FOREWORD
Being able to continually provide diverse educational experiences for all members of our Tri-State region is the central mission of the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science. Our Artist-in-Residence program is no exception: it is an immersive exploration into the artist, their artworks, and their creative process. We invite an artist from our region to exhibit their works and share their journey of practice with students, docents, and Museum guests, all of whom will appreciate the exhibition, expertise, and artistry - allowing for a new pathway to inspiration.
Tim Kennedy, the Evansville Museum’s 2025 Artist-in-Residence, is recently retired from his position as Senior Lecturer of Painting at Indiana University, where he influenced swathes of young artists for over two decades. He undoubtedly has had an immeasurable impact on Bloomington’s community as both an artist and educator. The Evansville Museum is extremely grateful to Kennedy for allowing us to exhibit his work, as well as bringing him to our arts community to impart his extensive knowledge to our own young artists.
Kennedy’s paintings capture moments of serenity and mundanity that we take for granted, displaying an innate appreciation for people, nature, and leisure. Some settings possess a quiet magic that captivates as Kennedy guides you through different perspectives of the same scene: three individual paintings depicting a man grilling, a woman reading, a picnic shelter; culminating in a final pièce de résistance showcasing previously separate subjects now inhabiting the same space. This body of work encapsulates the Hoosier spirit: friendly, down-to-earth, community-oriented individuals who are able to enjoy respites filled with verdant Indiana scenery together. Kennedy’s work is a reminder of how wonderful life can be when we take a step back to enjoy our surroundings and each other - a reminder that is especially vital during times of heightened unease and division.
Thank you to Tim Kennedy and his partner Eve Mansdorf for making this exhibition possible, as well as to our extremely generous lenders Jim and MaryAlice Rickert and Elizabeth Stirratt and Blaise Cronin for allowing us to exhibit artwork from their personal collections.
Cheyenne E. Miller
Virginia G. Schroeder Curator of Art
The Comedy of the Commons
When Tim Kennedy was immersed in painting his home neighborhood in Bloomington and its environs, he became intrigued with the notion of a space shared among strangers that generated relationships of commonalities and shared concerns. He crossed the threshold from owned property to the entanglements of randomly selected but strangely intertwined biographies. The more he pursued the project of neighborhood, the more the lives of surrounding neighbors opened up to him.
In recent years, Kennedy enlarged the ambition and scope of this impulse, venturing further from home to explore the spaces and activities that inhabit local parks, playgrounds, campgrounds and especially the boat launches at Lake Monroe in southern Indiana. The space of a public recreational area such as a lake or a park is both simpler and more complex than that of a neighborhood. It is perhaps the overlooked and under-appreciated fulfillment of the promise of the commons. Such spaces offer an open invitation to everyone without any agenda of exploitation or ownership. Boating, fishing, volleyball, cookouts are all native activities of the park. Human interactions are more limited than in residential settings and may not, by intention, even occur at all. The key presence that overtakes every other is Nature.
The interaction and the tension between the human and the non-human takes interesting shape in Kennedy’s paintings. Those opposed elements do not separate easily because Kennedy’s color and his touch are so solid and unbroken. His treatment of space may seem to collapse. The flat, even light that results, along with the reflections on the water in a painting like “The Canoeists” or the upper left of “Griffy Ramp,” all become quite abstract. An emblem of this paradox appears in the several paintings Kennedy did of boats marooned on boat trailers, for sale in various home front yards. Isolated from their native purpose, we realize the irony of an escape to nature that involves driving to the water. Taking it one step further, Lake Monroe itself was man-made in the 1960’s, the result of damming Salt Creek and the drowning of a few small towns. And in its short history, Lake Monroe has sparked controversies and lawsuits about encroaching developments, clearcutting and erosion, pollution and alcohol-fueled fistfights and drownings. Climate change has caused high water levels that have eliminated beaches and swamped boating launches.
In these paintings, Kennedy presents the most benign face of all this, perhaps an ideal or Platonic image of a pure intention. In the still, eternal moment of the fiction of the painting, an optimism prevails that we might call the comedy of the commons.
Tom Rhea
