Looking at clouds from both sides, now

A storm is brewing in the Grunwald Gallery.

Three massive dark clouds are hovering just inside the gallery’s entrance, raining black streams onto a spiky black lawn. But no one is getting wet. Together with a crew of gallery assistants who are graduate and undergraduate students in the Indiana University Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design, artist Lauren Fensterstock is installing a storm of her own making. The sculptural clouds are embellished with a mosaic of crystals and gemstones, strings of which stream down as rain. The ground is covered with jewels, glass puddles, and a carpet of black paper grass.

One of eleven artists featured in the show “Re:Visit | Celebrating a Decade of the McKinney Visiting Artist Series,” the Portland, Maine-based Fensterstock has returned to Bloomington to build “The Unending,” a reimagining of her installation for the Smithsonian’s “Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020.” At the Renwick, and in a subsequent incarnation at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk, Virginia, the piece incorporated a sculptural comet with a 46-foot tail and was titled “The totality of time lusters the dusk.”

Leaning into what she considers the experimental ethos fostered by the college art gallery, Fensterstock, who is represented by the Claire Oliver Gallery in New York, has removed the comet, and with it, taken the piece in a different direction: less a meditation on the “totality of time” and perhaps more about the storms we’re weathering daily, and how to cope with them.

When it debuted at the Renwick during the COVID-19 pandemic, the work was one of four pieces created by American artists working across craft traditions to “contemplate what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape” (Smithsonian). Fensterstock says that she drew inspiration from “The Book of Miracles,” an illustrated 16^th-century German manuscript that traced cosmological and meteorological phenomena to the dawn of time and assigned them to key events in Western civilization.

Connecting the dots in that way seems like a very human thing to do. Confronted with the vastness of the universe, we have been known to devise rubrics that right-size things to our scale. Nature often exists for us in a relational way: for Romantic novelists, for example, natural imagery or phenomena stand in for the human condition. A thunderstorm, for example, functions as a metaphor for rising turmoil in the plotline.

Turning to the natural world for correspondences with the human was also a pillar of 18th- and 19th- century landscape design, research into which has been another source of inspiration for Fensterstock's own secret gardens. A natural or contrived cavern transformed with shells and crystals, the device of the grotto, the artist discovered, split the difference between the natural and the man-made, offering just enough wildness to ignite the imagination. 

Fensterstock’s glittering clouds reprise the encrusted surface of the traditional garden grotto – the large wooden, steel, and cement forms are adorned with a mosaic of glass, onyx, obsidian, quartz, tourmaline, and Swarovski crystal, among other materials. The deliberation required to place the tiny pieces into the mosaic is only amplified by the provenance of the gems. The artist sources many of them from Wolf E. Myrow, a third-generation wholesale jewelry supplier in Providence, Rhode Island, the onetime capital of the costume jewelry industry. Many of the vintage gems she buys there are factory overstock, manufactured and packaged in Europe by workers who had recently survived World War II, with whom she feels a connection every time she opens an envelope of stones. Mosaic by definition contains a healing message, she says, in that disparate parts add up to something whole.

But navigating the universe is ongoing work, and the artist welcomes the opportunity to dismantle and reconstruct her work in a different place and time, to reveal new truths. Bloomington’s abundant connections to Tibetan Buddhism and the university’s robust collections in this area and others have provided fresh context for “The Unending.”

During the installation, Fensterstock took breaks to view materials at IU’s Lilly Library related to mandalas, black holes, and lunar cycles; on another day, she visited the Tibetan Mongolian Buddhist Cultural Center. Participating in the prayer session there, she made a connection to the imagery of her piece. She was reminded that her own daily spiritual practice involves reciting a text (during a mandala offering) that refers to features of the cosmos as “vast and extensive clouds of offerings. I realized that this piece is like the raining down of offerings,” she says. “Storms will always come. It is our work to find the beauty in the opportunity we have and to offer back the majesty of precious human experience.”

When it goes on view next month, Fensterstock’s “The Unending” will enter into conversation with works by ten other international artists who have at one time over the last decade been guests of the McKinney Visiting Artist Series at the Eskenazi School. Grunwald Gallery Director Linda Tien curated the selection that will also include works by Cappy Counard, David Hytone, Dakota Mace, Tetsuya Noda, Yvonne Osei, Sunny A. Smith, Chelsea Thompto, Roos van Haaften, Martin Venezky, and Sunkoo Yuh. The endowed series has brought eleven artists, curators, and other visual art professionals to the Eskenazi School annually for residencies ranging from three days to six weeks. During their time in Bloomington, the McKinney guests offer workshops, critiques, and one-on-one mentorship; engage in creative collaborations with students and faculty; and present a public lecture.

Her experience as a visitor has been inspiring, says Fensterstock, both during her original residency and upon her return. “I learn as much as I bring,” says the artist, a lecturer in jewelry and metals at the Rhode Island School of Design.

“Re:Visit | Celebrating a Decade of McKinney Visiting Artists” opens Friday, September 5 with a panel discussion from 5 - 6 p.m. in Fine Arts 015 featuring three of the exhibiting artists: Cappy Counard, Yvonne Osei, and Martin Venezky.  The exhibition opens with a reception from 6 - 8 p.m. in the Grunwald Gallery (Fine Arts 110) following the panel. The show remains on view through November 14.

The Eskenazi School is grateful to Dr. Meredith McKinney (B.A. ’65 and M.D. ’68) and Mrs. Elsa Luise Barthel McKinney (B.A. ’65) for their love of the arts and their generous support in endowing the McKinney Visiting Artist Series. A full listing of guests of the McKinney Visiting Artist Series from its inception is available here.

The Grunwald Gallery of Art in the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design presents contemporary works by professional and student artists in a special exhibition format. Exhibitions incorporate art from a variety of contemporary genres and approaches and can be experimental or traditional. The gallery is conceived as a visual art laboratory with artists participating in the installation of their works and interaction with students and the public is an integral part of gallery programming. The Grunwald Gallery frequently collaborates with artists, scientists, and scholars to produce exhibits that interpret visual art in a broader humanities and interdisciplinary context.

For more information please contact

Yaël Ksander
Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design
(812) 855-5512
yksander@iu.edu