Peter Olson

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Peter Olson  Armstrong gallery
 

April 1 – May 21, 2005

NIU Art Gallery Assistant Director, mixed-media drawings w/ bird imagery

Artist reception and Art Talk, Tuesday, April 5, 6-8pm

Birding Outing with Artist, Family Art Education Workshop, free, co-sponsored with local Audubon chapter

 

Peter B. Olson is Assistant Director at the Art Museum, Northern Illinois University. He earned his MFA at Northern Illinois University and BFA at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

As an avid bird enthusiast, Peter B. Olson not only uses birds as his primary source of artistic subject matter, but also travels the country in search of new bird-watching experiences.

The discoveries and encounters sparked by these trips act as a source of new images and ideas ultimately materialized through new artwork.

For his exhibition, Olson will show mixed media drawings, woodcuts, and sketchbooks pages, as well as a digital video – a new direction for him and his work.

Olson states: “Today, birds are the most common wildlife presence that we experience. To humans, birds metaphorically represent the vast and complex natural world on many levels: their likeness decorates stamps and calendars, their decreasing numbers signal environmental degradation, their mystery suggest a forceful yet unexplainable spirit in nature. Throughout history, birds have played many roles in our lives: hunter’s bounty, literary metaphor, scientific specimen, shaman’s totem, predator, prey, scavenger, caged pet, destructive nuisance and didactic moral symbol. Although we as humans understand them in these many ways, something about birds remains elusive, distant, and unknowable. They are always flying away from us.”

Join us for an artist reception and gallery talk on Tuesday, April 5, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. This event is free and open to the public.

This exhibition is generously sponsored by Deanna Frautschi & Alan Bedell and Anne & Brian Boyden
       

 

                  

                        

It has been over nine years since Peter Olson earned his MFA in printmaking from David Driesbach at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Since that time he has been working as Preparator and Curatorial Assistant at the Art Museum at NIU. A brain-stem stroke took him out of action in the winter of 1998, but he is now back to work at the museum and in the studio.

Oslon has participated in over 100 solo and group shows since first exhibiting professionally while in undergraduate school at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. Within the recent past he has had solo exhibitions at the Evanston Art Center, Quincy University, Expressions Graphics and the Ellwood House Museum, all in Illinois. Recent group exhibitions include the prestigious international Birds in Art show in Wausau, Wisconsin (the past two years), American print surveys in Kansas and Indiana and a show at Chicago’s Union League. His woodcuts were featured in a three-person exhibition entitles Nature as Metaphor with venues in Ohio and Illinois.

Other professional activities include giving numerous lectures and printmaking demonstrations as well as contributions to national portfolios and journals. He is the recent recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

A growing interest in birds led Peter around the country to observe and draw new species. In January 2000 he began The DeKalb Migratory Bird Project, an ongoing exploration of his combined interests in art and science. His illustrations of birds have been used in several ornithological journals and for the cover of a book, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: the Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums, published by Oxford Press in 2001.

 

More information regarding Mr. Olson's work may be found here: click link or here