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TEXTure: The Landscape Paintings of David Coughtry and Duncan Martin

September 13 – October 22, 2022

Opening reception: Tuesday, September 13, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

Special Homecoming reception: Friday, October 14, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

View the exhibition catalog here.

David Coughtry
“River Road, Twilight” 36 x 36″ oil on canvas

David Coughtry is a 1979 graduate of Principia College. He earned his MFA (1983) from The State University of New York at Albany, working with renowned painter Mark Greenwold and art historian Robert Bernstein. Coughtry has presented numerous solo exhibitions throughout the United States as well as participated in major traveling exhibitions such as New Response: Contemporary Painters of the Hudson River (1986), The Artist as Native: Reinventing Regionalism (1993), Rediscovering the Landscape of the Americas (1996), The Great American Paint-In (2020). He has completed many notable commissions and his art has been shown at various venues, including the Middlebury College Museum; The Ringling Museum of Art; The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts; Albany Institute of Art; The Chicago Art Institute Museum; The Lowe Art Museum; among others.

As a professor emeritus of studio art at Principia College, in 2019 Coughtry concluded academic contributions after devoting 23 years to teaching. Resuming professional work as a full-time painter, he purchased and rehabilitated a Henry Street building in Alton, IL. He now maintains his artistic practice in the new studio, which includes an exhibition space to be opened and shared with the surrounding community.

Duncan Martin
“El Capitan” 72 x 70″ oil on canvas 2020-22
Yosemite National Park

Duncan Martin is a painter living and working in Elsah, Illinois and Saguache, Colorado. Since 2011, Martin’s work has focused on a painting project, 58 in 58, painting in all 59 National Parks in 59 months. (A 59th park was added in 2013). In February 2016, he painted in his 59th Park, Glacier National Park. A selection of work from this project was exhibited at the Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park celebrating the 100th anniversary of Acadia National Park and the National Park Service in August 2016. The project continues as Martin develops a body of work from his experiences painting in the parks. 

Martin received a BA in Studio Art from Principia College in 1976. After graduation, he spent several years painting in Calhoun County, culminating in an exhibition in Inge Mack’s Maybeck Gallery in Elsah, Illinois in 1981. 

He continued his study of painting with Neil Welliver at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving an MFA in 1986.  Martin joined the Principia College Studio Art faculty in 1987. In 1995, he left full time teaching to focus on painting and lived in New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado.  In 2010, he returned to Principia College as a Professor of Art. Martin served as Chair of the Art and Art History Department for eight years and retired from teaching in June 2022.

Martin’s paintings have been exhibited at the SIUE Invitational Exhibition 2021,  Edwardsville, Illinois; The Schoodic Institute at Acadia National Park; Hunt Gallery, Mary Baldwin College, Staunton, Virginia; Davis Dominguez Gallery, Tucson, Arizona; Nielsen Gallery, Boston, Massachusetts; Susan Street Fine Art, Solana Beach, California; Shaw Contemporary and gWatson Gallery, Maine; The Gallery at the Tucson International Airport, Tucson, Arizona; The Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona; and the New Bedford Art Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts.  His website address is: duncanmartinart.com

22: Annual Juried Principia College Student At Exhibition

Opening reception: Tuesday, April 12, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.

This year’s juror is Cheryl Wassenaar, a visual artist who explores the function of text in a hybrid practice of painting, sculpture, and design. Wassenaar currently serves as associate professor of art at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts Washington University, St Louis, where she researches and gives lectures on the visual and cultural impact of color. Wassenaar received her BFA from Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, and her MFA from the University of Cincinnati. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, appearing in over fifty group and solo exhibitions. Her corporate collections include Camden Real Estate headquarters in Houston; Fidelity Investments in Boston; and Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, MI. The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs, a collaborative multi-media exhibition with Stephanie Schlaifer, was awarded an Artistic Innovations grant in 2018 by the Mid America Arts Alliance. She is currently represented by LongView Gallery in Washington DC. Last fall, Wassenaar exhibited with Jane Barrow in “Air-to-Air” in the James K. Schmidt Gallery. For more info, see cherylwassenaar.com 

Merit Prizes:  Four cash merit awards will be presented by the juror at the opening on Tuesday, April 12.   

square, you

“square, you,” 2022, oil on canvas, 24″ x 30″ 

square, you

Paintings by Kristians Klava 
January 25 – February 12, 2022  
Opening reception: Tuesday, January 25, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.  

James K. Schmidt Gallery 
Voney Art Center 
Principia College, Elsah, Illinois 62028 

Kristians Klava is a painter from Riga, Latvia. He received his undergraduate degree in Art from Principia College and currently is working as a Post-Graduate Teaching Intern for the Art and Art History Department and as a Gallery Assistant for the James K. Schmidt Gallery. Kristians previously exhibited work in the Annual Juried Student Exhibition in 2019 and 2021, and in “Still, Life”, the 2021 Senior Capstone Exhibition. He received the Kathryn Cogswell Maule Art Opportunity Award in 2021 which included the purchase of an artwork for the art collection of Principia College. 

Spinning Straw into Gold: New Work by Linda Vredeveld

“Longing–Above Water,” 2017, oil on canvas, 48″ x 56″

October 19 – November 19, 2021
Spinning Straw into Gold: New Work by Linda Vredeveld
Opening reception: Tuesday, October 19, 5:00 – 6:30 p.m.
Artist’s Talk: Tuesday, October 19, 8:00 p.m., Wanamaker Hall

Linda Vredeveld is an artist whose work has spanned personal themes of coming of age, motherhood, the female body, fantasies, sense of self, fear of cancer, and menopause, all through the lens of Feminism and cultural critique.
Born and raised in Ann Arbor, MI, Vredeveld graduated from Calvin College (BFA) and earned her MFA degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Having early career representation in Chicago galleries Lyons Weir and Gwenda Jay, with moves that took her from Michigan to Albuquerque, she settled in the St. Louis metro area in 1998 where she continues to live and work. She has taught many adjunct courses in studio art and has a large community of successful students from over the years.

2021 brought Vredeveld three solo exhibitions: “Glass Slipper and a Hot Flash” at (Kranzberg Arts Foundation’s) High Low in St. Louis, “Princess Probs” at Southwestern Illinois College’s Schmidt Art Center, and “Spinning Straw into Gold” at Principia College in Elsah, IL. Other recent solo shows have been at The Bermuda Project in Ferguson, Blackburn College, and Knox College. In 2017 she was a finalist in CAMSTL’s Great Rivers Biennial. She has been awarded residencies at Ragdale and at Ox-Bow (SAIC). Her work is in the Drawing Center’s Viewing Program Artist Registry. She has been in many group exhibitions, including Think Small at the Illinois State Museum, the Exposure series at the University of Missouri – St. Louis’ Gallery 210, Mama at Harwood Art Center in Albuquerque, and New Talent at Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids. Her work has been reviewed in the Chicago Reader, Dialogue, the Chicago Tribune, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Vredeveld lives with her husband, Eric Shultis, also an artist, in Alton, IL. They have two children – Arlo Shultis, a classical percussionist, and Zora Vredeveld, a performing artist.

Air-to-Air

Jane Barrow in Conversation with Cheryl Wassenaar
September 7 – October 9, 2021

“Terminal Pattern,” 2014, oil on panel, 30″ x 40″, artist: Jane Barrow
“February 28, Part II WSJ,” 2021, manipulated newspaper, digital print on aluminum, (original photo credit: Agence France-Presse, Getty Images) artist: Cheryl Wassenaar

Jane Barrow, artist

Initially trained as a figurative painter, Jane Barrow’s interests cross between observation and invention, with much of her work directed to the study of stillness in relation to motion. An earlier body of work focused on biological forms understood in the context of an engineering field known as fluid dynamics. Her fascination with integrating texts and diagrams into paintings continues in her current landscapes that draw upon the imagery of warfare.

Barrow received her MFA in painting from Indiana University in Bloomington and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. She has shown nationally and internationally with work in the collection of John Mellencamp, the Muscarelle Museum of Art (Williamsburg, VA), Lungwha University (Taipei, Taiwan), PNC Financial Services Group (Pittsburgh, PA), Ameren, and Private Bank (St. Louis, MO), to name a few.  Barrow has been represented by the Duane Reed Gallery in St. Louis, MO and Chicago, IL and has been a repeat resident at the Vermont Studio Center and Castle Hill Center for the Arts in Providence, Rhode Island. She recently retired as Professor and Head of Painting at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she taught for twenty-five years in the areas of drawing, painting and two-dimensional design and theory.

Barrow lives and works in the historic Benton Park neighborhoods of St. Louis. Barrow’s website.

Cheryl Wassenaar, artist

Cheryl Wassenaar is a visual artist who investigates language as a system of meaning that is dependent upon arrangement and context. Wassenaar’s object-based pieces work with found commercial signage, repurposing the discarded wood into visual metaphors of failed communication that borrow from the language of modernist painting, contemporary advertising, and technology. Her latest body of work uses sign-maker’s vinyl alongside manipulated objects, sound, and video to activate environments in site-specific installations, often collaborating with a writer or poet. The Cabinet of Ordinary Affairs, a collaborative multi-media exhibition with Stephanie Schlaifer, was awarded an Artistic Innovations grant in 2018 by the Mid America Arts Alliance.

Wassenaar earned her BFA from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and her MFA from the University of Cincinnati. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally, appearing in over fifty group and solo exhibitions. Her corporate commissions include Camden Real Estate headquarters in Houston, Fidelity Investments in Boston, and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids. Wassenaar currently serves as an Associate Professor of Art at Washington University in St. Louis, where she researches and gives lectures on the visual and cultural impact of color. She is represented by LongView Gallery in Washington, D.C. For more information view Wassenaar’s site.

Gallery Update

The physical space of the James K. Schmidt Gallery will be open to the Principia community and to the public for the 2021-2022 academic year, beginning with the opening reception for the first exhibition on September 7, 2021.  Any Covid-related protocols that may be reinstated by the state of Illinois and/or Principia College must be followed.