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"Word." & Art on East Main

By Jack Cantey

Fort Wayne Reader

2006-05-08

Three months ago, Beckie Stockert had an idea. The senior fine arts student at St. Francis wanted to bring together visual artists, spoken-word performers, and musicians to celebrate the word. Written, painted, smeared. Rapped, spat, or sung. Whatever the manner of delivery, the connection between the artists would be, simply, the word.

Word., a mixed-media exhibition, opens this weekend at the Firefly Coffee House (3523 North Anthony) and will remain on display through the end of the month. Curated by Stockert, Word. features the work of six Fort Wayne artists: Brian Baker, Dongo, Kat Rohrbacher, Dan Swartz, Joanna Wittke, and Stockert herself.

The show kicks off on Saturday night, May 6, at 7:30pm with an opening event whose line-up is packed with a slew of talented wordsmiths. Spoken-word artists CitizenLC (backed by Moser Woods) and John Commorato, Jr., and rapper Sankofa will share the mic with musicians Caleb Jehl and Sam King. Admission for the entire evening is only $2.

The criteria for the visual artists were intentionally left loose. Stockert—familiar with many of the participating artists from Fort Wayne’s underground art and music venues —left them “free to do what they wanted, as long as they somehow incorporated text in their work.”

In two untitled paintings, Stockert uses text both as a floating title (“Zoom Zip” above a stark head-and-shoulders portrait of Sankofa) and as the image itself (in a self-accusing, self-glorifying rant on canvas that screams “I only think about me”).

Rohrbacher, on the other hand, uses years of private missives to share a powerful personal story with her mixed media series, letters to a birthmother. At the age of 14, Rohrabacher, an adopted child, wrote a letter to her unknown birthmother. She wrote another the following year. And the year after that.

“I would write them every year, mostly around my adoption day,” Rohrbacher recalled. “I’d tell her what was going on in my life and my thoughts and feelings. The plan was to give them to her if I ever found her.”

While at the School of the Art Institute Chicago, Rohrbacher decided to use these letters for a book project assignment.

“I thought that I would write the letters on my stomach, thinking that the belly button was once my attachment to my birthmother.”

She then photographed her stomach and paired the black-and-white images with envelopes left blank except for the return address.

letters to a birthmother were first exhibited in Chicago two days before Rohrbacher’s 21st birthday. (One of the letters had even promised that, before she turned 21, she would find her birthmother.) On the day of the exhibition, Rohrbacher was located by her birthmother through an online adoption registry; she first spoke with her two days later, on her birthday.

When not on exhibition, this collection of six works now hangs on her birthparents’ living room wall. “It’s quite a circle of events,” Rohrbacher said.


• • •

What would a thriving downtown gallery district look like? The Fort Wayne Museum of Art is offering the city a sneak peek of this possibility—for an evening, at least.

Art on East Main is an exhibit that is spread throughout five venues in the 300 block of East Main Street and features work by more than 50 local artists—both emerging and established. From 6 to 10pm on Friday, May 5, viewers will have the opportunity to enjoy a wide range of work (painting, sculpture, photography, jewelry, and more) in the following locations: the Museum of Art atrium, the Arts United Center, Standard Federal Plaza, Park Place Grill, and the Fourth Wave office building.

According to the Museum’s Curator of Adult Programs Sarah Aubrey, the genesis for this community-centered event came from both formal and informal conversations with Fort Wayne artists. Many of them voiced concerns with the limited—and, perhaps, decreasing—number of spaces and opportunities available for local exhibition. Art on East Main temporarily addresses these concerns through the use of nontraditional, downtown spaces, while also showcasing creations by some of the city’s finest artists.

The reception for Art on East Main is strategically being held in conjunction with the opening of the Museum’s newest Main Gallery exhibition, It’s a Dog’s Life: Photographs by William Wegman from the Polaroid Collection. This selection of large-scale, color Polaroid prints, on view through July16, highlights Wegman’s hugely famous and often whimsical portraits of his beloved Weimaraner dogs.

The cost of admission to both Art on East Main and It’s a Dog’s Life is $15. Mojo Dub will be performing in front of the Museum’s Main Street entrance from 7 to 10pm.