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Item Duration at Mansion
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Summary
Rosalyn Schwartz (b. 1952)
Big Red #1, 1999
oil on canvas
Illinois State Museum, 2023.5.5, Gift of the artist
Rosalyn Schwartz was born in St. Louis, MO in 1952. She studied at Washington University and Fontbonne College in St. Louis. Schwartz taught painting and drawing at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and West Virginia University in Morgantown. In 1988, Schwartz served as a Professor of Studio Arts in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where she taught for 20 years.
In Big Red, Schwartz gives us a space of dense, glowing red light overlayed with a matrix of black curling lines. This is an imagined space of light and organic form that carries many references. The curling lines are ordered like the decorative ironwork of a gate. They drip with humidity, like Spanish moss. But the gate leads only into a deep red space. Perhaps it is a cosmic reference to a dying sun, the red giants of astronomy, that engulf their solar system in low-density energy. Equally, it could suggest the passage into our own heart, our blood, our inner universe.
Item Duration at Mansion
Temporary