Current | Symbolic Seekers

Seekers look to the cosmos, religion, nature, science, to themselves, their humanity, and often combine one, two, or more of these into their calculus for answers. This exhibit of symbolic seekers brings together groups of works by known and unknown visionaries who took to the arts to explore questions of the universe. And some of them look up their wife’s skirt!

Clara Belle Dunham (1901-1967), a member of the First Methodist Church in Glendale, California, became an expert on the origins and variations of the cross and created over 100 ink drawings. A group of mid-century colored pencil drawings, known as “The Earl Drawings,” explores Christianity as prismatic light and plumbing pipes. Leon D’Francelay (1918-2003), a former guard at the Metropolitan Museum, combines Christian scripture with a bizarre underwater duel between sea life and an aquatic dragon. Victor Gatto (1893-1965) also explores the ocean floor in a view that tricks the mind into thinking the water above is the sky. John Roeder (1877-1964) looked into the expanding universe in the Traveling Observatory. A group of four sets of nine African American playing cards from the turn of the 20th century, while familiar in concept, has unexpected variations that add mystery. A group of surrealist spacescapes reminds us of works by Escher and Abercrombie. Viola Heller (1906 - 2003), a person with schizophrenia working from an assisted living facility, provides us with the reinforcement of her identity by working her name into her boldly worked drawings of American Indians. Also seeking was Bill Anthony, who explored his fetish with vulnerable women, where he posed his wife in compromising situations in a series of pen and ink drawings. And Isabel Antonia Giampietro-Knoll (1917-2010) provides a large, distorted glass disc with black wave patterns that looks like a rhythmic record of radio waves from afar.