Bonnie Seeman, Bowl Form, 2008, Glazed porcelain and glass Glass elements created by Micah Evans
Racine Art Museum, Gift of Karen Johnson Boyd
The Racine Art Museum is excited to debut a major acquisition by ceramic sculptor Connie Seeman gifted by Karen Johnson Boyd. Many visitors will remember RAM's summer 2010 exhibitions that featured several items devoted to the subject matter of insects. This major gift extends the museum's investigations into this subject, which has proven intriguing to the museum's audiences.
Seeman is known for creating teapots and bowls whose structures recall growing plant forms. She glazes many of these works in the red and green palette of rhubarb. The textures of her compositions often recall the plant's leaves and stalks.
This acquisition, Bowl Form, is the largest sculpture Seeman has created to-date. In this piece, she exaggerates the scale and configuration of shapes so that the structures of the plant begin to recall other natural formations, such as the architecture of coral reefs and bone cells.
For this sculpture, the artist invited glass artist Micah Evans to create lamp-worked glass insects and floral sprigs. These glass flowers sprout unexpectedly in crevices around the ceramic leaves. Meanwhile, the insects establish communities and carry on their labors throughout the sculpture, crawling under leaf-like forms and over bent stalks that recall bleached bones. Bowl Form invites closer inspection��-the longer one looks, the more one finds-much like an exploratory walk in the woods.
RAM owns an earlier example of her work that was on display in an exhibition this spring. The inclusion of this new work in RAM's collection further documents Seeman's career with another major example. This gift also highlights Karen Johnson Boyd's continued support of artists in their creation of new work through her artwork purchases as well as her interest in sharing these pieces with the general public by donating them to RAM's permanent collection.
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Together, the two campuses of the Racine Art Museum, RAM in downtown Racine at 441 Main Street and the Charles A. Wustum Museum of Fine Arts at 2519 Northwestern Avenue, seek to elevate the stature of contemporary crafts to that of fine art by exhibiting significant works in craft media with painting, sculpture and photography, while providing outstanding educational art programming.
Docent led contemporary craft and architectural tours of the museums are available. Both campuses of the Racine Art Museum, are open to the public Tuesday - Saturday 10:00 am - 5:00 pm, and are closed Mondays, Federal holidays and Easter. RAM is open Sunday Noon - 5:00 pm, while Wustum is closed Sundays. An admission fee of $5 for adults, with reduced fees for students and seniors, applies at RAM. Admission to Wustum is free. Members are always admitted without charge to either campus.
