‘A Sense of Place’ exhibit features work of five Minnesota artists Sept. 15-Oct. 25 at University of St. Thomas
Works by five Minnesota artists – Chris Cinque, Barbara Hamilton, David Morrison, Toby Sisson and Kay Wagner – will be featured in a fall exhibition, “A Sense of Place,” at the University of St. Thomas.
Free and open to the public, “A Sense of Place” will run from Thursday, Sept. 15, through Tuesday, Oct. 25, in the lobby gallery of O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the St. Paul campus. Open hours are 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays and noon to 10 p.m. Sundays.
The public is welcome to attend a free reception for the artists from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 8, at the gallery. Guests also are welcome to visit six other local college and university art exhibits that evening during “Art Attack: A Six-School Gallery Crawl.” St. Thomas and five other institutions – Augsburg College, the College of St. Catherine, the College of Visual Arts, Concordia University and Macalester College – host the event. Free shuttle buses will take visitors from gallery to gallery, where they’ll enjoy refreshments and music along with exhibitions. The crawl is part of the fourth-annual Art on the Town, an Oct. 6-16 celebration with exhibits, educational events, family programs and artist receptions at more than 60 visual arts venues throughout the Twin Cities area.
In “A Sense of Place” curator Claire Selkurt is assembling between 40 and 50 works by five Twin Cities-area artists who explore in their work the concept of “place” and what it signifies. Locations as near as the Mississippi River and as far as San Cristobal, Mexico, have inspired these artists. Their media vary as well; the exhibit features photography, collage, drawing, encaustic painting and acrylic painting.
About the artists and their work:
Chris Cinque, of Minneapolis, now a teacher of English as a foreign language, enjoyed a 23-year career in theater as a writer, director, actor and producer. She works with mixed media, reflecting interior spaces where memory, history and narrative are expressed in richly layered collages. She enhances them with watercolor and acrylic painting, telling stories with superimposed script.
Barbara Hamilton, of Minneapolis, retired last year after working more than 20 years as an administrative assistant at the University of Minnesota. She also has been taking photographs for more than 20 years, too. Her explorations of the area near San Cristobal, Mexico, create a vibrant and detailed photographic journal of the people, architecture and landscape of the area.
David Morrison, of St. Paul, is an administrative assistant for the Schubert Club in St. Paul. He has been painting since 1980, when he began formal art studies at the University of Minnesota. Morrison began hiking and canoeing in the St. Croix River Valley as a teenager. Over the past 40 years the river has remained his favorite artistic subject. His acrylic paintings in this exhibit feature its landscapes and oak savannas.
St. Paul artist Toby Sisson, of African American, German and Native American descent, has traced the role of the Mississippi River in her family’s history. Her drawings and encaustic paintings (“hot wax” paintings) convey the movement of water and the geological layers of the river’s bluffs. A painter since the 1990s, she has a bachelor of fine arts degree from the College of Visual Arts.
Kay Wagner, of Golden Valley, has been an art instruction specialist for the Edina school district since 1981 and has been active in the arts since the 1960s. She received her B.A. degree from the Pratt Institute in 1969. Wagner began exploring photography during a recent sabbatical. Electronic manipulation helps her to interpret her vision, superimposing landscapes, heightening color and conveying the nature of her native state as as well as the emotion of her inner state.
For more information
For more information about this or other exhibits at St. Thomas, contact the university’s Art History Department, (651) 962-5560.
