Open to Interpretation

Grinnell College's Faulconer Gallery collection is filled with intriguing and curious works of art, which can be enjoyed or interpreted in many different ways.

The gallery's new exhibition, "Open to Interpretation," brings together 35 such works and asks visitors to provide comments and captions, selections of which will be shared for others to enjoy and ponder.

"Open to Interpretation" is curated by Tilly Woodard, curator of academic and community outreach, and Lesley Wright, director of the Faulconer Gallery. They selected 35 works from the gallery's art collection, including paintings, prints, and sculptures dating from the 1600s through the 2000s.

"With this exhibition, we invite visitors to collaborate with us, offering insights, facts, stories and conjectures about any piece that moves them," Woodward and Wright said in a statement. "We will share some of what we gather in our wall texts, and all that we gather in binders around the gallery. We will continually update both the binders and the selections on the walls.

"Through words and pictures contributed by our visitors, we hope individuals will see a piece differently, laugh aloud, stir an emotion, or ask more questions," they added. "Art should never be static, with just one fixed meaning. We hope that by inviting visitors to share and enjoy many interpretations, they will be open to the art and to making it their own."

The gallery already has collected some visitors' musings about a number of the works, including a Philippine grave marker in form of "Ship of the Dead," created by an unknown artist.

"We all think about death," wrote Tanner Alger, a student at Grinnell Middle School. "What will happen? Where will I go? I think for some cultures this boat might be the answer. It will carry you to wherever we will go, like the boats of Ra, the Egyptian sun god. But this is the Philippine way to the afterlife." 

Students from the Grinnell College Preschool also studied the marker and then collaborated to create the following story about it. 

"Mice are sailing on a stormy day. They fall off into the water, so they made a boat out of paper so they could get back on their wooden boat. Then they are playing pirates. The pirates come and find the mice. They didn't know that people were on the boat, too. The people were pirates trying to get the rats off. The pirates caught the mice in the net. The pirates ate the rats. And then the rats came out and turned into squirrels.

"The pirates fell off the boat; they couldn't swim so they sank to the bottom. The mice cheered! The pirates were never seen again. There was a restaurant on the boat where the mice could eat cheese. There was a party at the restaurant and everybody cheered."

"Open to Interpretation" will continue through Sunday, Aug. 2, in the Faulconer Gallery, Bucksbaum Center for the Arts, 1108 Park Ave., Grinnell. The exhibition is free and open to the public daily from 11 a.m. through 5 p.m.

For more information about exhibitions and related programs, contact the Faulconer Gallery, 641-269-4660. The gallery is accessible. Accommodation requests may be made to Conference Operations, 641-269-3235.