Quadrennial exhibition showcases faculty, staff

Poet William Blake detected an entire world in a grain of sand. Similarly, the Department of Art is sharing the whole gamut of the visual arts with campus and the broader community now through Sunday, April 6.

Since 1974, the university’s Elvehjem Museum of Art has hosted a quadrennial exhibition that brings together more than 80 pieces from close to 40 faculty, staff, emeriti faculty and affiliates from the Department of Art and Tandem Press, the department’s fine arts press.

Art department chair Jim Escalante says that the “Quad” provides a venue for students and others to experience faculty and associates’ artistic vision outside the classroom.

Museum director Russell Panczenko calls the Quad tradition one of his greatest pleasures. “The exhibition is kind of a micro art world of the great range of media taught and practiced by the faculty: painting, drawing, sculpture, graphic arts, ceramics, woodworking, metalworking, glassmaking, printmaking, photography, and in recent years an upsurge in performance, installation, and computer and technology art. Whatever might be encountered in London or Paris can be found practiced in the art department,” he says.

In addition to the exhibition itself, the artists will discuss their work at 12:30 p.m. on selected Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Check the Wisconsin Week calendar for specifics: http://www.today.wisc.edu.

The exhibition is free and open to the public. Information: 263-2246.