The Hopkins Hall Gallery opened an exhibit yesterday featuring design and art concepts from the past 40 years. The display is a collection of works done by students of professor Charles Wallschlaeger spanning his entire career at Ohio State.
The exhibit chronicles the basic design studies that form the underlying principles and concepts of all visual disciplines and is co-sponsored by the departments of art and industrial, interior and visual communication design. The theme of the exhibit is “Basic Design: A Retrospective on Process and Visual Concepts,” and only projects from freshman and sophomore classes are displayed.
The room is blanketed with colorful drawings and sketches, as well as models built of various materials such as paper, wood, and plastic. Drawings of simple objects such as an apple, pepper or a pocket-knife are manipulated and transformed. Art featuring geometric patterns appears all over the gallery on paper as well as in real-world applications like new building designs.
One type of display looks like a herd of wooden toys.
“In one of his classes he had his students draw and design their own wooden toy and build it,” curator Prudence Gill said. “There must be twenty or more all on a lowered platform looking as if they just rolled of Santa’s assembly line.”
When Wallschlaeger first began at OSU in the late ’60s, there was only a design program within the College of Art, not a separate department. With his foresight, Wallschlaeger helped to create the Department of Industrial Design, which came about in 1973.
“He has been teaching here since 1961 and received his Professor Emeritus in 1995,” Gill said. “His collection of student works is quite extraordinary and that is what you see here in the gallery.
“He would have some students complete two presentations in order for him to keep one for his private collection,” she said.
Wallschlaeger describes his collection as “a synopsis of a basic program that prepares students for whatever profession they pursue.”
“There is a visual language conveyed by the art and design, and it is important to see and understand that language we use in the arts,” he said.
The gallery is an overview of the past, present and future.
“The exhibit is broken down into three sections highlighting the projects done during classes he taught in fall, spring, and winter quarters,” said Alan Barr, a senior in art specializing in glass.
As a whole, the show displays numerous drawings and design techniques which can be applied to many fields beyond art, such as product design and architecture. The emphasis of the display is to illustrate the evolution of how design became a department, coming from a design program to a recognized national-international design department.
“It is important for a department, from time to time, to review its origins to know why it is, what it is, and how it all came about,” Wallschlaeger said.
“Basic Design: A Retrospective on Process and Visual Concepts” will run until Feb. 28.
