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The Mulvane Art Fair Is Coming Up! The 24th annual art fair of the Mulvane Art Museum will be here soon! On June 4th and 5th starting at 10am, members of the Mulvane will be granted free admission into the Mulvane Art Fair featuring the work of nearly one hundred artists, live music, a lineup of food trucks, and the ArtLab Outdoors. For non-members, the entry cost of the fair is $10. The admission proceeds and those from our sponsorships support the Mulvane Art Museum, the ArtLab, and all the outreach programming that we do. The Mulvane Art Fair is a two day summer event for the whole family, where adults can browse and purchase art and kids can make their own art in the ArtLab Tent. Consider becoming a friend of the Mulvane on our website and join us for the fair in June!

	Glenda Taylor, Youthful Figures

April 13, 10-11:30pm

May 17, 12:00 noon

April 13, 1-2pm

Larry Peters, ceramist and former director of TSCPL's Sabatini Gallery; Monette Mark, ceramic professor at WU and former student of Glenda Taylor's; and Cindy Bracker of Bracker's Good Earth Clays will discuss Glenda Taylor's retrospective exhibition.

April 21, 11:30-12:30pm

Bring your lunch and spend and hour learning about American printmaking from Michael Sims, who founded the Lawrence Lithography Workshop in 1979.

Visit www.washburn.edu/mulvane/education/classes to enroll in our spring classes.

Summer class registration coming soon!

May 12, 12:00 noon

Join us for a conversation with Marydorsey Wanless, Judith Sabatini, and Dan Coburn.

May 28, 1-4pm, All Ages

Create a unique floating lantern in the ArtLab to memorialize those that have gone before us.

Marydorsey Wanless is a visual artist utilizing non-traditional, alternative photographic processes. Tintype, gum bicromate, cyanotype, and installations assembled from the fragments of images are just a few of the methods employed by the artist as she explores nature, life, and the world around her.  A retrospective of her photographs is currently on exhibit at the Mulvane Art Museum through July 2, 2016. 

Process is a vital part of Marydorsey's work. Tintype and gum bichromate have an inherent patina of age, and for her, it is this reflective reference to the past that provides the framework for her photographs. Even the digital photographic prints made from images captured on her iPhone have been treated with filters to assume the appearance of a rustic past. "Photography has always recorded the passage of time," writes Marydorsey. She goes on to say that her work is "documentary in nature, catching the fleeting moments of the nostalgic past. It is a continuous search for times gone by; the yearning for a slower lifestyle focusing on relationships, reflections, and simple acts of living."

	Marydorsey Wanless, Everything Under $10

A series of gum bichromate photographs done over many years documents beach towns, seaside resorts, and small intimate villages. Gum bichromate can be a tedious and temperamental process requiring several days to complete, but the end result is expressive. The images in Marydorsey's beach series are a reflection of her memories of quiet places filled with "hot, cold beer, long walks in the sand, and the touch of a loved one." There is a sense that these are snapshots plucked from the pages of the family album, and there is a subtle irony at play in them.  The light and the vibrant and unnatural color shifts garnered by the paint pigments of the gum process, reinforce the sense of a time that is gone, mundane moments, the quiet of a remote beach, and the artifacts of recreational pursuits. The purposefully exposed brush strokes that frame the edges remind us of the artist's presence and the nature of the process, while insisting the photos are not windows onto the world but rather exist as objects of the past they portray.  

"Lumbago" is assembled from a series of tintype tiles that frame the artist's hands on her back. The tiles are assembled into a grid, and collectively they signify her personal journey through aging. Variations in color, contrast, brightness, and shape create a visual rhythm within the repetition of form. Marydorsey uses tintypes to document her aging process because the nature of the tintype lends itself to the narrative in the work. "I find it to be the perfect medium," she says. "Its history connects early photographic portraiture. Its mirror-like surface reflects and draws in the viewer. Its emulsion unpredictably decomposes and decays like skin." 

Using her iPhone and digital 'apps,' Marydorsey documents the backroads, the plains, and nature of Kansas prairie.  Using filters, she creates evocative moments that celebrate textures of rural environment. The vintage look of the photographs remind us of the harsh elements of the region, and they exist as slivers of moments rich with history. For Marydorsey, the Kansas landscape is unpredictable and unexpected and her photographs of the backroads capture deep moments of inspiration and reflection.

"The Morning Walk" is Marydorsey's latest work. In 2014, she spent a month on the campus of Maitland Art and History Museum in Florida.  Each morning, she walked the campus, photographing intimate moments, textures, gardens, animals, and architecture. Two years and fifteen hundred handmade gum bichromate tiles later, an installation was completed. Mounted with pins like butterflies, the 2.5 inch square tiles float across a 12 x 8 foot white field and create a wandering rhythmic pattern that echoes the light, movement, textures, colors and shadows of those morning strolls.

Over the years, Marydorsey has explored her environment through the lens of her camera. She prefers using the experimental and alternative processes for the production of her photographs because it relates to her beginnings as painter and allows her to be more expressive. 

I create my tribe's traditional pottery to help educate about and carry on the culture of my people because the once grand and widespread tradition of Caddo pottery has now been reduced to a shadow of its former self. I endeavor to learn and show people the beauty, craftsmanship, and uniqueness of our ancient pottery legacy. Pottery has given me a voice and a reason for my art that was long overdue. Growing up loving Pueblo pottery has given me a respect for the preservation of each tribe's culture and more importantly identity. With Native American art, one should never copy or recreate another tribe's heritage and identity, they should seek their own. To be honest and pure in my ancestral pottery continuation, I strive to make each piece as we would have made them in the ancient times by collecting my clay and pit-firing them without the use of any modern conveniences. Our ancestral pottery tells a story of our tribe and our history.

	Helen Otterson, Bulb to Blossom

My interest in biomorphic form originates from my experience with the human encounter with disease, which led me to observe organic growth and changes in cells. These extraordinary changes, the multiple forms and textures inspire tactile creations that reference the relationship between health and disease and explore the organic process of growth and replication. As my work turned to growth and plant life, I was drawn to the succulents of my native California landscape. Life is composed of the same basic elements and the same goals i.e. the survival of life. Both of my inspirational sources live in harsh environments. Disease creates a harsh environment in which the survival of healthy cells is precarious. The cells must split and transform to survive. Succulents live in dry, hot environments, and must generate leaves and tendrils that adapt for survival. Each struggles to live, and each creates in its humble way beautiful forms. These combinations of botanical forms and biologic imagery reflect the cohesive integration of form and function found in the natural world. My work is a hybrid of these cells and plant forms that share the drive to survive. Both in art and nature, a single element repeat itself many times. Many plants follow simple recursive formulas in generating their branching shapes and leaf patterns. One form may find itself nestled inside the same form, but in diminishing size, resulting in striking shapes. Capitalizing on nature's fractal patterns, I create organic forms that repeat, yet change and are similar, yet distinctive from nature. Inspired by the mysteries of nature, my ambiguous hybrids of cellular and organic forms celebrate life. Creating forms with fluid movement, I combine materials such as clay, glass or bronze to capture the beauty of nature's organic form. These materials are ideal mediums to showcase the rich surfaces and curvilinear components found in nature. The bright color palette draws on aspects in natural world and reflects the celebration of the pursuit of life and beauty of the natural world.