Manierre Dawson gallery features Illinois artists

VICTORY TOWNSHIP – Megan and Kristin Quinn, sisters now living in Illinois’ Quad Cities, are displaying their artwork at the Manierre Dawson Gallery on the campus of West Shore Community College during the month of September.

Megan Quinn is a potter and educator living in Rock Island, Illinois and teaching ceramics at Augustana College. On the other side of the Mississippi River, Kristin Quinn is a painter who teaches at St. Ambrose University in Davenport, Iowa.

Both artists grew up in Bowie, Maryland. Megan received her degree from the University of Maryland and later when on to earn an MFA in ceramics from the University of Notre Dame. Kristin studied at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and received her MFA degree from Indiana University.

Megan Quinn, whose early studies in botany give evidence of her interest in the natural world, often creates vessels that have figurative references. This is natural for potters who use words like lip, neck, belly and foot to describe a vessel’s parts. Some works, like “Green Poppy” in the exhibit is a good example of how an artist often abstracts from the natural world to create something wholly new. Her newest work however, is more geometric in form and was influenced by seeing the undersides of bridges on bike rides along the Mississippi.

A good way to describe Kristin Quinn’s paintings are that they are layered with shapes, colors and imagery. She says she “finds strange alliances between the common and uncommon, the natural and synthetic” that compel her to paint. Quinn compares this layering and the competing elements in her paintings to the “compressions, connections and contradictions” that inhabit a single moment.

The exhibit is currently on display at the Manierre Dawson Gallery, in the Arts and Sciences Center until October 8.

The gallery is open Monday through Thursday from 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. and Friday 9 a.m. – 1:30 p.m.The gallery is also open on evenings and weekends during events at the Center Stage Theater.