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Jo Hormuth

Lecturer

Contact

Bio

Education: BFA, Grand Valley State Colleges (MI); MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; additional study, Slade School of Art, University College London. Public art commissions: Center for Interprofessional Health, Grand Valley State University (MI); Regenstein Learning Center, Chicago Botanic Garden; Terminal 2, O’Hare International Airport; 47th Street (Red Line), Chicago Transit Authority; Chicago Public Library. Architectural restorations, recreations, and design: Darwin Martin House (Wright), Buffalo, NY; Willow Tea Rooms (Mackintosh), Glasgow, Scotland; Wrightwood 659 (Sullivan), Chicago; Victoria & Albert Museum (Stickley), London; LA County Museum (Behrens), Los Angeles; Crab Tree Farm Foundation, Lake Bluff, IL.

Personal Statement

Jo Hormuth is a multidisciplinary artist whose ideas spring from a fascination with perceptual, cognitive, and linguistic contradiction, backed by research into the architecture, history, and material conditions of the situation in which a work will be developed and shown.

Recent public projects integrate the function and spatial idiosyncrasies of newly built educational facilities. "The Big Picture (Sestina)," a six-panel, mural-scale painting, provides a poetic focus, contemplative yet conceptually rigorous, in the study commons of Grand Valley State University’s Center for Interprofessional Health. "Better Grammar–Garden" wraps the atrium of the Chicago Botanic Garden’s Regenstein Learning Center with eight large color compositions, assemblages of monochrome macro photographs of plants taken over the course of a year—a portrait of the Garden, itself already an abstraction.

Jo has exhibited at international art fairs and in more than sixty solo and groups exhibitions across the United States and in Belgium, Japan, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom. She is represented by Kusseneers Gallery, Brussels.

As principal of Chicago Architectural Arts, Jo Hormuth has focused on the research, recovery, and restoration of painted and textile decoration in historically significant interiors, including multiple buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Projects have included the re-creation of period rooms for museum exhibition, architectural design, and consultation. Jo has a deep and extensive knowledge of period and contemporary materials and techniques used in the decorated interior.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

This studio course will provide a hands-on introduction to the fundamental understanding and use of color. Students will gain practical experience working with material color in order to improve their understanding of how color works. Assignments will be introduced in class to help students develop a working knowledge of the basic concepts of hue, value, and chroma, and the relationship between these concepts and those of color harmony and organization. By working with color in context students will gain a practical understanding of color interaction and develop strategies for approaching color with greater sophistication and specificity in their own practice.

In addition to our investigations with color in the classroom, this course will examine the ways in which artists and scholars have worked with color art historically as a medium of expression, and thought about color scientifically as an index of an underlying natural order, as well as culturally as a system of signs reflecting our biases back to us to be interpreted. Reliable perceptual phenomena like simultaneous contrast and afterimages will be considered alongside more unstable notions like synesthesia and color music, as well as the complicated history of thinking about color as evidence of that which is ?other.?

Course work will include exercises to help students develop their approach to color, and a final project in which they put their understanding to work.

Class Number

1943

Credits

3