Kresge exhibit highlights use of wood

By Casey Nesterowich | Originally Published: 03/31/10 8:01pm |Modified: 03/31/10 8:13pm | No comments

For more than 5,000 years, wood has been used in almost every culture to produce unique art.

Beginning March 12, the Kresge Art Museum debuted an exhibit entitled Wood Into Art after collaborating with MSU’s Department of Forestry to execute a small exhibit displaying a wide range of art using wood as the key element.

Kresge Art Museum looks to expose the entire university to its collections by forming a partnership with all academic programs, museum events communications coordinator Christine Nichols said.

“I was thinking about how to bring science into an exhibition,” museum director Susan Bandes said. “We looked at wood and made the decision the show would not be about images of landscapes or trees because that would be the obvious thing you would come and see — instead we wanted to explore how wood is used in various types of unique art.”

In professor Larry Leefer’s Forestry 101 class, which focuses on the natural history of forests in Michigan, he tries to emphasize why forests are important to the history of American culture.

“We could take a course related to forests and say this is a species and talk solely about ecology and the interrelationship between trees and habitat, but part of the message is forests are all around us and inspire more than physical existence,” Leefers said. “There’s a cultural existence as well and so this is an opportunity to go see examples of how trees affect our culture.”

The pieces in the exhibit aim to show the diversity available in wood as a natural resource, Bandes said.

“We’ve never done anything featuring wood — we wanted to cover the globe and have a range of centuries and cultures,” Bandes said. “We chose the best examples visually of what we were trying to get across. For example, we have Inuit artists who are kind of unusual and one wouldn’t expect to see, and we have artists who do wood turned bowls.”

In the fall, Kresge Art Museum will pair with the history department for an exhibition featuring the celebration of the 100th year of Mexican independence and has many other plans to help students become more accustomed to the museum’s resources.

“We are interested in people’s reactions — everybody comes to art with different backgrounds and sees different things in a work of art differently than the artists or historians on staff,” Bendes said. “We are very interested in what people take away from the art exhibits and how they react to it, and we want the entire university to take advantage of the availability of our resources.”

For more information on the Wood Into Art exhibit, to look at the museum’s collections online or speak with a staff member from the museum, visit Kresge’s Web site at www.artmuseum.msu.edu.