It began as an assignment requiring Dawn Kramlich’s intermediate and advanced painting and drawing students to create art inspired by a recent visit to the Elmhurst Art Museum. It has turned into a multi-part collaboration between the museum and the students.
Much to the students’ surprise, the museum shared their resulting artwork with its 7,700-plus Instagram followers earlier this month.
“I’m thrilled because it’s a great opportunity for the students,” said Kramlich, who’s in her third year as an assistant professor in the Department of Art. “A museum posting your work on Instagram is a very rare occurrence as it is, and so for a student, that is a really exciting opportunity because it’s essentially the museum bolstering your practice.”
Adding to the excitement, Allison Peters Quinn, director and chief curator of the art museum, invited several of the students to show their work in a new Emerging Artists Pavilion at the museum’s Art in Wilder Park festival in Elmhurst this weekend.
“The point is for the students to be able to show their work and hopefully make connections and network,” Kramlich said.
“This is massive,” agreed sophomore art major Andrew Rhodes. “This is a way for me to have people actually see my work, and not just people who already know what you do—an actual, established museum.”
During their visit to the Elmhurst Art Museum earlier this spring, eight art students got a private tour of the “Living with Modernism” exhibition featuring Chicago artist Kelli Connell’s work. For their assignment, the students were asked to think about which aspects of Connell’s approach most resonated with them and then create a work based on one of those conceptual threads.
Liz Chilsen, the museum’s manager of exhibitions, led the tour. “Dawn’s assignment gave students the chance to find their own inspiration for their artwork and to learn more about how an artist develops a creative project over many years,” Chilsen said.
The assignment inspired Rhodes to create a painting featuring a lone figure sitting on a dock, surrounded by thriving trees overlooking a body of water. But the water reflects a shrunken figure and barren trees.
“I think all of us got the idea of perception identity from the tour, and I think that’s part of where the idea of literal reflection of water came in,” he said. “There’s life outside of the reflection, but in the reflection the passage of time is shown, with the trees now dying.”
As they worked on their assignment, the students received another surprise: Quinn, from the art museum, visited them on campus, spending time with each student to review their work.
“The students were thrilled with the feedback she gave them,” Kramlich said. “It really helped boost the conversations I had with them to make their work even stronger.”
Rhodes said working with Quinn was reassuring and helped guide his work. “I made a lot of choices when I was doing that one-on-one with her,” he said. “It made me stop second-guessing myself.”