New Exhibition to Open in Student Center--June 21, 2021

Campus Inspiration: 

The University of Missouri's Fine Artists 

Since its founding in 1821, Columbia, Missouri has served as home to numerous visual artists, but the city's visual arts community flourished after the founding of the University of Missouri in 1839. MU not only brought in educators and students, but new residents who also worked as artists. While these artists have played
an integral role in fostering a vibrant visual arts community, Columbia has also informed their body of work. The works featured here highlight the beauty of MU's campus and its inspiration to locally and nationally recognized artists. 

Brooke Bulovsky Cameron, A Country Drive in the City, 1983, photolithograph

Brooke Bulovsky Cameron was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin. Cameron earned her BA (1963) in art education from the University of Wisconsin and her MFA (1966) in printmaking from the University of Iowa. Cameron became a member of the University of Missouri's Art Department in 1967 where she taught printmaking and drawing. Her long tenure in the MU Art Department included appointments as Department Chair and Director of Graduate Studies. Although Cameron retired in 2006, she continued to teach until 2013 and is a Professor Emerita at MU. 

Missouri's cultural history and landscape are common themes in Cameron's work. Her compositions start with a memory or vision from her own experiences and build on that inspiration with color and form. A Country Drive in the City (1983) portrays natural elements in bold colors and forms. Cameron likely visited the site portrayed in this print, but she abandons realistic perspective, taking the liberty to alter the landscape and narrate her own recollection of the scene. Disparate elements--trees and shrubbery, and manmade architectural elements--are interspersed throughout the foreground and background, skewing the viewer's sense of place. This distorted landscape alludes to the elements a passerby would witness driving through Columbia's downtown district, observing both natural and manmade objects. 

Keith Crown, Missouri University Dairy Farm, c. 1989, watercolor with airbrush

Born in Iowa and raised in Gary, Indiana, Keith Crown was one of the most innovative American watercolorists of the twentieth century. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and served in the armed forces in World War I before accepting a teaching position at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California in 1946. There, he taught painting and drawing until his retirement in 1983, spending his summers in Taos, New Mexico and sabbaticals in Illinois and England. He lived the remainder of his life in Columbia, Missouri, where his wife Pat Dahlman Crown, taught eighteenth-century European art history at the University of Missouri. 

While Crown's commitment to reality tied him to representation, his desire to evoke its effects on the viewer moved him toward abstraction. Missouri University Dairy Farm (c. 1989) presents a local landscape that Crown frequented; he painted en plein air places he knew personally and intimately, often returning to the same scene again and again. Crown viewed the landscape as an all-encompassing entity rather than a still image, and as a result, experimented with perspective and composition to conjure a sense of the total environment. In this watercolor, Crown depicts views of MU's dairy farm in northwest Columbia. The background portrays farm buildings atop a grassy hill, while inverted trees and power lines fill the foreground. He would often imagine himself at the center of the composition, allowing viewers to see what is in front of them and what is behind them. Sometimes Crown even signed a single work multiple times on different corners to reinforce the perspectival quality of his work. 

John Kline, MU Power Plant from Peace Park, 2001, watercolor

John Kline is a native-Missourian who received his BFA (2001) in painting and his Masters of Education (2013) in Art Education from the University of Missouri. His artistic output regularly includes oil and acrylic paintings, watercolors and gouaches, and wood and linoleum prints. 

In this watercolor, the artist combined two adjacent, though seemingly disparate parts of the University of Missouri's campus: the MU Power Plant and Peace Park. Built in 1921, the MU Power Plant generates energy for the campus to this day. Originally named McAlester Park, Peace Park was renamed in 1971 in honor of students killed at Kent State University in Ohio during a protest against the Vietnam War. 

Kline connects the ambling creek of Peace Park in the foreground and the looming power plant in the background with a rolling grassy knoll. The artist implements dashes of color and line to build up the recognizable components of this image: the smoke emanating from the power plant is blended with the painterly brushstrokes of the gray and light blue sky and echo the silhouetted tree branches. Dark tones pervade the palette but Kline tempers it with bursts of yellow in the grass and soft crimson tones in the power plant. While the manmade power plant and the natural park are juxtaposed elements, they are shown in harmony, bringing to mind the former's increasing engagement with clean energy.

Josephine Stealey, Memorial Union, d. unknown, print

Native-Missourian Josephine Stealey, known as "Jo," earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Missouri. After completing her doctorate in art education, Stealey worked as a jewelry and textile designer in Mexico and traveled the country to collaborate on mural projects. Stealey returned to teach art at MU in 1992, where she earned a national and international reputation as a fiber and basket artist and developed a highly regarded program in Fiber Arts. In 2017, Stealey became the founding Director of the School of Visual Studies (SVS), unifying programs in studio art, art history, film studies, and digital storytelling. She is now a Professor Emerita and consultant for the Artist in Residence Program at the University. 

Stealey's body of work typically utilizes natural materials and invites intimate conversations through her sculptural vessels and art books. By using materials, such as handmade paper, leaves, and porcupine quills, Stealey enhances a familiarity of objects and places by capturing the ephemeral and suggesting the permanence of ideas, memories, and people that inevitably pass away. However, this early print, Memorial Union (d. unknown), reveals a different side of Stealey's artistry: one that realistically interprets the landscape around her. Although this work accurately depicts a landmark on MU's campus, Stealey continues to suggest the use of objects and monuments to memorialize people as this site honors the University's lost soldiers in World War I. 

If you would like to see the preceding artworks in-person, then visit the three-dimensional square cases on the first floor of the Student Center, next to The Shack!