[bed shoe home]
Champaign-Urbana is facing a crisis in housing for low-income families and the under-sheltered. To bring this issue into sharper focus, The University Y’s Art @ the Y program, in collaboration with The School of Art and Design and The School of Social Work, initiated BED SHOE HOME, a community-based art action organized by nationally known artist Jane Gilmor, who has maintained a socially-engaged art practice since the late 80s.The project was funded by a fellowship from The Institute For Advanced Study George A. Miller Visiting Scholar Program.
For BED SHOE HOME Gilmor was in-residence on campus for October, 2016 (Domestic Violence Month) working in area drop-in centers, soup kitchens and homeless residency programs including Courage Connection, Daily Bread, and The Phoenix Center. Workshops in metal embossing, journaling, handmade books, as well as video and audio interviewing were part of a number of activities involved in this dialogue between the University and those disenfranchised from the larger community. The project culminates with the exhibition of a large walk-in book covered with images and writings on metal from participants.
BED SHOE HOME opens Thursday January 26th from 5-7 pm at the University Y Gallery at Wright and Chalmers on central campus.
Gilmor will give a public presentation about the project Wednesday January 25 at 4:00 in Knight Auditorium in the Spurlock Museum on campus. Using the images and words of participants, Gilmor will discuss how this project intends to give a voice to those marginalized and stereotyped in their own community while also providing participants access to nontraditional art forms and encouraging the use of imagination as a survival tool. It is Gilmor’s belief that art can make meaning of one’s experiences as well as providing a critique of our culture.
For BED SHOE HOME Gilmor was in-residence on campus for October, 2016 (Domestic Violence Month) working in area drop-in centers, soup kitchens and homeless residency programs including Courage Connection, Daily Bread, and The Phoenix Center. Workshops in metal embossing, journaling, handmade books, as well as video and audio interviewing were part of a number of activities involved in this dialogue between the University and those disenfranchised from the larger community. The project culminates with the exhibition of a large walk-in book covered with images and writings on metal from participants.
BED SHOE HOME opens Thursday January 26th from 5-7 pm at the University Y Gallery at Wright and Chalmers on central campus.
Gilmor will give a public presentation about the project Wednesday January 25 at 4:00 in Knight Auditorium in the Spurlock Museum on campus. Using the images and words of participants, Gilmor will discuss how this project intends to give a voice to those marginalized and stereotyped in their own community while also providing participants access to nontraditional art forms and encouraging the use of imagination as a survival tool. It is Gilmor’s belief that art can make meaning of one’s experiences as well as providing a critique of our culture.
[jane gilmor]
Jane Gilmor’s art is concerned with social issues, found situations, and psychological narrative. From The 1976 All-American Glamour Kitty Pageant, to her 70's and 80's photo tableaux of cat-masked Isadora Duncan’s in the ruins of Greece and the bowling alleys and Laundromats of Iowa, to her thirty years of socially engaged work in shelters and hospitals, her search is for those entanglements of image, language and space through which we try to locate our own identity. Gilmor’s work is an amalgam of intuitive responses to personal experience and cultural critiques. Jane Gilmor has exhibited internationally for four decades. A thorough discussion of her career is considered in the recent publication of Jane Gilmor: I’ll be Back for the Cat by art historian Joy Sperling and published by AIR Gallery in NYC in 2012.
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New Art Examiner and is included in books including Lucy Lippard’s OVERLAY: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory; and Broude and Gerrard’s The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s History and Impact (Abrams, 1993); and Pioneer Feminists: Women Who Changed America, 1963-1976, B. Love (University of Illinois Press, 2006).
In 2011 she was one of five artists nationally selected for a Tanne Foundation Award for her career achievements. Gilmor has received an NEA Visual Artist's Fellowship, a 2003 Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal, a McKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, London, and at The McDowell Colony. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Blind at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, The Architecture of Migration, at Long Island University in Brooklyn and (Un)Seen Work, a year-long community based project at Grinnell College in Iowa. She is currently in The Kochi Biennale, in Kochi, India.
The 2017 exhibition BED SHOE HOME: Poverty and Homelessness in a Midwestern University Town, is the culmination of her socially engaged project of the same name funded by a grant from the Institute for Advanced Studies MillerComm Visiting Scholars program at The University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Created while working in soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and domestic violence victims’ residency programs, the exhibitions focuses on a huge walk-in book covered with messages on metal from area disenfranchised and under sheltered residents.
Jane Gilmor attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and has a B.S. from Iowa State University in Ames and an MFA and MA from The School of Art and Art History, The University of Iowa in Iowa City. She is an Emeritus Professor of Art at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where she taught from 1974-2012.
Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The New Art Examiner and is included in books including Lucy Lippard’s OVERLAY: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory; and Broude and Gerrard’s The Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970’s History and Impact (Abrams, 1993); and Pioneer Feminists: Women Who Changed America, 1963-1976, B. Love (University of Illinois Press, 2006).
In 2011 she was one of five artists nationally selected for a Tanne Foundation Award for her career achievements. Gilmor has received an NEA Visual Artist's Fellowship, a 2003 Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal, a McKnight Interdisciplinary Fellowship, and residency fellowships in Ireland, Italy, London, and at The McDowell Colony. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Blind at A.I.R. Gallery in New York, The Architecture of Migration, at Long Island University in Brooklyn and (Un)Seen Work, a year-long community based project at Grinnell College in Iowa. She is currently in The Kochi Biennale, in Kochi, India.
The 2017 exhibition BED SHOE HOME: Poverty and Homelessness in a Midwestern University Town, is the culmination of her socially engaged project of the same name funded by a grant from the Institute for Advanced Studies MillerComm Visiting Scholars program at The University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Created while working in soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and domestic violence victims’ residency programs, the exhibitions focuses on a huge walk-in book covered with messages on metal from area disenfranchised and under sheltered residents.
Jane Gilmor attended The School of The Art Institute of Chicago and has a B.S. from Iowa State University in Ames and an MFA and MA from The School of Art and Art History, The University of Iowa in Iowa City. She is an Emeritus Professor of Art at Mount Mercy University in Cedar Rapids, Iowa where she taught from 1974-2012.