Works by: Nena Bement, Bruce Coblentz, Victor Guschov, Mark & Meg Hebing, Bruce Koike, Jean Lawrence, Michael Stewart, Jeffrey & Heather Thompson and James Tingey.

The exhibit will feature handmade quilts, fused glass, blown glass, turned wood, wooden furniture, oil and watercolor paintings, contemporary metal work, pottery, silk painting and Gyotaku - Japanese fish printing. An opportunity to meet the artists and see more of their work will be available on December 3rd and 4th from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., at the 24th Annual Holiday Marketplace located in the Memorial Union Ballroom on the campus of Oregon State University.

September 5th to October 29th, 2004
INSPIRATION:
Hom, Johnson and Johnson
Recent works in painting, ceramics and glass

August 3rd to September 3rd, 2004
Censorship: Degenerate Art Germany 1937

In 1991 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art reconstructed the famous "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibition that originally opened in Munich in 1937. The resulting exhibit included 150 surviving works from the original show loaned by museums and private collectors.

The catalogue published in conjunction with this landmark Los Angeles exhibition was the inspiration for the exhibit you see here in the MU Concourse Gallery. The information, quotations, and reproductions are primarily from this publication.
Claudia Cave, Curator

Reference Catalogue:
Barron, Stephanie, et. al. "Degenerate Art" The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, New York. 1991.

The rooms were quite narrow, as were the openings from one room to another, and the ceilings much lower than the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. In some areas people pressed up against one another to see the badly lighted works; the atmosphere was dense. From the types of works selected, their hideous hanging and placement, the graffiti-like inscriptions on the walls, the notations of price, and the used of truncated quotes by museum directors and art historians it was very obvious to me that their exhibition was not intended to introduce people to modern art but to inflame them against these works. It was a blatant attempt to discredit everything on view.
Peter Guenther
Professor Emeritus of Art History
University of Houston

(At the age of 17 Guenther visited this exhibition in Munich, 1937.)

Photographs and Guenther statement, reproduced with the permission of Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Covallis Gazette Times artical about the Exhibit

OSU's Memorial Union Gallery opens its new exhibit, "Paul Klee's Images and Children's Art" on view from May 27-July 30. The exhibition presents reproductions of artwork of Swiss artist Paul Klee - one of the forerunners and masters of modern art - with children's drawings, published in Munich in 1877 and 1905, that influenced his work. Also included in the exhibit are a select group of paintings and drawings created by Corvallis elementary children inspired by Klee's work.

OSU is honored to have this exhibit curated by Dr. Rachel Kroupp, visiting Professor in the OSU College of Education. Dr. Kroupp is a Professor of Art Education at Kaye Academic College of Education in Beer Sheva, Israel.

Paul Klee based much of his painting language on the ideas and characteristics of the art of children, and valued the innocence, wisdom and directness of the "primitive." Many of Klee's paintings from 1911 to 1940 captured this childlike essence, and can easily be mistaken for children's drawings, most noticeably in his portrayal of human forms. The exhibition makes this point by counter-posing Klee's paintings with those of children from which the artist drew his inspiration. In his diary Klee wrote "Do not laugh, reader! Children have great artistic ability, and they have wisdom."

As part of this exhibition, OSU School of Education interns Heather Peterson and Paula Tereault worked with faculty member Nell O'Malley to incorporate art lessons based on Klee's work into their student teaching assignments with Corvallis second and third graders at Hoover and Territorial Elementary Schools. Many of Klee's discoveries about children's art and symbolic development are exemplified in the children's' paintings seen in the exhibit. They show how Klee's decisions about drawing topics and style cross cultural lines and display distinct developmental phases.