Local artist's work on exhibit at Fossil Site-Yet another reason to visit or relocate to Johnson City/Tri-Cities TN area!

Local artist's work on exhibit at Fossil Site

By Allison Alfonso

Press Tempo Writer

What a surprise to discover Suzanne Stryk is exhibiting work at the East Tennessee State University and General Shale Brick Natural History Museum at the Gray Fossil Site. She's exhibited a lot of places, but few where it seems as appropriate.


Stryk has a master of arts degree in painting and bachelor's degree in art history. She's done medical illustration, illustrated her husband Dan's poetry and exhibited her nature and science-inspired paintings while taking occasional teaching jobs and workshops. Her color palette has evolved from muted greens to shining blues and more as she painted dragon flies, beetles, snakes, birds, antelopes, butterflies, nests, monkeys, seashells and ocean life. Her journals of images and fragmentary sentences suggest a scientist at work, and her works portray in format and substance man's need to categorize and make sense of the wild world.


As a child, she'd fill the bathtub with wild animals she'd found. Stryk told me she thanked her mother for never saying "no." She and Dan recently went to the Western coast and studied the shore life there: he wrote poetry and she painted pictures. What a life.


Suzanne's "Keeping An Eye On Things" is on display through April 12 at the fossil site and features paintings, sketches and drawings from 2001-08, journals, animal skulls and insect specimens. Some of the work was inspired by bones and materials found at the fossil site and the Smithsonian Institution and some by the insect collections of others.


Stryk's imagery is increasingly complex and her paintings more physically layered. Trying to understand is increasingly challenging. I can define the imagery, but there's no overall clarity, just mystery. Perhaps that's a point. Time is long and the world too vast to make sense of. Man is small: That's the feeling I left with.


Jessica Evans, fossil site exhibitions and marketing coordinator, walked through Stryk's second floor exhibit with me one recent Monday. We talked about interesting elements of each work while researchers and other site workers worked behind closed doors and open windows on fossils they've unearthed. Those fossils will someday tell us something new and definitive. No such luck with art, but then, we don't expect that. If it opens a small window of knowledge and curiosity for us, we're lucky.


"The artist listens, keeps a close eye, and attempts to translate the voice of nature so that others may hear," Stryk said in Evans' exhibit essay "The Natural Connection." "But the artist, also, sometimes resembles a scientist: collecting evidence, investigating what the subject can tell us, and interpreting this data to the rest of the world. Yet, in turn, the scientist at times resembles the artist: gathering specimens, arranging them in a fitting order, deliberating, then telling the story."


If that's not enough richness for you, visit the Frank H. McClung Museum at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Feb. 7-May 3 to see "River of Gold: PreColumbian Treasures from Sitio Conte." The exhibit of Panamanian gold circa AD 700-1100 by master artisans includes hammered repousse plaques, gold-sheathed ear rods, pendants, bells and precious and semi-precious stone, ivory and bone objects. Animals that reflect the diversity of species and animal-human composites are recurring themes.


The exhibit provides archaeological and cultural context, ethnohistorical information, excavation drawings and videotaped segments from the 1940 film footage of the excavations by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The cemetery and artifacts were overlooked by gold-seeking Spaniards in the 16th century and rediscovered when the Rio Grande de Cocle shifted its bed. The Peabody Museum at Harvard University carried out the first expeditions in the 1930s.





Allison Alfonso is a Tempo writer for the Johnson City Press. Reach her at aalfonso@johnsoncitypress.com.



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East Tennessee: Tipton-Haynes video episode focuses on civilians during the Civil War

One of three episodes on East Tennessee history was being taped Monday at Tipton-Haynes Historic Site by the East Tennessee Historical Society.
The videos will be part of a permanent exhibit titled Voices of the Land — People of East Tennessee that will be housed at the East Tennessee History Center at 601 Gay St., Knoxville.
The segment being filmed here is on the Civil War from the standpoint of civilians, according to Cherel Henderson. The filming will next move to the Dickson-Williams Mansion in Greeneville, focusing on the diary of Rhoda Williams, who opposed the division of the nation although her family owned slaves.
Other diary entries come from Effie Eagleton and Eliza Fain. Eliza Rhea Anderson Fain opposed Union intervention in what she considered the South’s business. “We are asked to submit to this rule ...They should treat us as brethren and let us go,” she wrote.
Williams, while favoring Union, recognized it was a hopeless case. “The Southern people will never come to any terms with Lincoln,” she wrote. “His policy is to crush the South and make us all slaves.”
The first film will be an orientation to the exhibit and the final will be on country music and how traditions were passed from father to son or daughter.
The script, utilizing the diaries, was written by Hillman and Carr from Washington, D.C., the producers of the series. The Johnson City unit is under the hands of producer Jennifer Gruber.
“The Civil War home front is a unique story to East Tennessee, Henderson said. “There was so much bitterness and division between families. The diaries show this agony.”
The taping began with doing exterior shots of the buildings involved. Monday’s session actually involved actors running lines.
Adam Alfrey, curator of the exhibit, said it will cover 8,000 square feet of the old customs house in Knoxville, and will also have a traveling exhibit. The total exhibit will cover from early settlement up to the present, combining artifacts with images. The videos will each run about six minutes.
Unlike most Civil War film re-creations, this one will not involve battles or scenes with uniformed re-enactors, but will focus on the lives of civilians as they try to cope with the hardships and violence that was ripping East Tennessee apart.

By James Brooks
Press Staff Writer
Johnson City Press Chronicle