Truman’s Spring 2019 semester begins on Monday.  We are getting about six inches of snow before classes start, so be safe as you come back to campus.

Moonlit Crossing, courtesy of the artist.

Painting professor Lindsey Dunnagan begins 2019 with a new show in the Twin Cities area (in Silverwood Park, Saint Anthony, on the northern side of Minneapolis). Her exhibition, “Skimming Boundaries,” was rooted in her experience with her grandmother, who battled Alzheimer’s Disease for the last ten years of her life.

In her artist’s statement, Professor Dunnagan writes:

A Familiar Face, courtesy of the artist.

In the beginning, her illness showed in small ways as she repeated stories she told just days before.  Toward the middle of the disease, she began reinventing the history of her life. Toward the end, my grandmother didn’t know who I was.  She lost the ability to recognize family.  Conversations with her became circular as her short-term memory began to fail as well.  In the moments when the recognizable parts of her seemed to flicker in and out, I often wondered where she had gone.  It seemed as if a part of her was testing the waters of another realm even though her physical body remained vital.

In this series, I explore the intangible world of the spirit and the boundary that separates us. Religion maps out worlds of before and after death, but even the most secular are confronted these questions. What is the journey between life and death?  Where are the edges?  In this series, I search for what is felt but unseen.

Blinking Current, courtesy of the artist.

Much of the work experiments with natural dyes, a technique I learned while serving in Morocco as a Peace Corps Volunteer.  Vegetation such as raspberries and cabbage are boiled and poured over mordanted paper, resulting in permanent reds, blues, and greens.  Rocks and black walnuts provide tones of sepia and simultaneously act as a resist, allowing the places they weigh down in the paper to remain white.  Sometimes paper is buried overnight and exposed to the rain or wrapped around trees to capture the imprint of bark.

The dying process, courtesy of Lindsey Dunnagan.

Stay tuned for all the exciting events coming up this spring semester at Truman.  And Welcome Back!