City

City Slide by Virginia Randolph Buiede

1970, Acrylic on a square-shaped canvas, 60" x 62"

The composition is divided into four rows and four columns, creating sixteen rectangles. Thick black lines separate and delineate the rectangles but their thickness varies with slight curves. Each square has a similar makeup, each containing twelve smaller rectangles with thin, yellow outlines. They are arrayed in a border just within the perimeter of the rectangle which encloses them and are uniformly spaced. The title and shapes suggest city blocks, buildings, and windows. The divided squares give the impression of well-built tightly packed cities. 

China Shop, Paris by Virginia Randolph Buiede

2009, Acrylic on Canvas, 30" x 30" 

Painted mostly in blue tones indicative of the subject matter, this bright blue painting showcases a storefront open to the streets filled to the brim with dazzling white China. The perspective of the shop windows and view into the door feels like an impossible oxymoron coupled with the dozens upon dozens of precariously stacked pristine dinnerware gives the whole piece a dreamlike feeling. 

Shinagawa by Hasui Kawase

1931, Woodcut Print

Hasui Kawase (1883-1957) was a prolific 20th-century Japanese printmaker. Using a traditional method, Kawase was influenced by Western art and his art was atmospheric featuring natural lighting, uncommon for woodblock prints. Kawase was also a prolific traveler and created prints of several cities around Japan. We see Shinagawa, a ward in Tokyo, with traditional-style buildings, boats, and outfits blended with the modern technology of telephone polls. Without them, one might think this was an image of a long-ago era. 

Hex 13 by Diane Sloane

Gouache Painting, 13 1/16 x 9 3/4 

Overlapping geometric linear shapes create a complex woven composition, done in a variety of reds, greens, yellows, browns, creams, pinks, blues, and purples. The overall format is vertical. The bright colors and straight lines are indicative of man-made structures. 

Smokestacks Belching by Bettye Olson

2009, Watercolor Painting, 9" X 12.5

The harshness of belching smokestacks are made softer with reds, blues, and purples in watercolor. Bettye Olson, an abstract expressionist painter and longstanding foundational artist in the Minnesota art community, was known for her watercolor paintings with bold strokes and often painted scenes from nature. Even with industrial smokestacks, her brush strokes are remniscent of flowing water or blades of grass. 

Art Department Photographs: Student Exhibition: 1959 [Slide 6]

Attributed to Sonia Daleki

1959, 35mm Color Slide of Painting on Canvas

This slide is of a 2D abstract painting likely by Sonia Daleki and featured in the 1959 College of St. Catherine Art Majors Annual Exhibition. The overlapping paint strokes and loud contrast of colors in the action painting bring to mind the interweaving sounds and structures of a city center. 

Art Department Photographs: Student Exhibition: 1959 [Slide 4]

Attributed to Sonia Daleki

1959, 35mm Color Slide of Painting on Canvas

This slide is of an image of a landscape painting likely by Sonia Daleki and featured in the 1959 College of St. Catherine Art Majors Annual Exhibition. The focal point of painting appears to be a tree trunk with branches spreading over rows of houses, fusing together sprawling with orderly, nature with city.

Minamiza by Naoko Matsubara

1978, Woodcut, 61 cm x 46 cm

Visitors enter the impressive Minamiza (kabuki theatre) in Kyoto, Japan. This image is from the book Kyoto Woodcuts, which was published in 1978, although the original piece is titled "Minami-za" and was created in 1976. The book is a collection of woodcuts of Kyoto and the different facets of the city and its art, architecture, horticulture, and spirituality.

Paris at Night by Clara Gardner Mairs

Ink Etching, 5 3/8" x 6 1/8"

Clara Gardner Mairs captures a mundane and charming scene in Paris of a woman hidden under her umbrella while walking five dogs at night in the rain. The figures and faces are obscured by rain or hidden by perspective, except for the eye of one unamused dog gazing directly at the viewer. Mairs approaches Paris with playfulness and humor, possibly providing a glimpse into the city while she lived there.

The Commodore Fashion Show by Clara Gardner Mairs

Ink Etching, 8 1/2"x 10"

Three women stand around a table with both approving and unapproving onlookers in the Commodore Bar and Hotel in St. Paul. The hotel opened in 1920, the year Prohibiition went into effect, and has a rich history with a rumored speakeasy in the basement, and famous guests like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald who lived in the hotel in 1921. Mairs and her life partner, Clement Haupers, settled in the Ramsey Hill neighborhood in St. Paul in 1929, and may have been guests at the Commodore from time to time.