Lee Emma Running, right, pulls a sheet of tape off a vinyl-covered glass panel with help from Lydia Nong during last week’s Art Alive residency at Principal. (Photos: Michael Morain)
By Michael Morain
Editor
For at least one hour last week, a Principal conference room felt more like a kindergarten classroom than the staid headquarters of a global insurance company. Several dozen employees swarmed around tables covered with big sheets of paper and squeeze bottles of acrylic paint. They folded and unfolded the papers to reveal symmetrical paint smudges, like rainbow-colored Rorschach tests.
The workshop’s instructor, Iowa City artist Susan Chrysler White, flitted around the room dispensing encouragement and advice. (“Underestimate the amount of paint you’ll need.”) She offered to blow-dry the paintings so the employees could take them home, where at least a few of their masterpieces surely earned a place of pride on the kitchen fridge.
Afterward, Chrysler White returned to the skylit atrium at 711 High Street, where she and four other artists were making new works for Principal’s art collection.
The artists are represented by the local Olson-Larsen Galleries, whose owner, Susan Watts, proudly watched their progress throughout the week. She said she felt almost like a mom, watching her “kids” perform. “It’s been a blast,” she said. “It’s been a wonderful experience all around.”
The weeklong residency was organized by Principal’s “Art Alive” team to stimulate creativity, boost teamwork and have a bit of fun. Employees watched the artists’ progress, participated in hands-on workshops and decorated lunch bags for Meals on Wheels.
Here are the four new works that were recently installed — or soon will be — at Principal’s downtown campus:
“Anatomy of a Bloom” by Susan Chrysler White of Iowa City
Chrysler White created a series of Plexiglas pieces and assembled them into a hanging sculpture, like a chandelier. Some of the pieces are colorful and geometric; others are covered with lacy white filigree inspired by the wings of insects. (Its parts are pictured in the foreground in the photo above.)
The artist spent part of her childhood in Spain and credits Antoni Gaudi for her eclectic interest in natural and spiritual imagery.
“Wild Roses” by Allison and Jonathan Metzger of Des Moines
The couple affixed silkscreen prints to a pair of birch panels, which they chiseled and painted to recreate a prairie landscape. It’s inspired by their adopted home here in Iowa, where they moved about six years ago from their native Minnesota — lured, in part, by La Mie, a frequent stop on their way to and from art school in Kansas.
They travel the art-festival circuit and plan to display their work at Olson-Larsen’s annual landscape show and the upcoming Des Moines Arts Festival.
“Remnant Prairie” by Lee Emma Running of Omaha
Running collected prairie grasses and wildflowers and used an overhead projector to trace their silhouettes onto sheets of vinyl. Then she stuck the vinyl to big sheets of glass, cut and peeled away the botanical shapes, and then brushed on a chemical solvent to etch the glass. The final installation in a Principal hallway lights up with hidden ribbons of colored, motion-activated LEDs.
She hopes it will prompt viewers to pay closer attention to nature, noting that the Iowa landscape has its own majesty even without mountains or oceans. “With so much of the natural world here, you have to get close to see it,” she said.
“Mandala, Prairie Fractals” by Allison Svoboda of Chicago
Svoboda painted black sumi ink and blue watercolor paint onto absorbent paper made from mulberry pulp. Then she carefully tore the paper into pieces, arranged them into a big circular mandala and then mounted them with magnets onto a sheet of shoji paper — the kind used to make translucent screens in traditional Japanese homes. It follows a Japanese tradition called “orizomegami,” which involves folding and dyeing paper to create various patterns.
Svoboda picked up some of these techniques during a fellowship in Japan, where she also studied charcoal drawing and shibori (a tie-dying technique) and visited an indigo farm.
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