John Lennon will be making a special guest appearance when 'Come Together,' a collection of lithographs of his original drawings, comes to the Red Gym this weekend.
The event, sponsored by the Campus Information and Visitor's Center in collaboration with Yoko Ono, will also feature rare videos and music of Lennon.
CIVC Student Services Coordinator Nancy Sandhu expressed elation at the opportunity to bring the show to UW-Madison.
'Our office is charged with a number of things. One is really to open up the doors of campus to the community, to the public, and bringing them down here and giving them a reason to come down,' Sandhu said. 'John Lennon is obviously world renowned and a lot of people in the area have probably never seen his art.'
Traveling to Wisconsin for the first time in its 10-year existence, 'Come Together' organizer Rudy Siegel described his thoughts behind the buzz Lennon's art exhibit has generated in Madison.
'You've got a population of educated people that are into doing things, they're not couch potatoes. The college lends itself to forward thinking people that are interested in thinking like John Lennon's artwork,' Siegel said. 'They get the message. They get the man. The response that the community has had to the fact that the exhibit is coming has been tremendous.'
Although Yoko Ono will not physically be in Madison, her touch is evident throughout the exhibit. The works displayed are lithographs created posthumously from pen and ink sketches of Lennon's. Ono worked with skilled Toronto printmakers Atelier to bring John's art into a medium that the public could enjoy, and she oversaw the previous colorization of the lithographs. The show gives the public not only the chance to see Lennon's sketches, but also the ability to buy large lithographs starting at $200.
UW art professor and printmaking expert Jack Damer says many art collectors and artists are not overly concerned about originality issues of making lithographs from drawings, sometimes posthumously, so long as the prints are correctly identified.
'They're being displayed I guess with the idea that they're original John Lennon lithographs and basically what they are are reproductions of his drawings. Now a lot of artists have done that,' Damer said. 'A lot of artists didn't see a big deal about it. They just saw it as an image that was theirs. It looks like John Lennon's work and it has the originality look of his style.'
While some of Lennon's artwork created scandal, much more of his artwork was of a deeply personal and loving manner. The 'Real One' series of children's drawings he did for his son Sean will be included in the show.
'Most of the public didn't know that he did artwork and when they come into the room and there's a hundred pieces they're overwhelmed by the volume of his output,' Siegel said.
Much of Yoko Ono's ambition in bringing this exhibit was to let the public in to Lennon's life through his art. 'People say 'Oh, he's a musician,' but they don't want to know that he's an artist as well,' Ono told The New York Times.
Siegel described Ono's work in bringing Lennon's art to the public as crucial to understanding his life after death, 'I do think that she has done an amazing job of keeping what he stood for alive and in the public forefront,' he said.
'There's a positive quality about the artwork that is similar to how his songs were, and the overriding message in his artwork, it's all about the love he had for his wife, for his family, for his life and I think that's what makes it relevant 25 years after his death,' Siegel said.
