Painted Steel Sculptural Objects

Artist list

Vivian Beer,  Rachelle Thiewes

Mobilia Gallery proudly presents work by artists Rachelle Thiewes & Vivian Beer in the exhibition Painted Steel Sculptural Objects.

Rachelle Thiewes
Thiewes is a professor of metal arts at the University of Texas in El Paso. Her work is shown in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fuller Craft Museum in Masssachusetts, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Smithsonian American Museum of Art in Washington, DC, the National Museums of Scotland, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

"The Chihuahuan desert of west Texas, where I live, has played a pivotal role in shaping the way I approach my jewelry. The barren mountains with the desert pushed up to their edges are bold, dramatic, aggressive and seductive, providing a continual source of inspiration and study. The luminous energy of light that baths the desert can swiftly transform from sharp and shrieking to subtle and sensual, all within a day's time. Capturing the refraction and dispersal of light with my jewelry through the orchestration of body motion has held my fascination for decades and continues to challenge and inform my ideas of light."

Vivian Beer
Vivian Beer combines her favorite images, such as flags, clouds, tail feathers, and rodeos with a sense of architecture and furniture design to create objects that are steel calligrapher's lines in three dimensions.

Beer holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Maine College of Art as well as Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and recently finished a Windgate residency at Purchase College in New York. Her work can be seen internationally as part of the traveling exhibition, "The Art of Seating," and will be featured in the upcoming exhibition "40 Under 40" at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC. Her public collections include The Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts and the National Ornamental Metal Museum in Tennessee.