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  Organize Your Own: the Politics and Poetics of Self-Determination Movements

  Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

  Organize Your Own, curated by Daniel Tucker, features work by contemporary artists that responds to the history of multiracial coalitions organizing against racism, poverty, and oppression. The ATMA was the first stop on OYO's six-leg tour between 2017-2019. For this travelling exhibition, my work focused on two areas: providing more framework in the reading area around the Young Lords, and organizing programming that was specific to our venue.

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  #YarnBombQC

  Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

  #YarnBombQC brought the sculptor Carol Hummel the the Quad Cities to work with our communities to create crocheted, site-specific, community-based public art on trees in three locations: Augustana College, the Figge Art Museum, and Longfellow Liberal Arts School. This project, like much of the art by Hummel, draws diverse sectors of communities together in a positive, celebratory way to help create major pieces of art for the people, by the people. Well over 100 community members participated by creating crocheted circles, which the artist and her assistants stitched together and installed on the trees. Participants included students from Augustana College, the Creative Arts Academy, Longfellow Liberal Arts, Western Illinois University, and St. Ambrose University, as well as community members ranging from age 8 to 80+. This project was organized by the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art, and is supported in part by an ArtWorks grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as by the Augustana Art Department, Augustana College/Longfellow Liberal Arts School Partnership, Augustana Humanities Fund, Augustana Institute for Leadership and Service, the Creative Arts Academy of the Quad Cities, the Figge Art Museum, and Sunbelt Rentals. Our media sponsor is WVIK.

  Photos courtesy of Augustana Photo Bureau, Claire Kovacs, Berni Carmak, Danielle Beliveau-Derion, Carol Hummel, Molly Sedensky, and LuAnna Gerdemann

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  Herbarium Tales

  Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

  Herbarium Tales features scientific specimens of the herbarium of Augustana, and invites the visitor to explore the intersections between the study of plant biodiversity, art, and the history of the College.

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  Witness

  Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

  What does it mean to bear witness?

  How does this idea manifest itself in the visual arts?

  From tourism to war to social critique, at the local, regional, national, or international level, the concept of bearing witness through the arts provides a means by which one can better understand a place, an issue, or a person. It can undermine the powerful, or serve as a tool of propaganda. It can retell the stories that we have heard before, or make space for new voices and new stories.

  Visual works, such as the photograph on the right, can play a vital role in our understanding of the world. It was photographs such as this that helped bear witness to and disseminate information about the atrocities of the Holocaust.

  Works from the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art's collections dig into this idea of bearing witness. In addition, the exhibition features a listening both to share first-person stories of members of the Quad Cities through a listening station for The Great Quad Cities Listen, a WVIK project - a means of witnessing the stories of our own Quad Cities community.

  The Augustana Teaching Museum of Art would like to thank WVIK for sharing The Great Quad Cities Listen, Katherine Hellberg for exhibition installation assistance, and to Comet Blecha for the design of the gallery labels. This exhibition was curated by Dr. ClaireKovacs, Director of the Augustana Teaching Museum of Art.

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  Material Conversations

  Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

  This exhibition focuses on recent work by the studio and graphic design faculty at Augustana College. Their practice is as varied as their media - from conceptual to process-based - and belies the breadth of teaching embodied by the art faculty. The varied approaches to art-making is a strength of the program, and provides for our students a multiplicity of perspectives from which to approach their own learning about theoria (thinking), poiesis (making), and praxis (doing).

  This exhibition includes works by:

  Kelvin Mason, Vickie R. Phipps. Megan Quinn, Trew Schriefer, Rowen Schussheim-Anderson, Corrine Smith, Ronda Wright-Phipps, Peter Tong Xiao

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  2018 Senior Art Exhibition

  Augustana College, Rock Island Illinois

  This exhibition features the Senior Inquiry projects of the Class of 2018 graphic design and studio art majors:

  Bailey Driscoll, Brianna Jepson, Brock McNinch, Christine Marchi, Comet Blecha, Grace Iaquinta, Kate Schreader, Madalynne Russell, Rebecca Kelly, William Lawrence

  Photos courtesy of Ashleigh Johnston and Claire Kovacs.