Vol. 38, No. 18

6-6-2006
By: Julia Harris

Decking the walls with Buckeye art

Marion Fisher gets to play dress-up for a living - only it's not herself she's dressing but the walls and halls of Ohio State's Faculty Club. For nearly 10 years now, Fisher has held the enviable position of art coordinator, a job she inherited from two overworked graduate students.

It's a job she clearly loves. "Next to my family, what I like to talk about most is art," she confessed. "My goal is to find the best candidate in each category of media - oil, glass, ceramics, fiber and watercolor - and vary the exhibits as much as I can."

Exhibits run for two months and occupy the front hall and lounge area of the building. Artists must be Ohio State faculty, staff or alumni, because the goal of the club's art program is to highlight the talents of people affiliated with the university. While this narrow focus has the added benefit of reducing the competition with retail galleries, it does limit the pool of select applicants: "I haven't run out of artists yet, but I don't want to make any foolish statements," Fisher said. "We've only repeated one artist, Peggi Batchek - a photorealist painter who sold out half of her first show, which is why we invited her back."

Fisher is always on the lookout for new candidates. She scours newspapers and periodicals for news of shows and artists, she frequents art shows in and around Columbus and she seeks recommendations from artists who have previously exhibited at the Faculty Club. Once she finds a promising artist, she tracks his or her work over time until she feels that artist has matured in vision and productivity. Then she invites the artist to apply to the art committee for an exhibit at the club.

A favorite aspect of Fisher's job is the opening reception that kicks off each new exhibit. The receptions provide an opportunity for artists to speak about their art to people who have come expressly to see it. "We offer artists a mic, a podium and half an hour, and most of them really like that," Fisher said. "It gives them that moment, that chance to say whatever they'd like about their work. Ron Anderson, our current artist, talked about the life of an artist and how he can focus on his work because his wife and business partner takes care of the details of everyday life."

Anderson's exhibit, which is titled Moments and runs through June 23, comprises a mix of landscapes and figurative scenes that, as he writes on his blog (ronandersonstudio.blogspot.com), "depict a dynamic moment or event such as a snapshot might capture a moment in time." A master of light and shadow, Anderson's canvases are big and complex, full of tension. Even in what could be considered a landscape - the rectolinear Lafayette Street, based on a street scene in New York City, for example - there is an energy that seems coiled within the very canvas.

"It's got a kind of claustrophobia to it, a kind of push to the space that adds a lot of character," Anderson mused. "It's tight and stiff, wound and ready to spring. That's the sort of stuff I like; I particularly like paintings that force you to feel uneasy about them."

For Anderson, his most rewarding work to date is Cargo, a three-panel triptych that depicts the traumatic middle passage made by African slaves in the dark holds of slave ships. Cargo is included in a permanent installation at the King Arts Complex in Columbus that was awarded the 2006 Greater Columbus Arts Council Artistic Excellence Award.

Another award-winning artist due up on the walls of the Faculty Club is David Terry, a fine art restorer, appraiser, consultant and auctioneer who is creating new oil paintings for an exhibit titled Signatures in Oil that will run June 28 through Aug. 25. After Terry will be Ohio State art professor Charles Massey Jr. (September-October), whose prints and drawings have been exhibited all over the world; and Mark Yale Harris (November-December), a 1961 OSU graduate whose successful career as a full-time sculptor only began in 1996 after an equally successful career as the co-founder of Red Roof Inns.

"We run an extremely professional program and there's strong support for what we do among our members," Fisher said. "If the walls are quiet for half a day when we're changing over shows, people invariably ask me what I'm doing. And we've had very good feedback from our artists."

EXHIBIT NFORMATION
Faculty Club art exhibits are free and open to the public. For a schedule of openings and exhibits, visit www.ohio-statefacultyclub.com or call 292-2262.

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