Anne Lindberg: think like the river with poet Ginny Threefoot
Figge Art Museum
225 West Second Street
Davenport, Iowa
11 June - September 4, 2022
Though traditionally defined as works on paper, in recent decades drawing has become a field that uses a broad spectrum of formats. Anne Lindberg’s work embraces this freedom. While she does make drawings on paper, she also works three-dimensionally and understands her room-scaled installations as immersive drawings in space. This summer she will create an ephemeral tonal landscape of color and light by casting thousands of threads across the span of the Figge’s fourth floor gallery. She has invited poet Ginny Threefoot to collaborate on this conceptually rich project centered on the subject of water, conceived with an awareness of the museum’s location along the Mississippi River.
The chromatic thread installation will occupy the central open space of the gallery, rising and falling in its distance from the floor, thus encouraging visitors to walk around and under the work. It will be accompanied by a multi-panel 25-foot-wide drawing at one end of the gallery and Threefoot’s poetry on the other. The drawing and the text will guide and mirror each other as they converse across the space.
References to water and the river became a focus for Lindberg when she read Threefoot’s poem “think like the river,” a piece that entertains a possibility of union with the natural world. Across cultures, the river is a metaphor for the constancy of change and uncertainty in both nature and the human condition. Ideas of water lines, currents, flow, and immersion provide points of departure for this dialogue between art and poetry.
Anne Lindberg: think like the river will invite an interactive bodily experience for museum visitors as they traverse the gallery space. Lindberg’s use of tactile materials and indexical handmade marks have a visceral effect. The confluence of visual art and language will stimulate a fluid dialogue of ideas about the inner and outer worlds of mind and landscape.