Art

A downed tree may seem like an expensive cleanup project, but to Monica Tiffany, a small business owner from McGregor, a large piece of wood is a blank canvas.

You wouldn't expect a world-renowned charcoal and pastel artist like Cecile Houel to move from Paris to the southeastern corner of Iowa, and she didnt either. But Houel fell in love with Iowa, drawing strength and inspiration from the Mississippi River.

In this Talk of Iowa segment, Charity Nebbe talks with Houel about her life and career in Paris, her first impressions of Iowa and what has kept her here, her love of humanity, and her desire to heal through her work.

Jackson Pollock's "Mural" is the most famous work of art owned by the University of Iowa. The piece is seen as one of Pollock's most important works, and it marked a shift in styles during Pollock's career as an artist.

Mural was saved during the floods of 2008, sent to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles to be restored, and has been on tour ever since. It will return to Iowa City when the new University of Iowa Museum of Art is ready.

With 99 counties and some serious driving time between major metropolitan centers, it’s easy for Iowa’s artists community to feel decentralized and sprawing. The Iowa Arts Council wants that to change.

2014 marked the first class of fellows under the Iowa Artist Fellowship, and five years later, the program continues, with five Iowa artists receiving $10,000 each to support their artistic endeavors and professional development.

On this hour of Talk of Iowa, host Charity Nebbe explores the work of three fellows to learn more about the breadth of artistic work happening here in Iowa.

Noah Doely is a cross-discipline artist, working in photography, sculpture, and video. Most recently, Doely has focused his energy on a series of constructed, tableau-based cyanotypes -- a 19th century iron-based photography process that creates monochromatic images in a striking shade of blue. Doely is an assistant professor of photography at the University of Northern Iowa and has exhibited his work nationally and internationally in venues including the San Diego Museum of Art, Des Moines Art Center, and Viafarini in Milan, Italy.

Leonardo da Vinci was a certifiable genius, but historical evidence suggests that he was something of a late bloomer. Mike Lankford, author of the biography Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo da Vinci,  uses archival details and a lot of imagination to bring the legend to life.

Corn dogs, baby ducks, and a butter cow to boot!

The Iowa State Fair is a time-honored tradition for many Iowans, and has gained a reputation for being one of the largest fairs in the nation.

Do you remember your first fair? 

The intersection of art and agriculture is important to Mary Swander. She says art has been a part of ag for a long time with concepts like folk art. Now she has helped start a new non-profit called AgArts.

She says that we are in a dilemma with issues involving pollution, erosion, decline of the family farm, decline of small towns, and the arts have a role in addressing those issues in a way that people can embrace and that helps with revitalization.

Humans have been making, performing with, and enjoying puppets since the days of ancient Greece. In Iowa, this art form continues to thrive with a number of practicing puppeteers writing shows and giving performances throughout the state.

Coloring books published for grown ups have become increasingly popular over the last few years. Mark Muller, an Iowa city based artist who just published his first coloring book through University of Iowa Press, jokes that when he first heard about the trend, he misunderstood what was going on. 

"When I first heard of the adult coloring trend, I thought it was pornographic," he laughs. "Then I realized it meant coloring books for adults. I think it's a really cool thing." 

For many students who attended Peet Junior High in Cedar Falls, Bill Close was one of those teachers who was larger than life, just like the art he worked on with his students.

For nearly a quarter century, he designed mega sculptures that he enlisted his art students to help build as a part of his art class.

"The ladies in the cafeteria asked us to make some posters for National School Lunch Week. When I proposed the colored posters for school lunch week, their eyes kind of rolled,” he says about his students at the time.

Starting today artist Rose Frantzen will be live painting 20 Iowans, two each day of the Iowa State Fair in the Varied Industries Building as part of Iowa State University’s “Your Beautiful Adventure” project.

Old feed mills no longer in operation often sit vacant, but that’s not so for one old mill in Ames. A group of artists and entrepreneurs are planning to transform a building that formerly served as a Doboy feed mill and warehouse into an art gallery, workshop space and coffee shop.

“The person who previously owned it had an auto shop in the warehouse,” explains co-founder Lyndsay Nissen. “When it went on the market, we had to jump on it.”

Do you have a tattoo? Why did you get it, and what does it mean to you? 

This hour, we hear about the two-year restoration of the University of Iowa Museum of Art's most important holding: the mammoth (8 X 20 feet) 1943 painting "Mural" by Jackson Pollock.

When Pamela Crouch, a writer, underwent cancer treatments, she developed aphasia--the inability to remember the names of things. So she decided to create in a different way--painting birdhouses for other newly diagnosed cancer patients. 

"I was always taught that if you do something for someone else, you can't really feel sorry for yourself, it takes that pain away and you think outward."

  In a living room converted to a theater for the evening, Ethan Peterson and Madeleine Russell portray the characters from Mary Swander’s play, “VANG.” In it, the actors share the emotional stories of four immigrant couples who farm in Iowa. Swander used transcriptions of conversations with Hmong, Mexican, Sudanese and Dutch farmers to create the play.

On your mark, get set, lights, camera, action. The Des Moines 48 Hour Film Project is celebrating its tenth year this weekend. At 6 PM this Friday, over 40 teams will pull a slip of paper out of a hat. On that slip of paper is their genre assignment: anything from Romance to Fish Out of Water. 48 Hours later, they'll turn in a finished 4-7 minute film. Host Charity Nebbe speaks with city producer Samuel Pace-Tuomi and ten-time participant Mike Kieler in this hour of Talk of Iowa. 

In 1955 Virginia Myers first arrived in Iowa City with $150 in her pocket. When she stepped off the train, she had no place to live and no job. She hadn’t even been in touch with the University of Iowa about enrolling in classes, even though that was the reason she came to Iowa in the first place.

Pie.  Everyone loves to eat it, but when it comes to making it a lot of us would rather leave that to the professionals.

While the Nazis were murdering millions of people, they also perpetrated the greatest mass theft in history.  Host Charity Nebbe talks with former Congressman and Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Jim Leach and Director of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, Sean O'Harrow about that theft, efforts to understand it decades after the fact and efforts to protect priceless artifacts during the war.
 

Winterset is known as the birthplace of John Wayne, but the town also claims real life hero and art conservator George Stout who rescued hundreds of pieces of art work from being destroyed by the Nazi’s during World War Two.  Stout is profiled in the book, Monuments Men, and a film of the same name starring George Clooney, opened this weekend across the country. Winterset Public Library director Nancy Trask says when he was younger George Stout was quite an actor…

For our weekly news buzz program, we get a review of the pending U.S. farm bill that is moving through Congress, how businesses are dealing with the Affordable Care Act, modern humans have a surprising amount of genes that come from Neanderthals, an important piece of art is returning to Iowa, a new  smartphone app designed in Iowa with which users can hear and see how to pronounce certain foreign language sounds, and we hear from a couple mayors of towns on this year’s RAGBRAI route. 

For more than 50 years photographer David Plowden has been capturing images of American and the land he loves most is here in the Midwest. Host Charity Nebbe talks with Plowden about his latest book "Heartland: The Plains and the Prairie." 

Also, Dennis Chamberlin of Iowa State University's Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication discusses how the field of photojournalism is changing.