SPRING 2006

Executive Director’s Report

Dear Friends of the Arts,

Farewell and thank you to Tom Godfrey and Jackie Gould.

Tom Godfrey, a member of the law firm Hoogendoorn, Talbot, Davids, Godfrey & Milligan has been a legal resource to the Northwest Cultural Council since our inception. He is retiring and has become of counsel to his law firm. We wish him the best of luck in his retirement and gratefully acknowledge his contributions to the Council.

Jackie Gould, Chief Operating Officer and Principal of Assurance Agency, Ltd, was only a member of the NWCC Board of Directors for a short time. Yet she always encouraged our efforts and paid particular attention to the Corporate Gallery Program, which she embraced even before she joined our Board. Her generous and enthusiastic support of the Council’s programs will be sorely missed.

Treasured NWCC volunteer, Sherrie Kirmse organized a fundraiser at the Schaumburg Barnes & Noble bookstore for the Council. We received a percentage from the sale of books purchased by friends of NWCC on November 12, 2005. Any child donating a book to children suffering from hurricane Katrina could make a book mark for books bound for New Orleans. As a special treat and incentive for kids to share, they were also invited to make book marks for themselves.
 

Board Members and Corporate Gallery artists joined Sherrie Kirmse at the craft table during the fundraiser held at Barnes & Noble.

The Council is launching its first exhibition on architecture. “Architectural Inspirations” combines the drawings of architectural details from sites around the world that were composed by architect John Green. Also included are drawings of several Illinois projects designed by Groundwork, Ltd., Mr. Green’s architecture/engineering firm.

Through Mr. Green’s drawings, viewers will visit temples of ancient Egyptians and colorful streets of Buenos Aires and see how they influenced the design of the Mount Prospect Central Community Center. Visitors will also see how the shapes and details of Himalayan temples are reflected in the forms and shapes of the exterior design of the Buffalo Grove Village Hall. Green’s design for Twin Creek Park on Aptakisic Road was inspired by his visit to the private gardens of Versailles, accessible to only a privileged few. Twin Creek Park includes a baseball field fully accessible to persons with disabilities.

Join us for the architectural reception on Sunday April 23 between 2-4pm at the Kimball Hill & Northwest Cultural galleries.

The 2006 exhibitions for the NWCC/Kimball Hill galleries are in place. We’ll be announcing the winners of our Annual Photography Competition at the reception on Saturday, June 17, between 2-4pm. The show may be viewed from June 6 to July 27. August and September is devoted to current and new NWCC Corporate Gallery artists. The year will close with the November and December display of our Third Annual Poetry and Visual Competition, “A Family Is…..” Receptions are free of charge and open to all. We look forward to your visits to the galleries.

Warmest regards,

Kathy

Why I teach in the“Kids Meet Art”™ Program

by Deanna Goldberg

Perspective drawing is a method of creating the illusion of depth by arranging lines on a flat piece of paper. Using this technique one can create a flat image that appears three dimensional. While the Renaissance popularized perspective, creating the illusion of depth was well known to artists and architects in ancient Greece and Rome.

For “Kids Meet Art”™ I teach perspective drawing to students between 4th and 8th grade. When I begin a class I ask students to visualize what a road or a set of train tracks looks like as it gets farther away. Most can answer, correctly, that the edges appear to come together and form a triangle, which disappears at the horizon. We know, however, that the sides of the road don’t really come together or the cars would drive off the road! Kids use this to relate to the abstract concept of perspective, and have fun imagining what would happen if the road really shrank. We discuss types of lines necessary to create the illusion of distance - horizon, converging, diverging, and parallel,- and we start to draw together. We talk about how basic shapes are the foundation of many objects and draw boxes which are transformed into street scenes by adding details and more objects.

Visualizing perspective helps students understand spatial relations and mathematical relationships between objects. This knowledge carries over into geometry, and eventually into such fields as engineering and design. Teaching perspective is like teaching reading – when a student grasps the concept, a light bulb suddenly goes on, and wants to draw everything in perspective. This is very exciting for me to watch.

MY CULTURAL HERITAGE

2005 International Juried Art & Poetry Competition

Sponsored by the Ritzenthaler Family Foundation

View winning images and poems on our website:

About “My Cultural Heritage” Judges
 

Visual Art Judge Winifred Godfrey

Winifred Godfrey has been a part of the professional art world since 1971. The exhibits, awards, publications and collections of her work are innumerable. Winnie is best known for her dramatic floral canvases; but when she first visited Guatemala in the mid 1970s, she was completely captivated by the physical beauty of the country, its indigenous people, the glorious woven fabrics they produce, and the bearing and gentle spirit of its people. The political crisis in Guatemala in the early 1980’s moved Winnie to document this rare Pre-Columbian culture in her remarkable fourteen life size canvases – Mayan Procession. The Council was honored to display these works in October 2000 at the Kimball Hill and NWCC galleries. Winnie’s intense interest, knowledge and respect for a cultural heritage made her a natural choice as the judge of the visual works for this exhibition

Poetry Judge Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody

A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody is Distinguished Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kennedy-King College, Chicago, IL.

Named the Glendora Review Poet, Lagos, Nigeria, she was twice a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat in Scotland. She was Fellow at St. Demiel’s Library, Hawarden, Wales. Martha has received the Significant Illinois Poet Award from Gwendolyn Brooks, who also awarded her the Henry Blakely Award. She has poems in Illinois Voices: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century and Poets of the New Century. Her most recent Pushcart nomination was for When Pockets Held Dreams, published in After Hours: the Chicago journal of writing and art. Her publications and 11 poetry books are too numerous to mention in this limited space.

The Council has had the privilege of hearing Martha read from her works at one of its poetry readings and published Illuminaria and Binding and Loosing (from Under a Cat’s-Eye Moon) in the Spring 2004 issue of SPOTLIGHTS.

 

NWCC Board Member Mary Jo Willis reading the 1st Place Award Winning Poem, Last Italian Days: The Grandmother, by Mary Legato Brownell.

The Portrait in Print

The Northwest Cultural Council and Kimball Hill galleries were pleased to present a stunning exhibit of portraits in print. This superb display of fine art prints featuring portraits of historic figures, mainly artists, musicians and writers were on display from January 19 to February 16 with a reception on Saturday, February 4, from 1 - 3 pm.

The 32 prints in the NWCC exhibit are part of the Portrait in Print Collection donated by Mary and Charles Liebman to McHenry County College. The collection presents a comprehensive view of printmaking as a fine art by including examples of the four main types of printmaking techniques: intaglio, lithography, woodcut, and serigraphy. Mrs. Liebman chose to collect prints of portraits because of the added dimension of historical interest inherent in a portrait.  She has captured that added dimension with her personal writing style evidenced in the biographical entries for the subjects of the portraits. The prints selected for the current NWCC show focus on artists, musicians and writers, with the latter predominating.

Entertainment at the reception reinforced the literary theme expressed by the prints. Mary Jo Willis, NWCC board member and retired chair of the Performing Arts Department of Harper College, presented selected readings representing writers whose portraits are in the show.

An additional literary dimension was provided through a book signing by Jean Tolle of her new novel, The Galty Prize, an Adventurous Irish Tale. The Galty Prize tells the story of a nineteenth-century Irish girl who hopes to bring back her family’s lost land by winning the Galty Prize steeplechase.
 

Elizabeth Bishop Jack Coughlin - Lithograph, 6 5/8” x 5”

She was an American poet who won all the prizes and the awed admiration of readers and fellow writers. Yet she was, for most of her life, a hidden woman. Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, she lost her parents when she was very young and was raised by grandparents. As an adult she traveled a lot in the tropics; her first book was the stunning North and South, published in 1945. The she settled in Brazil for fifteen years. Her life was one of almost ruinous excess – alcoholism, lesbian passion, illness – but she kept that hidden; she did not believe in confessional poetry. Her work is cool, orderly, rational and witty. It takes careful reading to glimpse the loss and pain out of which she wrote some of the best poetry of her time.