Art Teachers Highlighted in Indy Airport Exhibition

INDIANAPOLIS (March 21, 2017) – Spring and summer art exhibitions at the Indianapolis International Airport (IND) will feature the works of four Hoosier art educators, showing their visions in clay, stone, and paint.

The Indianapolis Airport Authority and the Arts Council of Indianapolis have selected Lesley Baker of the IUPUI Herron School of Art, Amy Brier of Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington, David Cunningham of Franklin College and Lisa Sears of Greenfield Central High School to exhibit their contemporary Indiana artwork from March 19 – July 16.

“These four professionals bring expertise in a diverse range of mediums to our airport art,” said Mario Rodriguez, executive director of the IAA. “To see their work in contemporary art, and to also know they are passing their knowledge on to cultivate other artists in our community, is inspiring.”

Each artist’s work will be on display beginning the week of March 19, 2017. The exhibitions are part of the IAA’s larger strategy to connect travelers to the local Indianapolis culture and community, providing a sense of place that reflects the personality of Indiana and the city.

“Parents and students don’t always realize that their art teachers are also active artists,” said Julia Moore, director of public art at the Arts Council of Indianapolis and organizer of the exhibitions. “We are showing four excellent local educators who have their own distinctive artistic statements.”

Public art displayed at the Indianapolis International Airport are curated in partnership with the Arts Council of Indianapolis. The IAA and Arts Council work collaboratively to review and select artwork reflective of the Indianapolis art community. As a result, new exhibitions are displayed every quarter, with up to 12 exhibitions presented each year.

Lesley Baker, an Indianapolis resident, is an Associate Professor of Ceramics at IUPUI’s Herron School of Art and Design. Baker takes inspiration from historical wallpaper, world currencies and ceramics of places and eras to create that is both simple and precious. Her altered natural flora and fauna installation, titled New Growth, asks viewers to look more closely at the changing world around them.

Amy Brier is a Smithville resident and stone sculptor teaching art at Ivy Tech Community College in Bloomington as well as at the annual Indiana Limestone Symposium in Ellettsville. Brier’s work, the Roliqueries series, features carved spheres made to be rolled over beds of sand to leave imprints of natural images like fish and leaves. While viewers will not be able to roll the works in her exhibition, a demonstration sand bed can be seen up close for those travelers visiting Concourse B.

David Cunningham, a resident of Indianapolis, is a painter and professor of Art at Franklin College where he teaches painting, design, ceramics and issues in contemporary art. Cunningham’s installation, titled Meditations, features a group of paintings of stones that not only call up memories of his boyhood, but also reveal the deep, almost spiritual relationship we as humans have with the earth’s ancient past.

Lisa Sears, a Brownsburg resident, is a painter and art teacher at Greenfield Central High School. Sear’s painting, Suffragette, is inspired by women’s history, and arranged as a series of one-foot-square canvases, similar to quilt blocks, that form a single artwork that pays homage to quilts and the role they played in the movement to allow women the right to vote.

To learn more about these artists and their work, visit www.ind.com/community/arts-program.