MFA printmaking exhibit to be held in remains of Ladyman’s Cafe

The historic Bloomington restaurant where tables and chairs once sat quickly became a blank canvas for nine Master of Fine Arts printmaking students.\nNoel W. Anderson, Paul Bohensky III, Joshua Brennan, Lee Busick, Julian Hensarling, Nate Herman Kuznia, Young Suk Lee, Dora Lisa Rosenbaum and Jeremy Sweet embarked on their journeys with little more than tools, paint and open minds when they started work on their exhibit, “Pre-Demolition Installation Exhibition,” just a few weeks ago.\n“It’s a show with the graduate printmaking department in conjunction with our graduate seminar class, based around installation and printmaking,” Hensarling said.\nTheir exhibition is set to open Friday at Ladyman’s Cafe, 122 E. Kirkwood Ave. The cafe is a historic restaurant that was closed last December after more than 50 years of business and will soon be torn down.\n“We are having the freedom of a space that is going to be destroyed to do whatever we want, which is kind of a unique opportunity in the art world,” Sweet said. “Most galleries don’t want you cutting into their walls and painting directly all over their floor.” \nThe artists are completing the exhibition as a requirement for their seminar course. Their professor, Althea Murphy-Prize, organized the event. Although this is the first year anything like this has been done, Murphy-Prize said she hopes it will become a trend that will continue for years.\n“I think it is an exciting opportunity. Any opportunity to have a space not only to make an installation piece, but to react to the space and allow your work to interact with and react to the space is always exciting,” Murphy-Prize said. “What I’ve enjoyed that they’ve done is a lot of them have thought about the history of the space and tried to incorporate that into their own conceptual ideas.”\nThe graduate students found out they would be working with the former cafe just three weeks ago and have been there only two. About a week and a half was spent cleaning, clearing out the space, repainting walls and tearing up carpet to create a clean area the artists could work with.\n“We came in here with a pretty blank slate. We had a couple general ideas of things we would have been interested in trying, but for the most part the majority of the work in here started the moment we walked in the door,” Hensarling said.\nBefore they could begin, permission to use the space had to be granted. Murphy-Prize contacted Heartland Group owner Travis Vencel, who Murphy-Prize said has an appreciation for the arts and was excited to see the space put to use.\nEach of the artists have individual pieces at the cafe. One titled “Pie in the Sky” features various figures drawn by Bohensky alongside a hanging piece of pie that when viewed from the outside of the window can be seen within the figures. Busick contributed a piece focusing on the former cook of the cafe and the struggles he had when it closed. \nBrennan’s piece focuses on the perspective of what the actual cafe looked like and how different people interpret it. Kuznia used the idea of Ladyman’s famous pie to create a piece portraying 290 pieces of feces symbolizing the death of the cafe, along with the death of food in general. \n“I hope to create a unique visual experience that people don’t traditionally get to see, based on scale and technique and taking it out of the context of the newspaper and making it larger than life,” Sweet said about his piece, a blown-up comic strip drawn directly on the wall, inspired by the large number of people that would sit in Ladyman’s and read the paper.\nThe artists are eagerly anticipating the opening and reception, taking place from 8 to 11 p.m. tomorrow evening.\n“We are on the strip where everyone is going to be hanging out for Little 5. Stop by,” Anderson said. “We are the best artists in town. I guarantee it.”