Friday, August 19, 2016

Ball State Alumni art show at the Hoosier Salon Carmel

September 10,2016, from 5-9 PM, will be the opening for an invitational show at the lovely Hoosier Salon Gallery, 22 North Rangeline, Carmel. This month-long show will be open through the first week in October. The work of five artists and craftsmen who have been lifelong friends and who began their art careers at Ball State back in the 1960s will be blended into one exhibition.

We have all spent our lives showing our art.
Alan Patrick began his career as a potter with John Peterson at Bethel Pottery. I first met them at some college parties at their apartments and later at Bethel Pike and I met many other artists and while I was not making rustic furniture then, I was dabbling in photography. The art scene at Ball State provided me with a lifelong appreciation for the arts and a ringside seat to its production.

Alan and I found ourselves in 1969 at Southside High school in Muncie where he was an Art Teacher and I was an English teacher. As teachers, we were tasked with monitoring the hallways between classes. The sports teams were the Rebels with the flagpole flying a large confederate flag and we were dealing with an evenly matched student body of blacks and redneck whites who were bent upon fighting with each other in that turbulent year. Alan and I had lunchroom duty with a couple of police officers and we tried to keep the peace. The blacks wanted the flag removed and the whites were determined to keep it flying.
Sound familiar?

Alan went on to go out on his own with pottery and then with painting. I am flattered to be in this show with him.
John Peterson was a city boy from Skokie, who was always very inclusive and gracious and after finding myself hiding with my date on the roof of his Jefferson Street apartment in Muncie in 1965 after the police raided his party, we became friends and I was often invited to play poker at Bethel Pike, which was an art colony that attracted a rotating group of artists and freethinkers back in those days in the sixties which provided me with a stimulating alternative to PreVietmam stolid America.
I remember long discussions interrupted by an unloading of the kiln, the smell of mud and the magical forming of pots on the wheel.

Alan and John always maintained an orderly beautiful calm Zen environment that they maintain to this day.
Although John Reynolds and Bruce Neckar were part of this same group and scene, I did not come to know them well until the last ten years or so, but we have become good friends due to our association with the art scene in Noblesville, where we all live. We have done a number of shows together, pooling our work in displays as The Nickel Plate boys with our Purdue graduate friend John Bundy.

Bruce has worked hard to put this show together and it will be a pleasure to be in the company of these highly talented artists and lifelong friends. We credit Ball State University with bringing us all together.









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