Sculpture transformed: The work of Marjorie Schick
The Indiana University Art Museum will present Sculpture Transformed; The Work of Marjorie Schick as part of its fall program. The exhibit, on view from Oct. 6 to Dec. 16, features 67 works of art and is a highly anticipated retrospective of Marjorie Schick's career as an internationally renowned contemporary craft artist.
For four decades, Marjorie Schick has influenced the worlds of craft and jewelry in both the U.S. and abroad. Her ability to create forms that are both jewelry and sculpture places her in the first wave of crossover artists who combined the conceptual programs of the fine arts with methods and values associated with craft. This exhibition is of special importance for the Indiana University and Bloomington communities, as Schick received her MFA with distinction in jewelry and metalsmithing in 1966 from Indiana University-Bloomington where she studied with Alma Eikerman, a pioneer in the field of metalsmithing.
Marjorie Schick, In Henri's Garden , © 2003 Marjorie Schick, Photograph © Gary Pollmiller
The artwork included in Sculpture Transformed traces Schick's experimentation with the body's relation to form, texture and color. Always conceived with the human form in mind, her challenging body sculptures are brilliantly colored, mixed-media works that are simultaneously ornamental, performative, visual and tactile.
The exhibition is organized in two sections. The first, which is narrative in focus, traces the evolution of Schick's aesthetic concerns from her earliest work, made in the 1960s and 1970s. Her oversized armlets, cloaks, helmets and masks, constructed of metal, painted paper, mops and wood, reflect the revolutionary spirit of the time and enabled Schick to form her artistic values and vision. Continuing into the 1980s, Schick's pioneering "drawings to wear" secured her international fame.
The exhibition's second section includes themes and conceptual challenges that Schick has addressed from the late 1980s to the present: dialogue with other art forms; a sense of place; unexpected inspirations from nature, domestic objects and words; and repetition of forms in large installations.
Schick is currently a professor at Pittsburg State University in Kansas and has pieces in many of the world's major museums including: the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of fine Arts, Boston; The National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul; the Applied Art Museum, Oslo; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and many more.
Marjorie Schick will present a lecture on her work on Friday, Oct. 5, at 5:30 p.m., on the IU campus, in Room 015 of the Fine Arts Building. The lecture will be followed by a reception in the Thomas T. Solley Atrium of the Indiana University Art Museum. Both the lecture and reception are free and open to the public.
As a complement to Sculpture Transformed: The Work of Marjorie Schick, a selection of contemporary jewelry, on loan from a private collection, and metal pieces by Schick's mentor Alma Eikerman also will be on view in the museum's first-floor gallery of Western Art.
The national tour of Sculpture Transformed: The Work of Marjorie Schick is organized by International Arts and Artists in Washington, D.C. The tour schedule is as follows: the San Francisco School of Craft and Design, July-Sept. 2007; the Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Oct.-Dec. 2007; the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Manhattan, Kan., January 2008, March 2008; the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, Mass., June-Oct. 2008; and the Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, Mich., Dec.2008-Feb. 2009.
Further information related to Sculpture Transformed: The Work of Marjorie Schick can be found by visiting: https://www.artsandartists.org.
