They call themselves the Art Sisters — a group of six local women whose friendship is rooted in their art and whose work has grown to intersect and influence each other’s.
When they get together once a month for lunch, they pull a word out of a bag.
“These are words that we come up with. When the bag gets low, we refill it with new words. The assignment is to create a piece of artwork that has something to do with that word,” said Chris Dokolasa, a retired Galesburg High School art teacher who runs Hole in the Wall Pottery and has been an Art Sister since 2012.
Then they bring their creations to the next lunch.
“We show our pieces that we've created and we talk about what the piece is about and what the word meant to us and how it inspired us to create that,” Dokolasa said.
The current iteration of the Art Sisters includes Dokolasa, Lori Reed, Mary Schuytema, Linda Sickmon, Rae Standard, and Janis Wunderlich. All live and work in or have ties to Knox and Warren counties.
Reed said Sickmon formed the group around 20 years ago. It was never about classes or instruction, but instead was for women to share their work and their processes, to support each other, and to learn from each other.
"She wanted women who were working in art to meet in each other's studios and maybe have a lunch together and then just talk about process and what you were working on,” Reed said.
Their connection has evolved beyond the lunches and the words pulled from the bag to the group taking trips across the country together. They call the trips art camp, where they immerse themselves in other people’s art, discuss how it relates to their own work, and bond with each other.
“It is a very supportive group. It's interesting we not only can get together and talk about art, influence each other with our art, but also travel together, stay together at these places for five, six, seven days and still be laughing on the way home together,” Reed said.
The Art Sisters didn’t form the group with the intent of showing their work together, but they’ve done that a handful of times from Galesburg to Monmouth to Bloomington in recent years.
“Five of us are ceramic artists. But our work is all totally different, so it makes it interesting for people to see the shows that the Art Sisters put on,” Dokolasa said.
The Art Sisters now have an exhibit up at Sandburg in Galesburg that is the largest showing of their work to date. “Influences and Intersections” features more than 80 pieces of artwork by these six artists, and is up through Nov. 18. It’s art that speaks to their individual styles and personal stories as well as their shared experiences and camaraderie.
Standard said she started working in functional ceramics, but has evolved into hand-building other figures, like rabbits.
One thing about the Art Sisters — they know each other’s work and respect it. This isn’t about competition.
Dokolasa describes Wunderlich’s sculptures and paintings as storytelling through animals, texture, and details.
Standard describes Sickmon and her functional pottery as “Earth Mother.”
“It's just so organic, so beautiful. Her glazes are incredible. She has this huge gas kiln and she single-handedly fills it and out comes the most beautiful pieces you've ever seen,” she said.
Schuytema said she’s blown away by Standard’s hand-building creations and the carving in Dokolasa’s pieces, noting that several of the Art Sisters started in clay and functional ceramics and have taken off from there.
“I’ve kind of taken a departure, doing more sculptural pieces. And then I also have wall pieces that are plaster cast. So that's brand new for me over the last year. But our work is just all so different. We all kind of start with the same medium and take it to completely different places,” Schuytema said.
The diverse ceramic pieces are complemented by Wunderlich’s paintings — and by Reed’s collages, which reimagine impressionist landscapes by digitally adding animals in the foreground and embedding hidden elements.
And when the Art Sisters are putting together a show, there are a lot of text messages going back and forth.
Standard said it’s about really seeing each other’s work.
“Do we plan for it to mesh together? No. I think we mesh together and that's why we do what we do. We tend to complement each other, I think,” Standard said.
“Influences and Intersections” is in the Sandburg art gallery in building D on the Galesburg campus through Nov. 18, and an artists’ reception for the show will take place from 5:30-7:30 p.m. Nov. 14.
The show and reception are free and open to the public. Regular gallery hours are weekdays from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
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