'Magic Budd' on display through December

Budd Stalnaker is still having an effect on the art world at IU, despite passing away in May 2005. Stalnaker came to IU more than 40 years ago to teach textiles, and now his own private collection of African artwork will be displayed in the IU Art Museum.\nStarting now and continuing through Dec. 17, the IU Art Museum will present a special exhibit in the Hexagon Gallery titled "Hats off to Budd," featuring an array of gifts of African art donated by Stalnaker who came to IU in 1964 and taught textiles in the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts. \n"He was a teacher but also an artist in his own right," said Diane Pelrine, IU Art Museum curator of the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas.\nPelrine said Stalnaker had a great interest in African art, which led him to accumulate a large collection of objects such as tapestries and hats. His understanding of weaving fostered an appreciation of the West African strip-woven cloth "Kente," and he developed collections from the Asante and Ewe peoples, according to the information provided inside the exhibit. \nThroughout his time at IU, Stalnaker donated various pieces from his collection. Shortly before he died in May, Stalnaker donated a remarkable collection of at least 80 hats from sub-Saharan Africa, Pelrine said. The hat collection shows the diversity of materials and techniques used in hats across sub-Saharan African, as well as varied purposes for which they are made, according to the museum. \n"The hats are intense levels of imagination and creativity," said professor of African art history Patrick McNaughton. \nA sampling of these hats along with some of Stalnaker's own work and other African tapestries from his collection are displayed in the exhibit. Presenting a lecture Wednesday afternoon as part of the museum's Lunch with a Curator series, McNaughton pointed out pieces from the Stalnaker collection and explained them. \n"I call this exhibit 'Magic Budd' because it is an excuse to recognize the profound sensibility he shared with the artists he loved," McNaughton said. "It is metaphorical magic because if you take all the capabilities and put them together, you get a kind of power that becomes bigger than itself; it is more than what it seems to be visually," he said. \nPelrine said the exhibition is a representation of Stalnaker in many ways.\n"He was a master of technique and creator of meditative form in his own work," she wrote in a tribute that hangs in the exhibit. \nPelrine added that Stalnaker had genuine appreciation for the creativity of African art, which is displayed in the hats and other items in the museum. \n"You can't find this type of hat at Kmart," McNaughton said during the lecture.