On Friday, Oct. 11 from 7 to 9 p.m., Grinnell community members will have the opportunity to see student artwork exhibited in a unique setting — an old corn crib on a farm a mile away from campus.
This unusual gallery, called Grin Cupola, was created by Joe Tuggle Lacina, whose family has lived on the farm for five generations. “Hodgepodge: A Show on Formlessness,” curated by Amy Kan `27, is the gallery’s first in-person exhibition. Attendees can expect to enjoy not only the art but also refreshments and a musical performance by Collin Marshall, Yudora Petraitis and Marley Pozniak at 8 p.m.
Six students are showing their work in the show — Sophia Vikesland `27, Ethan Versh `27, Liv Hage `25, Gwyn Redding `25, Evie Redding `25 and Tobias Lincoln `25. Their artwork spans a wide range of mediums, including paintings, digital projections and ceramics.
Lacina grew up on the farm and said that it has gone through several iterations.
“It was full agricultural production with cows, pigs, chickens the whole lot. And then that all shifted to growing organic row crops and CSA [Community Supported Agriculture]. And now we’re doing conventional farming, and we have a lot of acres of hay,” he said.
Lacina is a career artist who started his own company last year. He is currently focusing on public art projects, working on a series of six concrete and steel sculptures commissioned by the city of Indianola, Iowa. He is also involved in a collaborative process of making a Veteran’s Monument for Central Park.
Before Grin Cupola, Lacina founded the Grinnell Artist’s Residency in 2006, which later became Grin City Collective. This endeavor saw over 40 artists come to stay and work on the farm over the 12 years that the Collective was active, as Lacina and his father had renovated several of the farm spaces to transform them into artist residences and studio spaces.
Since the end of Grin City Collective, Lacina said that “we’re sort of resetting things with a reduced amount of programming and having an informal, small gallery set up out here in the corn crib.”
In founding Grin Cupola, Lacina said he was motivated by “wanting to develop community and share some of the spaces and some of the structures that I’ve made out here.”
Lacina said renovating the Cupola to transform it from a farm space to an art space involved “a lot of questioning the norm and questioning why we decide to view art in these conventional types of ways, whether it’s a dark room or a white box gallery. I think it’s having it be what it is, and just have a rawness and eccentric-ness to it and letting that shine through.”
Lacina said that Grin Cupola will host one gallery exhibition like Hodgepodge every year and that he hopes to work with students again in the future.
Kan first heard about Grin Cupola through an email that was sent to the Art Student Educational Policy Committee (SEPC). She started working for Lacina as a studio assistant over the summer before he approached her with the prospect of curating a show. She said, “Joe has been giving me a lot of freedom with what I want to do with it. The space and the theme and the artists involved were all things that Joe let me choose of my own volition.”
Kan chose the exhibition’s theme after having been introduced to the idea of formlessness through a class on surrealism in which she studied the artist Georges Bataille. “I wanted to learn more about it and think more about this weird, kind of wobbly, unstable topic.”
She found the participating student artists by reaching out to people whose work she had seen in Smith Gallery shows, student publications or on social media.
Vikesland said that Kan has hosted some artist meetings in the lead up to the exhibition, to keep all the student artists informed about the timeline of the exhibition. Vikesland said she was excited for the opening and especially for the live music component.
Several of the student artists involved emphasized how they viewed the opportunity to exhibit their work at Grin Cupola as an exciting and unusual opportunity.
Lincoln said, “I didn’t take the idea seriously of exhibiting my own work in a gallery until my professor of this hybrid Media Studio Arts seminar really recommended that as students, we take advantage of the opportunity to show our work in a gallery that isn’t directly connected to Grinnell as an institution.” He said he hopes the exhibition inspires other students to seek out chances to show their work.
Versh said, “I’m excited to see Grinnell art in a very Grinnell space, kind of owning its identity, like formlessness in a barn, in a cornfield. It’s this super unique crossover. I don’t think we think of Grinnell as a super artsy place. It’s not an art school or anything like that. But I think there’s a lot of really talented people, and people are passionate about it, so I hope people show up.”
Kan said that she has been impressed by “the caliber of work that people are producing here” and said that “I’m excited to expose student work from the college to a larger scale community.”
