Posted December 06, 2023in Art News
Moberg Gallery’s 20th anniversary show is up through Jan. 6. The gallery is a grand expression of Des Moines’ elevated role in the arts scene. When TJ and Jackie Moberg opened two decades ago, the gallery represented five guys from greater Des Moines. The new show’s artists come from Barcelona,
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Posted November 01, 2023in Art News
Des Moines Art Center’s new show “Transform Any Room” is a call to everyone’s inner artist. A mish mash of crafts, weavings, assemblages and mixed media, “TAR” is designed to show its audience that decorating, collecting and shopping can be artistic self-revelations. Glittering beads, vibrant Azerbaijani carpets and cologne bottle
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Posted October 04, 2023in Art News
Des Moines Art Center Print Gallery’s exhibition “Double Take” attempts to make a photographer’s involvement as much a part of the medium as his subject. Curator Laura Burkhalter and guest curator Ben Easter (a superb photographer himself) selected pairs of images — “one of which is a staged or posed
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Posted September 06, 2023in Art News
One person’s new year is another’s equinox. The calendar new year comes with January, the fiscal new year in July, the farmer’s in March or April. In the art world, the new year begins in September, like the football season and the school year. Some, including Picasso, say that’s because
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Posted August 02, 2023in Art News
The great Kickapoo artist Pahponee (Snow Woman) taught this writer about the religious qualities of clay. After seeing a sacred white buffalo and a white buffalo calf, she started dreaming about white buffalo pottery. She knew nothing about ceramics but was so moved by her dreams and visions that she
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Posted July 05, 2023in Art News
Robert Moore is an enthralling artist, a great story, and a humbling writer. His hand-touched archival prints recount his personal struggles within the context of the historic ordeals of black manchildren desperately trying to grow up in America. His story is how art can become therapy for drug addiction and
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Posted May 31, 2023in Art News
The Des Moines Art Center’s Print Gallery is an underappreciated gem. Almost every show provides great lessons in history, culture and “there is nothing new under the sun” humility. “Rembrandt and His World” doubles down on all that. Born too late to be a true Renaissance man, the melancholy Dutchman
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Posted May 03, 2023in Art News
Chris Vance is Des Moines’ artist. His murals are seen all over town. His paintings are so popular that even before his new show, “Moderate Restraint” at Moberg Gallery, opened, more than 30 new works had been sold. “That’s confusing because his collectors buy several paintings at the same time.
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Posted April 05, 2023in Art News
Tom Jackson is a dazzling, versatile Iowa artist. He has worked in painting, photography and ink brush drawing. His abstraction works tend to become fascinated with geometrics. His realist works hang their hats in a wind-grieved America with which the artist seems nostalgically engaged. Carnivals, junkyards, highways, theme parks, motels,
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Posted March 01, 2023in Art News
Jeff Fleming is retiring from his directorship at the Des Moines Art Center in late April. That makes the new 75th anniversary exhibition his swan song. Because he came to Des Moines a quarter-century ago as a curator, we asked him how involved he was with the show, whose curators
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