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Beyond Faulconer and Burling

Town’s unassuming community gallery exhibits much more than kids’ drawings

by Cid Standifer

The Grinnell Community Art Gallery may be a secret well-kept from most college students. They may have passed it on the way from the Chrystal Center to the Farmer’s Market but probably never dared to venture in the door. If they did find the nerve or curiosity to intrude on this exo-college art zone, they would have had to go through the front door, take the door labeled “juvenile court services” and “art gallery” across the lobby on the right, go up the staircase with the garish orange banister, take another right and stop at the door with the “Art Gallery” sign in front of it.

The illustrious gallery itself is a single narrow room with one greeting desk and a collapsible chair. The drawings are hung with a casualness few large galleries could conceive. Ordinary, nondescript thumbtacks are stuck straight through frameless pieces of notebook paper into the yellowing walls.

Finding artistic gems in this ordinary-looking little room might be difficult to imagine, but the world has a way of hiding pleasant surprises in unexpected places.

Anyone who stumbled into the tiny gallery before Oct. 27 would have found themselves surrounded by the enigmatic paintings and sketches of artist and writer Therese Murdza. One side of the room was devoted to her recent work: queer and colorful paintings, featuring round, fluid abstract shapes and surreal pears plopped onto intensely bright and whimsical backgrounds. On the other wall resided her older sketches, including many cryptic charcoal drawings, referred to as “biographical maps,” that feature sharp, severe slashes and squares arranged in mysterious patterns across the page.

Today, the gallery switches to the opposite end of the abstract-representational spectrum with a photography exhibit, featuring the work of Mark Schneider, Physics. The show will focus mainly on landscapes from locations as diverse as the Rocky Mountains, Japan and Schneider’s own front yard. However, one or two of Schneider’s pieces will venture into the realm of weird photography, using “tricks” to distort the image in surreal ways.

On Jan. 6 and Feb. 3, the gallery will exhibit artist Joe Lacina’s drawings, paintings and watercolors from the Grinnell College collection, respectively. One of the yearly highlights for the gallery will be from March through May, when elementary, middle and high-school students will display their work.

According to chair of the council for the gallery, Dan Ferro, “A lot of people come out to those [exhibitions] because their kids are involved,” and many people learn about the gallery through these shows.

Ferro says that the gallery is fairly well-known in the wider Grinnell community, mainly because of the student exhibits, but also because the Grinnell Herald-Register prints short articles on the gallery every time an exhibit opens. Unfortunately, he said, there’s “no way to hook into [college] students with that,” so the gallery is still largely unknown on campus.

However, Ferro hopes to change that in the future by making more information available to the student body, and, according to Murdza, the committee is also considering having Grinnell College students exhibit their work sometime in the future. Ferro would also like to get students involved by having a college student on the art gallery committee.

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