Changing Art Exhibits, featured at all ISM sites, are listed on the Calendar of Events. Click on the exhibit name below to view Online Exhibits. |
Current Online Exhibits
Illinois Amish Quilts:Sharing Threads of Tradition
The Illinos State Museum is proud to present a spectacular collection of quilts from the Amish community near Arthur, Illinois. Portions of the collection will be exhibitited at Illinois State Museum galleries through 2003.
The Illinois Amish Quilt Collection contains more than 100 quilts from the mid-1800's through the 1950's. Illinois Amish quilters tended to use a wide choice of colors, fine quality materials, and spontaneous piecing. The Illinois State Museum acquired the quilts through a combination of public, private, corporate, and grassroots funding.
Such nationally significant Amish quilt collections are rare. Even rarer is one with such carefully recorded information about the makers. This historical information helps viewers to understand the importance of family and community in the tradition of Amish quiltmaking. The quilts will be documented in an exhibition catalog.
From 2001 to 2003 portions of the collections will travel to the Southern Illinois Art Gallery in Whittington, The Illinois State Museum Chicago Gallery, and the Illinois State Museum Lockport Gallery in Lockport. For more information please call (217) 782-7386.
Past Online Exhibits
M. Joan Lintault: Evidence of ParadiseEvidence of Paradise presents the most recent works of fiber artist M. Joan Lintault. Eleven extraordinary quilts will be on display including several from private collections. Lintault's quilts portray nature, both in and of the garden, presenting a masterful interpretation of image and metaphor. Lintault starts her quilts from raw fabric creating images by dyeing, printing, painting, and drawing on it. She assembles her imagery in an openwork style using applique, embroidery, and machine-made lace to connect it all.
From Limb to Limb
Linking elements from the Illinois State Museum's collections of birds' nests and ethnographic
basket collections with 19th Century Anglo-American basketry and contemporary basket and
sculptural forms, From Limb to Limb seeks to illustrate a deeply-rooted, recurring tie between
the natural world and the creative moment.
Featured Artists: Jerry Bleem, Barbara Cooper, Rosemarie Hohol, John McQueen, Carol Nelson,
Janet B. Reed, Ann B. Coddington Rast, Char Wiss, and Toby Zallman.
Doc's Legacy: 50 Years of Photographic
Inquiry
This exhibition featured 75 black-and-white photographs focusing primarily on work from the
1940s, '50s and '60s. Doc Helm worked as a full-time photographer for the
Secretary of State's Office, and
part-time chronicler of Springfield's African-American community for over fifty years until his death in 1994.
This much-loved local figure left behind thousands of photographs ranging from portraiture to photojournalistic work.
FIRE & ICE
Touching on ten years' work and contrasting radically different
approaches to the medium, FIRE & ICE highlights two of Illinois' best
known glass sculptors, José Chardiet and William Carlson. Colorfully cast
and blown-glass forms dance across José Chardiet's tableaux in joyous
abandon to a primal rhythm. William Carlson's sandwiched granite and
crystal explorations of geometry reveal a mastery of a technical
sleight-of-hand that fascinates the viewer with its constant permutations
of a central theme.
Journey to Other Worlds: Siberian Collections from
the Russian Museum of Ethnography
Journey opened at the ISM - Springfield in October 1997, and has traveled to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
The physical exhibit explores, through over 200 objects of material culture and a magnificent collection of archival photographs,
the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century lifeways of fourteen ethnographic groups distributed across Siberia.
The material culture and photographs illustrate the fabric of daily life of Siberian reindeer hunters and breeders and the
interrelationships between environment, economy, domestic life, and spiritual life.
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