We left our campus in Highland
Heights, Kentucky, in the NKU bus at 12:30 on Thursday, April 10. We
anticipated a seven-hour ride that would get us to the Sweden House Lodge in
Rockford in time for a restful night before visiting the show early the next
morning. We did not anticipate the April snow-storm that whitened the
landscape and heightened the drama throughout our stay in Rockford (making our
bus driver wonder for a while whether he would be able to get us into downtown
Chicago for our reservations on Saturday night).
Our Gam did not begin officially until l p.m. the next day, but our hosts, Robert McCauley, chair of the Rockford College Art Department, and Maureen Gustafson, Director of the Gallery, kindly allowed us to visit the show in the morning so we could see not only our own works but those of the students of Rockford College with which they were hung. We had not had a chance to see the new works we had made before they were shipped off from Kentucky, so we had decided to do a little show-and-tell for each other after we located our own works in the gallery and got our first impressions of the exhibition as a whole.
The snow was falling fast and furious when we arrived at the gallery shortly
after 9. The Landlocked Gam was installed in two parts, part of it in three
display cases outside the gallery, the remainder in the gallery per se. After
we got a sense of the whole layout, locating our own MOBY-DICK art in the
context of that which had been created by students Rockford College and the
guest professional artists, we took turns showing our
own new works to each other. This took much longer than we had anticipated
owing to the active participation of three Melvilleans who joined us in our
morning preview of the show: Elizabeth Schultz, Robert Del Tredici, and
Merton Sealts. Their impromptu questions and comments made this a moveable
feast, a walking seminar, a spontaneous gam.
By the time we had completed the circuit, our hosts had arrived to whisk the guest speakers off to lunch in advance of the fast approaching afternoon Symposium. The snow was still falling fast as students walked across campus for lunch or took our trusty shuttle back to the Lodge.
The official symposium began in the afternoon with a wide-ranging lecture on
"Moby-Dick and the Bomb" by Robert Del Tredici. He moved from his
Moby-Dick drawings from the 1960s (six large silkscreens of
which hung upstairs in the show) through his anti-nuclear photography of the
1980s and on to more recent work that he was showing for the first time. His
presentation, and the questions it
provoked, was followed by a short slide presentation by Robert Wallace on
The Prairie, the most recent work in Frank Stella's Moby-Dick
series, and Juam, a multi-media print that Stella had recently named for
an imaginary place in Melville's Mardi. After a short break for
refreshments, we returned upstairs
to the gallery and the student art.
Because most of the Rockford students had not been able to be with us during
our morning tour of the gallery, they began our afternoon session by speaking
about the art works they had created for the Landlocked Gam. As in the
morning, Elizabeth Schultz, Robert Del Tredici, and Merton
Sealts actively participated in the exchange, as did Robert McCauley, Maureen
Gallagher, and the contingent from NKU. This was a sitting, rather than a
walking seminar, as we were all in the main gallery, but it too went quickly.
Before we had time for the two student groups to talk at any length about their
differing approaches to the novel and to the challenges of creating art inspired
by it, someone noticed that it was already 4:30. Our bus driver had been
waiting half an hour for us in the snow, and even the Rockford crew had leave
immediately in order to get back to the Clark Art Center for the next round of
action at 6 p.m.
Our more formal festivities in the evening began with Elizabeth Schultz's
lecture on
Moby-Dick as a cultural icon. In introducing her, Robert McCauley
explained that he and Robert Wallace, co-organizers of the show, attributed
everything they and their students had done to the inspiration and information
she had provided in her 1995 book and exhibition Unpainted to the Last.
Her illustrated talk, before which the student artists were asked to rise and be
recognized, was an inspiring prelude to the pleasures of the
reception which followed. Food, drink, and good general cheer extended the
gamming, mentoring, and informal exchanges, again, beyond the scheduled closing
time. Again our driver had been waiting for us in the snow, which was still
falling.
For most of the students in our group, the marathon day on Friday, along with
whatever followed later that night, precluded a return visit to the gallery
early the
next morning. But several of us did return to try to get some photos we could
later put on our web site, and we were again joined by Schultz, Del Tredici, and
Sealts. Later in the morning Beth Schultz and Robert Del Tredici rejoined our
larger group for our bus ride into Chicago, while Merton Sealts negotiated a
treacherous drive back to Madison, Wisconsin. Our
Rockford hosts had provided everyone concerned with an unforgettable
experience, for which we will always be grateful.
We did make it to Chicago, where the snow had melted. Reports were later
heard about feasting, theatrical improv groups, blues clubs, tattooing, and
other activities in which Melville, had he been there, might have been
interested. We returned safely home, as planned, on the evening of Sunday, April
13.
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