Susan E. Picinich, Dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communication, has been working hard on her loom this spring. As a member of the Weavers Guild of Greater Baltimore, Dean Picinich will have pieces in the Anniversary show this summer.
My fiber art will be on display in the Weavers Guild of Greater Baltimore 70th Anniversary Show from July 5 to August 31, 2019. There is an opening reception on July 11 from 6:30-8:00 p.m. with demonstrations of weaving and spinning. The show is at the Baltimore County Arts Guild, 1101 Maiden Choice Lane in Baltimore 21229 www.bcartsguild.org
As a costume designer, the fiber arts have always been part of my world through sewing, dyeing, surface embellishment, and clothing related crafts. In graduate school at the University of Michigan I took Weaving and Fabric Design with Sherri Smith. I continued learning to weave as a new Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University with Art Professor Jo Sanders. But my fiber work took a backseat as my academic and free-lance design work intensified. Now I am working as an artist again, anticipating my new faculty role. In the past year I joined the weaver’s guild, took workshops, and made Shadow Weave towels to enter in the 70th Anniversary Challenge Heirlooms category. Now that I’m back in the swing of weaving, my next project is a series of sculptural bodices or corsets representing female archetypes. The pieces will be woven of rags and shaped on the loom using the pulled-warp process.
Wing’s Over Wall Street’s first contemporary art installation ‘Close to you’: A Tribute to Karen Condron by Jim Condron, Adjunct Professor in the Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education.
Just like me, vintage bicycle, Karen Condron’s clothing, 72x65x10 inches, 2019
“Through adversity we find our heroes” – Steve Gleason
Karen Condron Modeling, circa 1965
Karen Condron and son, Jim, circa 1973
‘Close to You,’ an art installation to honor the memory of Karen Condron, will be featured at the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual Wings Over Wall Street Benefit Gala. The stirring exhibition includes ten sculptural installations by her son, the artist Jim Condron. Karen Condron passed away in July of 2018 after a nearly eight-year battle with ALS. She was the 2015 winner of the MDA Spirit Award and embodied all that the award represents.
Moondust in your hair, vintage crib, Karen Condron’s clothing, 2019
To make the sculptural works, Jim Condron combines his mother’s clothing and shoes with materials such as a bicycle, a crib, mannequin arms, yarrow and straw to create intangible forms that express his mother’s ebullience throughout her life and the challenges of the disease. Each piece expresses the complexities of nostalgia and deep grief. The exhibition will also include personal photographs and ephemera that openly depict his mother’s joys, and her losses as ALS progressed through her body.
Every time you walk by, Karen Condron’s shoes, straw, yarrow, 2019
All the girls in town, Karen Condron’s clothes, straw, yarrow, 2019
Jim Condron’s works of art honor Karen’s life and were created to raise awareness of the life-threatening effects of muscular dystrophy and muscle-debilitating diseases, such as ALS, and of MDA’s important mission to find a cure.
BIOGRAPHY: Originally from Long Island, NY and Connecticut, Jim Condron earned his MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art (2004) and a BA in Art and English from Colby College, Waterville, ME (1992). He also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1993-’95). Since 1993, Condron has studied with Rohini Ralby, the artist’s mentor. His work appears nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as well as in corporate, university, public and private collections. Jim Condron is adjunct faculty in the Department of Art + Design, Art History, Art Education at Towson University.
Artist Statement: Condron’s pieces express humor, absurdity and beauty through the combination and interaction of everyday objects, castoff remnants and paint. Each piece is titled with a textual fragment from a story that intends to add to the work’s rhetoric rather than naming or defining it. Titles are applied to the pieces the same way Condron assembles materials and are appropriated from literature by an array of great authors such as Don DeLillo, James Salter, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and others. https://jcondron.com/
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As a costume designer, the fiber arts have always been part of my world through sewing, dyeing, surface embellishment, and clothing related crafts. In graduate school at the University of Michigan I took Weaving and Fabric Design with Sherri Smith. I continued learning to weave as a new Assistant Professor at Western Illinois University with Art Professor Jo Sanders. But my fiber work took a backseat as my academic and free-lance design work intensified. Now I am working as an artist again, anticipating my new faculty role. In the past year I joined the weaver’s guild, took workshops, and made Shadow Weave towels to enter in the 70th Anniversary Challenge Heirlooms category. Now that I’m back in the swing of weaving, my next project is a series of sculptural bodices or corsets representing female archetypes. The pieces will be woven of rags and shaped on the loom using the pulled-warp process.
