Paintings by Sue Hettmansperger and Drawings by Crit Streed
Kristin Wigley-Fleming Fine Arts Gallery, Center for the Arts
March 13 - April 25, 2012

There will be a Gallery Reception held on Wednesday, April 25, 2012 from 3:00-4:30 p.m. All are welcome.

Sue Hettmansperger 

Sue Hettmansperger holds MA and BFA degrees from the University of New Mexico, and currently is a Professor of Art at the University of Iowa. She has had numerous one-person shows at A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, most recently in 2011. Group venues have included the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art; the Figge Museum of Art; Bowling Green State University; Northern Arizona University; Grinnell College; University of Texas, San Antonio; the Des Moines Art Center; the Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; and the Evanston Art Center.  Her work was included in the publication New American Paintings-Midwest in 2010 and 2005. She has received grants from the Iowa Arts Council (Public Art) and is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship. In 2008, she was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in Painting.  She also received the University of Iowa Faculty Scholar Award for 1997-99, along with multiple Arts and Humanities Initiative Awards from the University of Iowa, with the most recent in 2011.  Artist residencies include the Corporation of Yaddo; the UCROSS Foundation; the Roswell Art Museum; and MacDowell Colony. Collections include the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Des Moines Art Center, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Artist's Statement

Entanglement Series

"The language of painting embodies the morphology of form through process, materiality and its collaboration with the structure of space.  Walking the line between abstraction and representation, the imagery of this series traces the interior of the human body, botany, digital distortion, and manufactured objects, collapsing their boundaries. The internal rationale of the painting changes and shifts, as though the form travels through a topologically stretched space, altering its shape in accordance with unseen mathematical operations. Resulting hybrid images acknowledge a present ethos of genetic and digital manipulation, reflecting the complex relationship of humans to their environment.  This work seeks to mirror a current cultural perspective in which boundaries between organisms are increasingly blurred, and our awareness of digitally altered images makes us question the truthfulness of everything we see in visual culture.  Musing on the interdependence of human and botanical, organic and inorganic systems in a conflicted embrace, this series provokes thought about cultural attitudes and perceptions of our place within nature."

-Sue Hettmansperger

Crit Streed

Crit Streed holds MFA and MA degrees from the University of Iowa, and a BA degree from the University of Northern Iowa where she is an Emeritus Professor of Art.  She is an alumni member of the National Artist A.I.R. Gallery in New York City, where she has shown her work on multiple occasions.  Other venues that have shown her work include the Des Moines Art Center; Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, TN; Galapagos Art Space, NY; Hertzen Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg, Russia; Atlantic Center for the Arts, FL; Nelson-Atkins Museum; and Chicago Art Institute.  She has had one-person shows and installations in several locations, including New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, Iowa, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Portugal.  She is the recipient of a Fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and received numerous Faculty Competitive Grants and Awards from the University of Northern Iowa, including a Professional Development Assignment in Guatemala in 2007.  She has led workshops at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, as well as Penland School of Arts and Crafts, NC, where she was also given a Funded Invitational Artist Retreat.  She served as artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and has made presentations on painting in St. Petersburg, Russia.

Artist's Statement

"My drawing practice is an examination of surface appearance and conceptual substructures. It is an investigation of drawing as performance. I am interested in the topography of drawing, the visual surface as magma, and the shift in identity as the drawing evolves.

I acknowledge my own organic interconnectedness through the act of drawing by what the drawing reveals to me. I pursue, in the intense activity and process, a notion of perfection but often the success of the work is realized because of human (the hand’s) imperfection. I relate to the drawings as having a potential to reciprocate by letting me 'in' on something. Each series of drawings has directed me towards different considerations or understandings."

-Crit Streed