp. 275-276—

My daddy never went shopping, but while my mother was sick, he had to take me to buy a bathing suit. I was four or five, and he bought me an adult size-fourteen bathing suit, a size which I have never worn in my whole life.

When he got us home, Mother asked, "Why did you get her that bathing suit?"

He said, "That's the one she wanted."

Evidently he had said, "Pick out a bathing suit," and I had—a white two-piece. I can still remember it because you can't return a bathing suit, and every year I would try it on thinking that it might be the right size. It never was.

Schedule Posted for UNI Design Conference

Click here for complete schedule

Available online is the complete schedule of events for ENVISIONING DESIGN: Education, Culture, Practice, a two-day series of presentations, panels, films and exhibits for design professionals, design educators, students and alumni. Events begin late Friday afternoon and evening, April 26, and continue throughout the day until 4:00 pm on Saturday, April 27, 2013.

Keynote speakers include designer Sang-Duck Seo, graphic design professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who will focus on various aspects of his experiences in design and design education (7:00 pm on Friday), and Claudia Covert, research scholar and librarian at the Fleet Library, Rhode Island School of Design, who will discuss that school's collection of 455 WWI dazzle camouflage plans, made by designers and artists (11:00 am on Saturday).

All events will be held in the Kamerick Art Building on the campus of the University of Northern Iowa, in Cedar Falls. The conference is open to the public. Everyone is invited, and there is no charge for attendance. For complete information click here.

Book Review | Faking It Before Photoshop

Cover of Faking It, with photomontage by Wanda Wulz (1932)

Mia Fineman, Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2012. Distributed by Yale University Press. 288 pp, illus (278 color & b&w). Hardcover, $60.00. ISBN 9780300185010.

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens

THE TITLE of this book is well-chosen. But another appropriate title would be "Protoshop" (which is in fact the title of one of its chapters). Even more helpful is the subtitle—Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop—in the sense that its readers are forewarned about the thorny concerns and discussions inside. Better yet, inside is a bushel of visual delights since it turns out that this is the catalog for an ongoing exhibition that premiered in October 2012 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and, during 2013, will also be exhibited at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Not surprisingly, a major sponsor for all of this was the Adobe Corporation, whose Photoshop 1.0 was released in January 1990. Since then, as an essay in the catalog states, that now-famous software is commonly blamed for having undermined “photographic truthfulness” because of the widespread assumption “that photographs shot before 1990 captured the unvarnished truth and that the manipulations made possible by Photoshop compromised the truth.”

Anon, photomontage (photo collage rephotographed), c1930

After reading this book, you will probably reach the conclusion that image alteration tricks attributed to Photoshop are nothing new, and that equivalent techniques have been commonly practiced since 1840 and before. Photoshop’s main contribution has been to make photo manipulation less time staking and far less dependent on manual skills. It has provided the greatest variety of people with access to the tricks long used by photographers, despite our naïve assumption that a photograph is “a mirror with a memory,” and, to follow, that the camera is an “innocent eye,” a “pencil of nature,” or an objective observation device that “never lies.” Surely, that was never the case, as this book shows persuasively. At best, as Picasso once said of all guises of art, a photograph is “a lie that [sometimes] tells the truth.”

In the process of showing the history of pre-Photoshop manipulation from about 1835 through 1990, this volume inevitably also becomes a history of photography. Admittedly, it doesn’t cover everything. For example, it lacks the time and space to say very much about “faking it” by other means, like setting up a “factual” scene and claiming it was found that way, or purposely posing ones subjects to look unposed, or providing exotic subjects with culturally inappropriate props to make them more compliant with ethnic stereotypes. more>>>

Book Review | Nostaglia

Emir of Bukhara in Bukhara (1911), from Nostalgia

Nostalgia: The Russian Empire of Czar Nicholas II. The Russia of Czar Nicholas II in laboriously restored historical color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii

by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii; Robert Klanten, Editor
Gestalten, Berlin, 2012

...
 
In 1914 the Russian Empire was among the Allied Powers who went to war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the Central Powers. Three years later, in the upheaval of the Bolshevik Revolution, Czar Nicholas II abdicated, Russia withdrew from the conflict, and in 1918, the czar and his family were murdered.

That same year, among the native Russians who left the country, was a chemist and pioneering photographer named Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944). He was wise to leave because his family had ties to the aristocracy and the military, and in recent years, he had been working for the czar. Beginning in 1909, he had been given financial support, a mobile darkroom, and unusually lenient permission to travel, for the purpose of documenting the people, architecture, landmarks and natural surroundings of what was then the largest, most diverse empire in history. That achievement in itself is amazing, but there is another dimension that makes it more extraordinary—Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs were made in color, at a time when color photography was rudimentary. Indeed, it would not be widely available for another 25 years.

This impressive volume is a large-sized “coffee table book” in which are collected (in maximum page size) more than 300 of Prokudin-Gorskii’s photographs. There are also informative essays about the purpose and range of his travels. Many of these photographs can only be said to be stunning, because of their richness of color, of course, but also because they provide us with eyewitness views of what it was like to be alive under the rule of Nicholas II, as distinct from the later infamous regimes of the Communists. more>>>