Art at the IIAH

As previously stated, our mission is to help the public experience our industrial and technological heritage and enjoy it as both engineering and art.  We periodically schedule events by artists whose work relates to our mission.  Alan Bull was our guest artist in March 2018.  He is an artist, teacher and illustrator based in Newburyport, Massachusetts. Originally from Old Town, Maine, Alan received his BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art and his work is in numerous public and private collections. His paintings have appeared in the Martha Blog, Houzz, Architectural Digest, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, House Beautiful and many other publications.

 

Alan is well known for his painting of antique trucks and his annual truck calendar.  The painting above of the Euclid truck is in the IIAH permanent collection.  The figure on the left is for his 2019 calendar. (http://www.alanbull.com)

 

Another artist whose works relate to our mission is Anne Pelikan.  Anne Pelikan (text and image art) received a BA in Art History from the University of New Hampshire ('66) and attended the Museum School. A book artist and conservator, Anne was introduced to book making while in Florence, Italy, working on the restoration of books damaged in the flood of 1966. She has studied book structure with book artists from around the country and taught and exhibited throughout New England and Canada, as well as in Florence and New York. She is the recipient of grants from the Wellspring Fellowship ('99), the Massachusetts Cultural Council ('98, '97, '96), and the Committee for the Restoration of Italian Art.

 

A technique Anne has developed is to take vegetable “parts”, leaves, stalks etc., and compress them using a hydraulic shop press similar to the ones found in any garage or workshop.  She then either photographs or scans the item to obtain a digital image.  The image above “Vegetable Papyrus Swiss Chard” is a print in our permanent collection.  They are very similar to the digital scans of lantern slides and Victorian microscope slides in our collections as seen in the figure to the left.  (Anne.Pelikan@tufts.edu)

 

The works of Anne Pelikan and Alan Bull can be purchased through our web page www.iiah-usa.org.