History is the blood of Iowa October, the season to slaughter pigs, commune with the dead and honor ancestors. Appropriately, three thoughtful artists share unique visions of history with Des Moines this month.

Will Mentor's inspiration came to him while he was driving in Iowa. That lucky coincidence has led to regular career stops at Karolyn Sherwood Gallery between the two coasts. Mentor, who hangs his hat at MIT, is a painter of exponential analogies, commenting simultaneously on the historical relationships between technology and nature, on the methodologies of landscape painting and on the development of Op Art.

Originally his "Bionic Farm" series took form in straight-line paintings using the colors of corporations that converted Iowa from virgin prairie to biotech laboratory. As much as any contemporary artist, Mentor is adding a "post-industrial" chapter to art chronicles of the American Midwest, picking up brushes dropped by Tom Benton and his Regionalist minions. Mentor's recent show at Sherwood developed new styles and analogies. "Feral swirls" replaced straight lines and paid tribute to the Op Art ancestors. On a superficial level, these look like psychedelic computer art. Look closer and brush strokes betray more complicated technique.

"Flipping and duplicating on the computer takes 30 seconds. The painting takes six months, and that's with two assistants working full time," Mentor explained of a process that involves four layers, taping off with pliable automobile striping tape, gesso; and hand painting in both oil and acrylic.

His interest in Op Art is more scientific than hippie.

"Op Art tires the eye," Mentor says. "It beats up the rods and cones leaving the impression of an after-image on the brain. Duchamps' 'Roto Leaf' was an attack joke on Op Art, reducing it to a visual pun. When the Freudians wrote about Op Art, it acquired their vocabulary. The '60s added psychedelics. Then computer art became the last of the lineage of things tiring the eye. So I started asking, 'What happens when that happens, in this complete historical context?'"

Mentor creates 3-D illusions by adding earth tones next to bright acrylics. Because the earth tones are the last painted on the canvas, he flips the order of traditional landscape painting.

"Abstraction has been expunged by analogy, but I love analogy," he says.
That is clear in his use of colors, which employ the signage of rural Iowa: "true blue" Garst (and the orange hunting jackets that Mentor remembers Garst giving to their good customers), the blue on blue of Henry Ford tractors, and the cornfield colors of John Deere and Pioneer.

Says Mentor: "Agricultural Iowa has four layers. There was virgin prairie, then animals traced trails of convenience on that landscape. Then came Europeans with their horse-drawn plows who cleared the land and drained it and left more dramatic marks. Finally, the Industrial Age brought mechanized grids of townships, then hybrids, chemicals and genetics introduced new analogies."

Historical painting takes traditional form at the State of Iowa Historical Museum and the Salisbury House. Mary Kline-Misol's "Alice Cycle" brings together, for the first time, two decades of the artist's paintings of both the historical Alice Liddell, and the amazing adventures of the Lewis Carroll literary character she inspired. Like Alice, Kline-Misol channels the power of strangeness from the far side of Wonderland.

Assembled from dozens of private collections, this is an astounding array of portraits such that the museum director told us Kline-Misol broke down when she saw them all together.

"They are her babies," says Curt Simmons.

They are also the highlight of the museum's "Victorian Iowa" exhibit, two months of parlor games (including chess boards made by Des Moines Public School students), teas, talks, storytelling and hat making. The Lewis Carroll Society will conference here and at Salisbury House, where Kline-Misol's collected portraits of the wives of Henry VIII are exhibited. Those subjects also channel from beyond, but they are grownup girls without the aura of innocence. All Kline-Misol's work is best observed in October, when souls cross the bar and broadcast the sinister urges of otherness. Through November.

Ledelle Moe tells tales of historical upheaval with elemental media and metaphor. The South African is a hot artist. Her name keeps company with expressions like "major contemporary." Interpreters of her large-scale sculptures see timely commentary on the willful destruction of monuments, from the World Trade Center towers to synagogues in Gaza. We found her last week wearing a tool belt and heavy gloves, reassembling two tons of molded concrete, broken down into more than 100 hinged pieces for their cross country trip to Drake's Anderson Gallery.

Her exhibition includes a ruin of three giant heads and a baker's dozen of small ones. They have never been exhibited together before, and one of the large pieces debuts in Des Moines. Moe told us that one of the heads is modeled after a photograph of a young Liberian who was murdered by Charles Taylor's rebels.

"Originally I thought he was alive. Looking closer I saw just a severed head. His expression was so serene, despite his horrible death, it reminded me of a feeling I have of personal loss. Big immovable objects are like heavy memories of things you can't get past," she says, adding that she lost several friends in South African riots.

She insisted that the inspirations for the other heads remain anonymous. "It's important that I didn't know them, yet that I felt all this empathy for them," she says.
She works in concrete and dirty motor oil for symbolic reasons.

"Concrete's such a strange material. Limestone and sand come from deep in the earth, get separated and then go under these extremes of heat to be put back together as cement. Yet it is so familiar to us, because we're surrounded by it in all urban settings," she says, before mentioning that she recently lost her mother.

"When we lose our heroes, we all try to reconstruct them in our own way. People live through memories of other people. On this planet, that is," she clarifies. Through Nov. 4.

Big grant

"I Love It, But It Doesn't Match My Sofa" at the Iowa Genealogical Society included a few works each by Sarah Grant, Jason Scott Hoffman, Jeni Johnson, Andrea Kraft, Michael Lane, Rachel Merrill, Anthony Pontius, Jeffrey Thompson and E. J. Wickes, along with sundry furniture. Grant brought wonderful big canvasses that the artist normally wouldn't show in Des Moines. Her reputation here, for works on paper and for smaller pieces, is so well established that she shows her big works and canvasses only in the Palm Springs and Santa Fe markets. She explains that "The Moon and the Vessel on the Midnight Prairie" was autobiographical.

"I am the red vessel," Grant says. "I'm 51 now, the woman in menopause. Too much information."

Andrea Kraft's new collage deconstructs a female portrait in which everything except the foot looked Gothic. E.J. Wickes brought some chess puns that played with famous artists and Jason Hoffman showed interesting self portraits. All the sofas looked happy.

Little big shows

It's the best of both worlds for music fans - if you can get tickets. The Des Moines Art Center Music Series is filled with musicians used to packing big concert halls. In Des Moines they will play theaters as small as the Art Center's Levitt Auditorium and no bigger than Drake's Sheslow Auditorium. The lineup starts with Jon Nakamatsu and the German trio Jacques Thibaud. Kuss, another German group with a reputation for stirring classical fervor in the young, and the Aspen Ensemble follow. The Art Center's biggest coup combines the Brentano String Quartet, oft regarded as the best of their generation, with revered violist Maria Lambros. We are blessed because Gilda Biel is a well-connected impresario and her organization is generously endowed by music loving angels. So get your tickets before they sell out.

Now boarding...

Des Moines Art Center's reopening "To All Gates" is a stunning demo of both restraint and employee morale management. Imagine having all the resources of the museum's secret vaults at your disposal to accesorize a room. Even those of us without the decorator gene can get excited about that. The amazing thing is that so many curators used minimalist discretion. The Anna K. Meredith Gallery, for instance, has just two pieces - Alberto Giacometti's "Man Pointing" and Mark Rothko's "Light Over Gray." Through Feb. 19.

Orson Welles once said that movie stars can aspire only to a semblance of the immortality that Jean Renoir bestowed on his blooming models. The Faulconer Gallery's astonishing Impressionist exhibition glorifies several of them: Julie Manet, the only daughter of Berthe Morisot (Renoir's co-star in the show) and Edvard Manet's brother; Lucie Hessel, Vuillard's model and the wife a famous gallery owner; Germaine (so famous she had no last name), who was Renoir's discovery from the Folies Bergere. These identifications are a small detail in a dazzling show, but so was the meaning of "Rosebud." Through Dec. 11.

While visiting Thomas Jackson's studio in Cedar Rapids, Karolyn Sherwood found some old photographs the artist had forgotten. She persuaded Jackson to resurrect them, and he began pairing them with ironic partners. Later he painted versions of the pairings. In one, a man ties his necktie against six landscapes that indicate different comfort levels for men in suits and ties. Opening reception Oct. 13. Through Nov. 12.

Valley Junction's Gallery Night is Oct. 14 with Olson-Larsen Gallery premiering new works by salty ceramist John Beckelman and bright-colored painters Sharon Booma and Jan Zelfer-Redmond. Through Nov. 19.

Moberg Gallery's "Cohesive Pursuit" is a joint exhibition of new works and collaborative pieces by abstractionists Edward Blaze Brafford and Shawn Wolter. Through October.

"Attention Deficit" promises new paintings by Christine Mullane, dealing with "cowboys, snowboarders, topless dancers, bomb pops, canned corn, Buddha, veiled women, the Taj Mahal, geisha girls, the Dalai Lama and Marlon Brando," plus a film by Mike Gustafson and collage & magnet art by a group of Kansas City artists. Oct. 28 at Art Dive.

Salisbury House hosts an a capella choir from Norway at Central Presbyterian Church, Oct. 28, $25. That concert is part of a Nordic chamber music weekend that also includes a concert on the Salisbury Steinway and a catered wine dinner, $100 for all events. 274-1777.

The Des Moines Project showcases new work by Vanja Borcic. Also at DMP, Arthur Martinez' paintings show a serious eye for both portraiture and irony: "Country Road" is a sweet visual pun on the "grass is always greener," with cows lingering longingly behind a gate that leads from their green fields to an utterly bleak mud-scape.

Brent A. Holland's figure-drawing course at Iowa State University is having trouble finding nude models. The school is paying $7 an hour for clothed models and $10 an hour for unclothed models. (515) 294-4768. CV

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