UMVA Showcase – Summer 2025: Kelly Desrosiers, David Little, Brian Boyd

Kelly Desrosiers

An encounter with ideas spawned the first art I made as a young adult. I was interested in and made artlike things as a child, but my rural northern Wisconsin school district’s art programming was pretty dismal (and the science offerings were worse), and the art that I encountered in my world was basically Duck Stamp illustrations and taxidermied deer heads. The only museum I’d encountered was the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum which was all about birds. The bird art there seemed realistically oriented and quite detailed. I liked birds and spent a lot of time outside with them, especially in wetlands, and especially along migration flyways at Horicon Marsh and Lake Superior. I noticed them, and thought about them, but because I was very myopic and couldn’t actually see them, they became symbols as much as creatures. Same with boats. I have never been sailing, but have been in canoes often, and adored the children’s book Paddle to the Sea. Birds and boats became symbols, also known as ideas. Nature was real, while migration was an idea. A toy canoe, or even the idea of a canoe, could go on a grand adventure from the headwaters near where I grew up to far flung places and could encounter a world of more complex ideas.

As a young adult I decided to go to university to study Animal and Veterinary Sciences, after a chance but life-changing encounter with an old woman known in rural Washington State as the “goat woman of Oakville.” Leora was an animal hoarder or rescuer, and she lived in a shack and might have had a mental illness, but I could not tell because she was a licensed veterinarian and smart as hell, and she was indigenous Inuit and had grown up in Unalakleet, Alaska where she inhabited a different world view than I had ever encountered. She told a story of generations of life, genetically coded, that linked the past with the future. She was earthy; no new age hippie was she! She told me to study this stuff, so I did.

At university I had only twelve total elective credits, so I took Drawing 101, to ease my load. I made drawings that semester of birds, eagles, because I was seeing them up close through a telescope, but I was also seeing up close through the microscope the mysterious inner workings of living things. I was encountering caverns like the Mithraeum and vessels through which coracles could drift and tissues that spread out like vast plains of shag-carpeted villi over the surface of the intestines. Adding to the mystery were the cryptic labeling conventions of microscopy, with their labeling lines and letters divorced from words or concepts. On the other hand there were the vast wordy tomes on anatomy and physiology, inches thick and dense as an alder thicket, of difficult vocabulary and torturous explanation. This was a required encounter, and even for someone who loves to read non-fiction as much as I, it was an intellectual marathon to master the Canon. The scientific canon, which underpinned all knowledge, I pictured as literal pillars and lintels, solid as the Parthenon. The puzzle of genetics looked in my mind like the Labyrinth required to understand that linkage of time from past to future, through the grand migration through time we know of as the idea of evolution. This circled back to the migration of swans through the Great Lakes, where entire populations moved through space in a yearly cycle, and individuals touched down only briefly, for an encounter with the present, which is of course the idea of a lifetime.

 

David Little – Max Ernst, Julien Levy, and Me: Encounters of the Surreal Kind

In March 1975, I flew back east from the University of Iowa to visit my family. The previous September I had enrolled in the School of Art and Art History. At the time, I questioned why the faculty had accepted my application so quickly (two weeks) while others took so long . . .

I took the train into the city from my family’s home in Water Mill on Long Island. The grand retrospective of artist Max Ernst at the Guggenheim Museum was top of the list: 300 works by the brilliant artist! This serendipitous brush with the famed Surrealist would bookend my art history classes in college and grad school. I purchased a student ticket, the exhibition catalogue Max Ernst: A Retrospective, rode the large elevator to the top floor, took a deep breath, and walked out.

In college, art history classes were superficial; in grad school, a revelation. Lucky for me, Dr. Stephen C. Foster’s 20th-Century History of Art class included a deep dive into the Surrealist movement and its leaders, among them Max Ernst (1).

I skipped past the first galleries, highlighting early influences: Vincent van Gogh, Marc Chagall, Giorgio de Chirico, and the European avant-garde. The spiral ramp drew me downward to the collages and paintings that sang to my heart. 

Then distant muffled voices as in a nautilus shell drew visitors to the railing. What was it? A commotion? I could not in my wildest imagination presume to see the artist at such a fortuitous moment, but there he was, down below and across from where we had gathered, in a coterie of museum officials outside the entrance to the Thannhauser Collection. We stared down at the small figure with his bright shock of white hair.

I would later disavow this sighting as a chance meeting of unconscious longing and inspired dream, one that grew to include meeting the artist at a special event at the Museum of Modern Art. Yet I was there, in New York City in Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece, making penciled notes in the catalogue (2).

At some point in my first full year at the University of Iowa, a teacher in the studio program asked me to be the Chair of the Student Art Federation. Among my duties was taking visiting lecturers to lunch, after which I would escort them to the lecture hall. Two of these I remember vividly: Stephen Pace and Julien Levy. It’s the latter I wish to acknowledge here.

I greeted Mr. Levy on campus and we walked over to The Mill, a luncheon place recommended by faculty. My smattering of knowledge of this significant visitor extended to an early book of his from the art library, Surrealism (1936). In my mind, Julien Levy was the father of Surrealism in America! I didn’t know much more about him.

I remember we mostly made small talk at lunch, which consisted of sandwiches and sodas. He didn’t say much about himself or what, at age sixty-nine, he was up to. As he mentioned the flight out and first impressions of Iowa City, I wondered who on the faculty had suggested inviting him. 

Levy asked about my work and my interest in Surrealism. I shared my inspiration and influences as best I could. He smiled when I praised MoMA’s choice collection, which included his gift of The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí. I revered several Surrealist artists: Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Jean Arp, Joseph Cornell, and, peripherally, Giorgio de Chirico and Wassily Kandinsky. 

Then the question burst out. “If we have time, would you come to my studio and see my work?” Levy chuckled. “Why not?” 

And we did have time—not much, but sufficient. We walked to the studio building, up the stairs, turned left, and I unlocked the door to my small space. On my plywood-sawhorse work table was a large watercolor and acrylic in progress. Several paintings were tacked up on the walls, two of them inspired by Tanguy. Levy smiled but was reserved in his appraisal. “Very good,” he said. “Thank you for showing me your work.”

We made the lecture hall with time to spare. I thanked him again. The rest of the afternoon was a blur. 

This past year I discovered Levy’s 1977 book Memoir of an Art Gallery, which in 1975 must have been uppermost in his mind. Now I am encountering Levy again, learning about his gallery years in New York City, his trips to Europe, his financial support of many artists he represented, and splendid anecdotes sprinkled throughout. Levy remains a shadowy figure in my past, a living connection to the art I love (3).

Revisiting these encounters helped answer my surprise early acceptance to the University of Iowa. Maybe the range of medium, expression, and fantasy in slide selection helped and perhaps mentioning Surrealism in my brief statement. 

Notes

1. In 2024, the art world celebrated the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, the avant-garde art movement that began with André Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto published 15 October 1924. This anniversary was celebrated worldwide with exhibitions in Paris, Brussels, Florida, and Tucson; articles in The New York Times) “Surrealism at 100. The World’s Still Surreal”), ARTnews, and other publications; an auction at Christie’s; and books, including Desmond Morris’s 101 Surrealists (Thames & Hudson).

2. My illegible handwritten note on p. 196 of the exhibition catalogue reads: “This [painting The Eye of Silence] has always been one of my favorites, it is definitely a masterpiece and the emerald greens are lush and romantic. This is one of the most unbelievable, incredible paintings I have ever seen in my life—and the blue one I did of the grotto + caves + creatures is certainly inspired by this masterpiece. Boy, do I have a lot to learn. The funny thing is, this thought has only come to me now, after having seen the show. I feel this connection in subject matter to be an evolutionary fantasy.”

1. In an online research for this article I found two threads that connect Julien Levy and my surrealist past to Maine. First, there is a YouTube video of a lecture on Julian Levy at Bowdoin College by Marie Difilippantonio, director of the Jean and Julien Levy Foundation for the Arts. In 1933, the Julian Levy Gallery in New York City gave poet and artist Mina Loy (1882–1966), the mother of Julian Levy’s first wife Joella Loy, a one-person show. Last year, to celebrate the Surrealism anniversary, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art presented Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable. Second, from the University of Iowa and Bowdoin College obituaries, I found that my professor of art history Dr. Stephen C. Foster was also an instructor and assistant professor in art and art history at Bowdoin College from 1972–74.

 

Brian Boyd – Chance Not Chance

In 1971, a tempestuous time, a hopeful time, my sister and I, children-not-children, lived with our mother, the painter Connie Fox (1925–2023), for a near-year in northern Jutland in Denmark. Amidst fields where the plough tossed up the same sharp-edged flint from which Stone Age people crafted spear-heads, in the U-embrace of farmhouse and barns on limestone hills, we were all both students and teachers at New Experimental College, where our mother taught-not-taught students-not-students in a class-not-class of art-not-art. And painted.

One night Hair, whose plaster mask she had made the pistil of a canvas-petaled tropical flower, found an unpainted corner of a painting in her studio where my mother had written in charcoal script the word blue on a patch of bare canvas to be painted later blue. Hair crossed out blue and wrote red, in his flower-not-flower hand, and next day my mother happily played the hand of fate and painted it red.

The great landmarks of our young-not-young world the fjord a longship of silver water in the east, the Viking burial mound looted of its treasure, the draftsman’s line of road where the west wind brought bicyclists to a standstill like a single frame of celluloid film strip, and that storm-axed field of flint-crested waves planted in slant-scant Scandinavian light-not-light.

In my mother’s paintings, experimentation is as pragmatic and respectful of mystery as a Danish farmer skirting the edges of the burial mound on his tractor.

In one of her Danish paintings, the sky is a plaid of sideways rain, the field a prank of candy stripes stubborn as tire tracks, saffron-mud an autumn crop, a barn with archers’ slits stained glass white on a turquoise wall, a windblown tree where memory puts a steeple, blue sun and blue moon showing their true colors, and so characteristic of her paintings, a vertical invention in the landscape, a lavender paper-thin obelisk, a flatness in the depth of (farmer’s) field, like the water towers rising from the Colorado plains of her dustbowl childhood.

That, and a surge of ghostly silver, broadside of chaos against the order of plough and custom. Church-not-church, sky-not-sky, abstraction with a horizon line, all the mysteries planned and unplanned.

 

 

Image at top: Kelly Desrosiers, Ichthys, charcoal, 26 x 17 in.