Museum Staff Holiday Party

After the semester ended, but before finals began, we held a little gathering for the staff.


Danny Cruz, Diana Arntzen, Erin Coleman-Cruz, Heather Hine's back, Janean Koebbe and Rachel Papp.


John Benson has been good all year; no way he's getting coal.


Erin & Bradley discover that an electromagnetic field is created when the tips of santa-hats touch.


Jo Burke, Ian Johnson, Danny Cruz, Erin Coleman-Cruz and Bradley Cahill.


John Benson, Chan-Mei Yu, Janean Koebbe and Peter Olson.


Brandon Kirkman is so funky that normal cameras cannot capture a clear image of him.


Graduate Assistant Heather Hines and husband Dana.

Installing the Faculty Biennial

Graduate Assistant Heather Hines employs the powers of mathmatics to insure that artwork by professor Harry Wirth will be straight and level on the wall.

Museum Studies fieldtrip

We took our ART465/565 Intro to Museum Studies class over to the Regional History Center and Archives in NIU's Founders Memorial library. Cindy Ditzler, the director, showed us around and explained the many roles of an archive of local, regional and university history.

Hand-made book enclosures

Artist Karen Hanmer not only makes fabulous books, she also makes elegant protective enclosures for them. I had a chance to take a few snapshots when we packed up her recent exhibition RetroTech.


Here's a soft enclosure for a bound stack of printouts. Made of archival cardstock, the top and bottom fold in, followed by the right flap. The left flap is held in place on top by those two small dots of velcro.


A hand-tooled leather-bound book gets stored in a custom-made clam-shell box lined with suede.

Wrapping it back up

The first exhibitions of the fall semester are already over. Here's Bradley stapling bubble-wrap and plastic sheeting over Jessica Gondek's paintings. The paintings are backed with thin plywood, giving the artist a surface to staple her canvas to, and us a surface to staple the wrapping to.

Techno Dance Rehearsal

NIU student dancers have been rehearsing for the upcoming free performances in the galleries. They will be interpreting & responding to the pieces in our current "Technology and Art" exhibition suite.

Student Monique Hickman and instructor Paula Frasz

GOTB Milwaukee

Last weekend we took a Get-On-The-Bus trip to Milwaukee to see the Art Museum, Discovery World and galleries in the Third Ward neighborhood. In keeping with the "behind the scenes" feature of this blog, I present to you a photo taken in the Men's room at the Milwaukee Art Museum, where there is currently a big Andy Warhol exhibition. I hear tell that the women's featured the same quote, but I can't speak from personal experience.
(click on photo to enlarge)

Matting Temple Rubbings

The NIU Anthropology Museum is presenting an exhibition that will feature some rubbings made at the Wat Po temple in Thailand. To mat them for display, I had to attach them with hinges made from a thin, long-fibered paper similar to the art itself. For an adhesive, I used wheat paste, which is water-soluble and considered the best choice for archival matting.


A close-up of a hinge.


Two rubbings in their mats; the weights keep the artwork in place and prevent the moist hinges from buckling as they dry.

Get-On-The-Bus

A group from NIU went in to Chicago on Friday, September 11 to view the Olafur Eliasson show at the MCA (it sort of fits with our current "Technology and Art" theme) and take in the spectacle of "First Friday" openings throughout the city. Here we are at Intuit Gallery, checking out the technological art of tatooing etc. That's Erin Coleman-Cruz and bearded husband Danny in the center.

Technology & Art reception

Thursday, September 10, 2009. Among those pictured are museum supporters Steven Johnson and Lori Hartenhof, Jo Burke, Brandon Kirkman, Robert Sabala, Rachel Papp, Heather Hines and Diana Arntzen.


During the reception, three artists - Jessica Gondek, Gerald Guthrie and Karen Hanmer - spoke about their work upstairs from the gallery in Altgeld 315.


Museum assistant Ian Johnson processed museum memberships.


Museum assistants John Benson and Brandon Kirkman know how to have a good time.

Technology & Art

To augment our Technology and Art exhibitions, Diana Arntzen, our PR & Education person, put the current shows in context by giving two very informative illustrated talks on the the history of artists responding to technology.

Installing Video

One of our new exhibitions, called Dimensional Figures and Environments, features 3 artists, including Elona Van Gent of Ann Arbor, Michigan. For her video piece "Fallen", the image had to be large, and oriented vertically, to amplify the sense of figures falling through space. This piece is located is a small "turret" off the gallery (the building in which the museum is housed looks like an old castle, so we have turrets). The space is too small for a projected video image to get very large, so we bounced the projection off a mirror to double its dimensions. Yes, this also resulted in a distorted and reversed image, but we managed to minimize those problems. Other images from all the artists in our current "Art and Technology Suite" are on our website.