2019
EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS
Seed Museums: Viewing and Using Nature by Shilin Hora
West Wall Gallery, L. V. Eberhard Center
November 2, 2018 – March 1, 2019
Shilin Hora is a multidisciplinary American-Canadian visual artist and educator based in the Chicagoland area. She pokes, prods, bends, dissects, harvests and sorts materials found in the natural environment in order to build unique artwork. Hora was born in St. Joseph, Michigan, studied at Grand Valley State University (BFA 2002) and has held positions at Kendall College of Art and Design in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Through installation, prints and sculpture, Hora explores ideas about our relationship to place and the natural environment. In Seed Museums, she presents some of her most recent sculptural work, inspired by natural history museum displays and 19th century Wardian cases used by botanists to import foreign plant species to Europe. Seeds are dried, arranged, and placed behind Plexiglas, emphasizing their unique inherent qualities. Hora has strict commitments to sustainability, utilizing repurposed and sustainable materials to house seed collections, becoming part of a larger ecological narrative.
Strange & Magical Beasts: Etchings by Tony Fitzpatrick
Russel H. Kirkhof Center Gallery, Russel H. Kirkhof Center
November 2, 2018 to March 1, 2019
Tony Fitzpatrick was born in 1958, and raised in and around Chicago as a member of a large middle class Irish Catholic family. His father worked as a burial vault salesman, and often took Tony along to appointments around the city when he was suspended from school. Drawing was a pervasive part of his life, and he’d sketch anything that caught his eye. He graduated from Montini Catholic High School in 1977, untrained in the arts.
Over the years, Fitzpatrick spent time as boxer, bartender, actor, waiter and tattoo artist. These experiences, coupled with an insatiable appetite for drawing, had a profound effect on his work. This exhibition features 21 etchings by the artist. They are drawn out of a recent gift of over 120 works on paper to the GVSU permanent collection. Filled with strange and magical beasts they draw on his childhood imagination, Catholic upbringing and immersive experience in street culture.