Enjoy a traditional county fair, complete with 4-H projects and competitions, a rodeo, loads of food vendors, carnival rides, games and more! 4-H projects are on display throughout the fair in a variety of subject areas and a large commercial exhibit building offers tons of booths and a great way to explore the Bloomington community.

Runs July 27 through August 3. Visit website for all details.

Several new exhibits can be seen at the Indiana University Art Museum. The galleries are open Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 5 pm, and Sunday, 12 pm to 5 pm. Running time varies by exhibit. Check website for more detailed information.

Breaking the Gilded Ceiling, Women Artists of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
March 5-August 25, 2013

This installation will feature women artists—some former artist’s models, some wives and mothers, and some trailblazers—who worked in a variety of media. Included will be work by photographers Anna Atkins, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Laura Adams Armer, as well as prints and drawings by Mary Cassatt, Suzanne Valadon, Gwen John, and Käthe Kollwitz.

Three Remarkable Women: Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Margaret Chinnery, and Félicité de Genlis
March 23-September 1, 2013

The IU Art Museum will premiere a focused exhibition featuring Vigée Le Brun’s Portrait of Mrs. Chinnery (1803) and selected materials from the Lilly library. The exhibition presents an unusually rich opportunity to use a single artwork as a lens for an interdisciplinary study of the history, politics, art, literature, and music of its time.

New in the Galleries: Pierre-Auguste Renoir: A Visiting Master Print
May 29-August 18, 2013

One of the originators of the Impressionist style, Pierre-Auguste Renoir was particularly noted for his depictions of his friends, family, and their children in scenes of domestic activity and repose. A favorite subject included two young girls pinning flowers on a hat. Renoir did several versions of this scene in a variety of media, including an important large-scale lithograph that is on temporary loan to the IU Art Museum for the summer. The installation will be complemented by several small prints by Renoir and two portraits of the artist by Pierre Bonnard and Jean-Louis Forain.

New in the Galleries: Sam Gilliam: A Lyrical Abstractionist in Indiana
May 29-September 15, 2013

Sam Gilliam draws on a wide range of inspiration, from his African American heritage and abstract expressionism to the poetry of Pablo Neruda and jazz music. Although associated with the Color Field painters of Washington, D.C., Gilliam had a strong connection to this region of the country. This installation will feature several works produced at IU’s Echo Press and a miniature watercolor painting given by the artist to Bloomington’s Second Baptist Church in honor of his brother Clarence and his wife Frances, who were recently named by the City of Bloomington as a Black History Living Legends.

Special Installation: Tapa: Unwrapping Polynesian Barkcloth
May 29-September 1, 2013

This spring, students taking the course On Exhibit: The Pacific Islands have had the opportunity to create a small installation, as well as an online web module focusing on Polynesian tapa cloth from the permanent collection of the IU Art Museum.

On display in the Upper Loft Gallery July 2 – 31
Artists’ Reception: Second Saturday, July 13, 5-8 pm, during the Village Art Walk

Please join us for an evening of light refreshments and to purchase your 10$ raffle ticket for a unique opportunity to win a beautiful autumn landscape created by several Guild Member Artists. (raffle winner will be drawn December 14, 2013; need not be present to win)

Biographies:
Wyatt LeGrand is an artist from southern Indiana. While growing up in the small, scenic town of Bloomfield, Wyatt soon became acknowledged by the community for his skills as an artist. After winning numerous art awards and honors as a boy, it became apparent that Wyatt would pursue a career in the arts.
Wyatt first began painting in oils while in college. He attained a degree in visual arts education from Indiana University, and also immersed himself in the study of art history and other art forms. He became an equally accomplished draftsman, ceramicist, sculptor, and metalsmith. However, it was painting with oils that thrilled him most.
After winning several awards at plein air painting competitions and becoming recognized as one of Indiana’s most promising young artists, Wyatt decided he needed to pursue his passion for painting full-time. In 2009, he opened LeGrand Art Studio and Gallery just outside his hometown of Bloomfield. The studio has become a popular destination for local art lovers and a hub for the area’s art community. “The studio is where I feel most comfortable. I go there every day feeling totally motivated and inspired. How could I not? The studio is where I can pursue my strongest passions: making art, studying art, and teaching art. I am very fortunate to be able to do what I love.”
Wyatt’s passion for painting is matched only by his passion to teach. His desire to share his knowledge and skill with students of all ages has led to many teaching opportunities and rewarding experiences as an educator. It is Wyatt’s intent to continue pursuing opportunities as an educator, whether it is in the public school arena, artist workshops or from his own studio.
Wyatt has been a member artist at the Brown County Art Guild since the 2011.
Artist’s Statement: “There’s nothing too complicated about what I do; I just pay attention to what I see. Whether it is the colors of a landscape, the shapes of an interior space, or the movement of a busy street, my painting reflects the need to preserve desirable aesthetic experiences and communicate my human response to the subject before me. I say let things be spontaneous… paint what interests you, paint what confuses you, paint anything you wish as long as you paint more quickly than slowly, as the moment won’t last forever.
I prefer not to become comfortable in painting according to a particular fashion or style and I do not contemplate how I put paint to canvas, I simply try to arrange colors side-by-side so that they most closely represent the experience of seeing them first hand. My painting methods change regularly, but I have found I always work best while painting from direct observation. There is something fantastic about painting the world as you see it naturally, recording the subject as fast as your eyes can pass over it, avoiding unnecessary detail but paying special attention to light and shapes of color. Painting this way, with the intent of capturing a visual experience, evokes in me a certain type of emotional resonance that I find most appealing.
As Edward Hopper brilliantly stated, “If you could say it in words there would be no reason to paint,” and I agree completely, as my painting is a means of communicating all of those wordless experiences, emotions, and occurrences as a witness to this life. Painting must after all be its own language, a method of articulating the innermost expressions of the artist…a way of demonstrating a profound interest and appreciation of the magnificent world around us. My inspiration and drive comes from nothing other than the experience of putting brush to canvas, letting the things I see before me flow from eye to heart to hand to brush. These actions, as they occur, bring with them a certain anxiety, excitement, and satisfaction that I cannot find elsewhere. This is why I paint…to keep those feelings suspended in action…to keep my spirit alive.”

Roger Merkel was born in East Chicago, Indiana in 1949. As a kid growing up in the fifties, Roger was influenced by the work of America’s great illustrators. He read books with illustrations by the likes of N.C. Wyeth and Maxfield Parrish. And, of course, Norman Rockwell’s work was everywhere, from magazine covers to toothpaste ads.
Roger worked at U.S. Steel in Gary while attending school and began a career in law enforcement in 1971. In 1973, he became a Deputy U.S. Marshal for the District of Columbia and the following year he was sworn in as Deputy U.S. Marshal for the Southern District of Indiana, a post that he held for ten years. He then worked for the U.S. Treasury Department as a criminal investigator until his retirement in 1989, when he began painting on a full-time basis. Roger now lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Ginger.

Roger remembers being impressed by the artists of his youth, not only by their superb draughtsmanship, but with their ability to tell an entire story with a single image. That is a difficult goal to achieve, but it is the one Roger has set for himself. He particularly enjoys the challenge of assembling props, models, and costumes to create scenes which evoke other times and other places. He quips that “It takes no more time or talent to paint a woman in a beautiful Victorian gown than to paint the same woman wearing a pair of blue jeans.”
Roger has won many significant awards for his paintings. The 86th Annual Hoosier Salon exhibit, 2010, at the Indiana State Museum, awarded Merkel’s War Bride with the Outstanding Oil Painting prize, and Summers in the Hamptons took Best Figurative. Roger Merkel has been an artist member of the Brown County Art Guild since 2006.

The Mathers Museum of World Cultures presents a new exhibit for the year 2013, “In The Kitchen Around The World”, which will be on display in addition to the already-installed exhibits from 2012. This exhibit will run until November 15, 2013.

“In The Kitchen Around The World”: an exhibit that presents objects used in preparing food and food service from different areas of the world. It breaks down into two categories: what the viewer perceives as familiar, such as plates, cups, and dishes, and what is unfamiliar, such as a Peruvian corn toaster and an Ecuadorian grater. The goal of the exhibit is to look at what other cultures have come up with as solutions to help them in cooking or eating food, allowing the viewer to make comparisons to the solutions that are similar or dissimilar to their own.

Other exhibits include:

“Picturing Archaeology”: Described in their words and illustrated by their images, the research and fieldwork of 13 Indiana University archaeologists is presented in Picturing Archaeology at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures/Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology.

“Rhythms of the World”: a free audioguide tour of musical instruments from around the globe featured in exhibits throughout the museum. The audioguide includes narration and musical clips of the highlighted instruments.

“Thoughts, Things, and Theories…What Is Culture?”
Thoughts, Things, and Theories…What Is Culture? examines the nature of culture through the exploration of cultural traditions surrounding life stages and universal needs.

“From the Big Bang to the World Wide Web: The Origins of Everything”
This exhibit examines history on a large scale, through the exploration of cosmic, biological, and human origins.

“Treasures of the Mathers Museum”
Decades of collecting and curating will be featured in this exhibit, presented in conjunction with the institution’s 50th anniversary.

Museum is open Tuesdays through Fridays, from 9 am to 4:30 pm, and Saturdays and Sundays, from 1 to 4:30 pm. Check website to see all of the Mathers Museum’s exhibits.

Design, build, test, and engineer all kinds of structures! The special exhibition’s three-dimensional building experiences include the Skyline Toolbox, developed and designed by Chicago Children’s Museum, where children can use wooden struts and braces, fabric curtain walls, and real construction tools to build imaginative, original structures big enough for them to walk inside! Other components include the Earthquake Shake Table, the Multilevel Building Zone, the Bridge the River Cantilever Challenge, unique materials construction stations, and more. There also is a special place for toddlers and preschoolers to build with age-appropriate materials.

July 12, 13, 17, 19, 21, 23, 25, 27 at 7:30 pm.
July 14, 20, 28 at 2 pm.

http://www.indiana.edu/~thtr/productions/2013/thematchmaker.shtml

This classic American comedy introduced Dolly Levi to the world! In Thornton Wilder’s farce, hilariously mismatched couples careen from one ridiculous situation to the next as matchmaker Dolly attempts to create love connections for everyone—including herself. Light-hearted and romantic, this play is as enchanting as the musical it inspired.

Sacred Harp, or shape note singing, is a tradition that dates back to our country’s founding. We gather regularly to sing with and for each other, with no accompanying instruments. What does it sound like? Nothing you’ve ever heard before. Tunes range in style from rousing and jubilant, to contemplative, to mournful. Ours is a tradition that emphasizes participation and we welcome you to come try it out.

Held on the second and fourth Sundays of every month from 2 to 4 pm at Bell Trace Health and Living Center.

Americana Showcase at the Player’s Pub. The Player’s Pub is a restaurant and music venue, with both a bar and an all-ages section. A variety of local and regional acts perform seven days a week. Visit website for the full schedule.

The Performing Arts Series offers the Bloomington community numerous opportunities to experience the talent of its local artists. Enjoy free, outdoor performances in venues throughout the city. Bring a lawn chair, a blanket and a picnic basket and become immersed in the sights and sounds of the Performing Arts Series. Bryan Park Concerts in Bryan Park are Sundays from 6:30-8 pm.

July 28 – Bottom Road Blues Band
August 4 TBD
August 11 – Kid Kazooey & the Ballroom Roustabouts
August 18 – Post Modern Jazz Quartet
August 25 – Krista Detor

Johnny Bennett – Vocals

Mike Stone – Piano

Performing standards from the Great American Songbook. They focus on the most well known and loved jazz standards from the 1950’s and 1960’s. All ages. No cover.