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Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
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Erin Vigneau-Dimick’s graduate class revealed their pottery exhibit at the Fuller Dome, featuring brief speeches by the students and several wall panels full of information on the history and origins of this pottery. Vigneau-Dimick is executive curator of the university museum, from which the artifacts in this exhibit were taken. The theme of the exhibit was “Earth, Water, Fire”, reflecting the elements needed for the creation of pottery. “We have a partnership with the Fuller Dome,” Vigneau-Dimick said. “The gallery was created through a grant from the Meridian Society.” The exhibit features pottery from indigenous American civilizations, African cultures and Mediterranean peoples across a wide range of time periods. Abbie Schaefer, co-curator and museum studies grad student, wishes to use the exhibit to breathe life back into the vessels and uncover deep connections between ourselves and the Earth. Schaefer said that today’s show would not be possible without preliminary work done by the class
this,” Eckles said. “It was both very difficult, but one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.” John Justice, another co-curator, focused on the African portion of the exhibit. One of the larger items in the exhibit, a spiked Lobi vessel, was one with which he worked very closely. Justice said that it was meant to protect medicines and water in the context of its original culture. “Coming from a heavy scientific background,” Justice said, “it’s fascinating to see that the way they built these pots served to keep any and all contaminants out of it. So it wasn’t only protecting the water on the biological side, but it was also serving a spiritual purpose in family shrines.” Laura Strand, a professor in the art and design department, attended the curator talk. Strand teaches courses involving indigo dyeing, screen printing and weaving, among other things. Strand said she was particularly interested in the talk because her husband is a potter, and found her favorite exhibit to be that of the “whistling” pot, a vessel which imitates the sound of an animal when poured. “I’m so excited about this notion of the pouring ves-
The Mississippian ceramics from 800-1600 C.E were created to carry water, medicine, and to store items.
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of 2019. “Because of the pandemic,” Schaefer said, “there was kind of a gap in how and what we were able to present … this was the first year that we were able to actually pull from the museum’s permanent collection and put something on display in person for people.” Schaefer said that they had a collection of the class of 2019’s documents, most of which were prototypes for the exhibit that would have been set up before the pandemic. “They started with the big ideas, and we kind of took those and ran with it,” Schaefer said. Emily Eckles, a PhD student in the history department, said that the course was an incredibly hands-on experience. Students involved themselves in hand picking artifacts and designing labels and historical supplements, agreeing with Vigneau-Dimick’s comment that the class was an incredibly involved one. Eckles said that the program students met twice a week for class, but many came in an hour earlier or stayed an hour later than their class times required because of the immense work ahead of them. “This kind of feels like a reward for doing all those previous courses leading up to
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sel, the notion of an engineering quality … that they discovered. Clearly from the images and the sounds that we heard, they developed a lot of sound mechanisms. It’s very cool,” Strand said. Strand said she was incredibly impressed by the cycle of development and experimentation that the makers of these pieces of pottery went through to produce the items in the exhibit today. “It’s so wonderful to see that purely artistic, even engineering research, that makers go through, not simply making pots to use on a daily basis, but looking for ways for them to have meaning, to have sound, to have engagements that would be meaningful in average daily lives as an entertainment form,”Strand said. The exhibit was on display in the Fuller Dome through Wednesday, Aug. 31.
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