Covering five decades of creating, this exhibition of 80 ceramics and 30 paintings, selected from the artist’s collection, is an engaging, visual overflow of color and texture. There is a feeling of seriously harmonious fun: sometimes quirky, ironic and humorous; and sometimes a tribute to history, heroines and heroes. Take the time to read the titles. Invariably Schwarz’s titles offer a portal to understanding the context of the artwork. Dean’s paintings are predominately spare, minimalist renderings emphasizing color, light and organic forms. His paintings also reflect the atmosphere of personal euphoria and tenderness. The brushstrokes seem immediate and assured, suggesting a measure of intuitive gesturing. During the 1970s he created Cubist-styled paintings of flowering plants, boldly colored and often large-scaled, with interlocking graphic shape-shifting. By the mid-1980s his sons, Gunnar Schwarz and Lane Schwarz, were creating the white stoneware clay bodies. Dean focused on incising designs and glazing, so that by the late 1980s the leather-hard clay vessel became Dean’s canvas. The silica, slip and ground pigments became his oil paints. During an interview in 2011 Dean said ironically, with a smile, “I don’t know what to expect when I go to the studio in the morning. Lane and Gunnar leave me with what I see before me, and
I work from there.” The expression of art is his most pure communication. Dean’s ceramic works are piquant visual conversation meant to connect the artist with his world and the world with Dean. When talking to Dean, however, you clearly understand that each vessel is, in his view, an equal investiture of a son and his father. The sense of family runs deep and there is no doubt of the importance of Gunnar and Lane’s work with their father.

Des Moines River, North Fort Dodge, 1924
by Robert Alden Reaser
Pastel on canvas mounted on panel
Gift of Pat and Mary Casey
BCF 2010.05

Robert Alden Reaser was born April 1898 in New York City and died in 1980 in Palm Beach, Florida. His father, Willbur Aaron Reaser [1860 – 1942], was a well known painter in his time. His father’s family had moved from Ohio to Fort Dodge shortly after Willbur’s birth. His mother Cora May Conlee was born in Fort Dodge in 1863, the daughter of Andrew Jackson Conlee and Emily Jane Bledsoe. Cora Conlee Reaser was an accomplished pianist.

His father was boyhood friends with Senator and Mrs. Jonathan P. Dolliver and through this relationship Robert as a young boy met Theodore Roosevelt in the presidential office in 1904. George Roberts, Director of the Treasury at this time, was also from Fort Dodge, and the Roberts family was among their numerous Washington friends. Robert Reaser’s parents were always on the move. In the United States, they went frequently by train to San Francisco and Los Angeles and then back to Washington DC and New England, stopping in Fort Dodge, Des Moines, Chicago and Minneapolis along the way, as well as spending months at a time in Paris, the Riviera, Italy, and the Netherlands. They were a socially congenial family of interesting individuals, who made long term friendships easily.

Robert served as an ambulance driver at the front during World War I in France, staying 22 months without leave until the war ended. A letter sent to his parents is reprinted in The Good Soldier: a selection of soldiers’ letters, 1914 – 1918 compiled by N. P. Dawson.

This magnificent pastel painting appears to depict the area west of the Fort Dodge Regional Airport and just east of the Des Moines River in 1924. Note the 2-story wooden house at the right edge of the painting. Deep shade lies in the foreground and sunlight highlights the burnished gold and greens of the middle ground. It is fall, the trees are at their height of color, and rain seems possible. The six-foot painting is almost equally divided between sky and land. The emphasis is on the vast changing beauty of an uncultivated Iowa landscape.

Eva Funderburgh [American, born 1982]
City Beast, 2009
Wood-Fire Kiln Ceramic
BCF – Blanden Charitable Foundation

Rose Katz Cabat (Born in Bronx, New York in 1914)
Turquoise and Gold Vessel, Circa 1989
Glazed Stoneware
4.5″ Height x 2.75″ Diameter
Gift of Catherine Vincent Deardorf
BCF 1989.05

Rose Cabat’s small, gourd-like shape narrowing to a one-quarter inch opening from a short narrow neck has a unique sense of satiny texture when held. The softness of the thin liquid glaze over a stoneware body polished before being fired to a luxurious smoothness gives her work a distinctive sensory experience, as does the wheel-thrown shape with its elegant neck and pinhole opening. The fullness of the shape juxtaposed to the narrowness of the neck and the way the vessel sits in the hands are characteristics that Cabot sought to achieve during his long career. Rose Cabat continues to work in her Tucson home studio, assisted through the kiln loading and unloading process by her daughter June.

The lustrous matte turquoise glaze, thinned to a vaporous pale blue at the neck, is overlaid from the mid-point down to the beginning of the base with shimmering vertical streaks of gold glaze.

Born in a borough of New York City Rose took night art classes at Steubenmueller High School and is said to have first worked with clay in the early 1940s, joining the Greenwich Settlement House in order to use the pottery equipment and kilns. Moving with her husband in 1942 to Tucson Cabot worked at a munitions factory. Her only formal ceramics training was acquired during a glaze calculations course at the University of Hawaii in 1957. Cabot’s glaze formula is a result of her experimentations following her coursework.

-Margaret A. Skove

Madai Taylor (Born Lake Village, Arkansas 1955)
Bendito, Bendito, Bendito, 1995
Acrylic, Dirt, Rust on Paper
71″ Height x 49″ Width
Purchased by the Blanden Charitable Foundation
BCF 1996.11

Energy and experimentation are two words that describe Bendito, Bendito, Bendito. Literally earthbound with its specks of dirt embedded in the reddish-brown or that acrylic paint that roughly demarcates a rectangular plot of ground, yet strongly invoking the heavens and the spiritual with three circles firmly suspended in the upper register. Images of suspension make sense in an age obsessed with aeronautics, mobility, and rapid change. The uncertainty of suspension lies in the question of just how well fixed the ground beneath you is – a state of suspension encourages you to think about the relativity of your relationship to everything, particularly the steps you take, the footprints you make.

Bendito is the Spanish word for holy, blessed. “Bendito” as a spoken word has a soft, alliterative sound. Each experience speaks its own language. Each artist creates his own set of visual expressions.

Although he has taken courses at the Chicago Academy of Art, Madai is a self-taught artist. He reads museum exhibition catalogs and studies work in museums but he has never been formally led to develop this or that style advocated or demonstrated by professional faculty. His work is derived from internal, private sources of inspiration.

You never know, can never know, the true nature of someone’s experience. Indeed, few individuals could articulate the nature of their own experience. In his work, as in his words, it is more often what-is-not-being-said – what is beyond or without words that is the most important. Reading his paintings is an exercise in looking between the interstices. In these vortexes there is the spiritual side of Madai. Full of what he calls Grace, with a capital G, set down with his own hand. Grace can be seen in his work as joy-on-the-loose, with respect, dignity and pleasure in the sheer physicality of each marking.

Madai creates art with his hands and his thoughts in union.

I think Madai would agree that “you must run your own race” and his race, achieved in solitude, is to perfect the invisible through color and shape.

-Margaret A. Skove

Mexico, Colima Dog, 300-600 CE
Ceramic, Pigment
8.5″ Length x 6.5″ Height x 6.5″ Width
From the John J. Brady Jr. Estate
BCF 1990.22

Colima pottery is some of the liveliest in Ancient Mexico. Leaving behind no stone cities or other lasting evidence of their lives, what we know about this western coast culture comes primarily from the ceramics found in distinctive shaft tombs. Even what they called themselves is unknown, and they are referred to by the contemporary name of the region where their art is found. However, we can gain a great deal of information from this art. Colima ceramics are particularly notable for the profusion of plant and animal forms, making it readily apparent how much importance the culture placed in the natural world and surrounding environment. They also had a complex ceremonial life, evidenced by the figures of men and women in ritual garb, often in dance postures suggesting their role in community celebrations. These figures are solid, hand built sculptures in a natural colored clay in a variety of sizes from small personal scale pieces of a few inches to larger ones of almost a foot high intended for more public use. The hollow, red-slipped ceramics arc on an even grander scale, sometimes reaching a few feet in height and diameter. Ceremonial figures are also depicted in this medium, but more common are the plant and animal figures, especially dogs.

Dogs are the iconic form of Colima art. The sculptures depict the small native hairless dogs of the region, often almost in life-size. This particular piece is smaller than most, but is no less sophisticated than its brothers and sisters. Dogs were the only domesticated animal of the ancient Americas and played a special role in west Mexican culture. They were companions in life and death, helping to guide the spirit through the underworld on its way to its final destination. The placement of ceramics depicting dogs in graves underscores this role. They were also associates of the god of thunder and lightning, bringer of the life-giving rain so essential to an agricultural society, and were believed to playa role in storms. Wrinkly dogs were particularly connected to this aspect of belief, as me wrinkles were thought to signify lightning. Finally, they were a significant part of ceremonial feasting at important times in the Colima year. A dog such as the one portrayed in this sculpture was fattened and eaten as a ritual foodstuff. There were no other sources of domesticated meat in this culture, so at times they had to make use of what was available. Dogs were not consumed as everyday food, however, but only at times and in ways that acknowledged their special role. The frequency with which Colima artists depict dogs in their art and in the variety of ways they were shown, far more than any other animal, illustrates the important place they held in their society. This dog is a classic example of the liveliness, personality and character contained in these ceramic representations.

-Molly Hennen, Curator,
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Jacues Clement Wagrez
French, 1846-1909
Fencer On The Stairway, 1883
Oil on canvas
155.6 cm. x 84.8 cm.
Gift of Mrs. O. M. Oleson
Acc. No. 1970.50

The calligraphic applique on the vest indicates the wearer to have been a foot soldier with the Boxer forces in China. The Boxers were a secret society from the north of China, which believed that foreign influences. especially in trade and religion, were harming their country and weakening the Qing Dynasty. Known in China as the Fists of Righteous Harmony, Westerners called them “Boxers” because the martial arts calisthenics they practiced appeared similar to boxing motions. The Boxers were spiritualistic and superstitious, believing that they were protected from sword and bullet wounds by the practice of these ritualistic martial arts, rendering the members impenetratable.

In the late nineteenth century, China was suffering from a drought, which aggravated the frustration of local populations with imperialist policies exercised by foreigners in China – including Germans, British, and Americans-who were often able to demand exemptions from Chinese law and rights to property for mining, railroads, and commerce. A siege of Beijing’s foreign legations, lead by the Boxers, lasted for fifty-five days from June 20 until August 14 of 1900. Foreign diplomats – like Mr. and Mrs. Conger, ancestors of the donor – were under siege in the foreign legation compound, often leaving their Chinese friends, servants, or collaborators in danger. Although 230 foreigners were killed, the vast majority of casualties were Chincsc; primarily Chinese Christians and the Boxers themselves. An international force of eight nations overwhelmed the small number of Boxers and poorly armed Qing forces to end the short but bloody conflict.

The attempt to rid China of growing foreign influence and control was a failure, but me stories of the Boxers became legend. China, in the years that followed, saw a further weakening and eventual fall of the Qing Dynasty, and even more control by Western nations, especially in trade and commerce. Artifacts like this vest are quite rarei the fragile nature of the materials and the Allied countries’ demand that the Qing government quickly stifle the Boxer movement after the failed uprising means that few of these items
remain today.

-Lindsay E. Shannon

This exhibition takes a closer look at major modern artists in the Blanden’s permanent collection in the context of the difficult period in which the artists lived. The hope is to demonstrate how one might think about style and biography in relation to the historical context of World War II, encouraging patrons to think about their own interpretations of these pieces. Both World Wars exercised immense influence on Europe and America, fracturing and altering both societal and artistic identity in these cultures. The aftermath of the second ‘total war’ and the eventual revelation of tragedies surrounding the Holocaust created anxiety and criticism about the state of modern societies, as well as the pervading influence of ‘Old World’ values. Also thrown into sharp relief were the most basic issues of humanity and the value of individual human life.

The transition from the early 20th century into the postmodern age we now live in constitutes an era of controversial and rapid change. Experimentation in the arts was intended to create a visual ‘language’ for the public, which would supersede the boundaries of class, gender, and race, and although the project to ‘heal society’ did not succeed in the intended way, modern art has fundamentally changed the way we
experience the world.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a gallery guide to contextualize the artworks.