Exhibition focuses on the coal industry: WM Weston Stoerger, Sharp Museum curator of exhibits at SIU Carbondale, is working to ready the “Captive Coal” exhibition that features fine artist Michael K. Paxton. The exhibition opens Jan. 16. (Photo by Russell Bailey; Paxton photo provided by Sharp Museum.)
January 10, 2024
SIU’s Sharp Museum exhibition focuses on the coal industry
CARBONDALE, Ill. — An exhibition that highlights the work of fine artist Michael K. Paxton’s deep roots in the West Virginia coal industry and tells the story of the region’s coal miners will be featured at Southern Illinois University Carbondale’s Sharp Museum this spring.
The museum’s exhibitions for the spring semester start next week. Paxton’s “Captive Coal” exhibition with oil paintings and charcoal drawings that reflect the people and industry that shaped his life will be on display from Jan. 16 to May 10 in the museum’s North Hall Mitchell Gallery. A companion exhibition in the adjacent Continuum Gallery through March 30, “Coal Mining Families in Southern Illinois,” highlights the region’s diversity and strong connection to the coal industry through narrative photography from SIU’s Advanced Energy Institute via Morris Library’s Special Collections Research Center.
“West Virginia is coal country,” said WM Weston Stoerger, the museum’s curator of exhibits. “Southern Illinois is built basically the same way. We are a region built largely on the back of mining, it is intrinsic to a lot of towns here.
“When we had the opportunity to show Mr. Paxton’s work, we jumped at it because we believed it will be something that will resonate with the people in this region.”
Reception and artist talk
The opening reception, and artist talk, is from 4:30 to 7 p.m. Jan. 19 in Sharp Museum. The event is free and open to the public. The artist talk begins at 6 p.m.
Family history of coal mining
Paxton’s works are a retrospective exhibition that features art of the past 30 years with a central focus of coal mining, noting Paxton’s sixth-generation connection with the industry where he “has seen all of the ups and downs and what that means,” Stoerger said.
“He’s lost family members to black lung disease. Yet the coal industry has given family members opportunity, and it’s instilled lessons into how he behaves and conducts himself,” Stoerger said. “The exhibition is recontextualizing and grappling with that industry, both the positive and the negative.”
One of Paxton’s nearly 30 works in the exhibition includes a 1997 commissioned oil painting of underground miners, “From Widen, W.V., to West Frankfort, Illinois” for longtime collectors and supporters John and Lucia Hollister of Chicago. John Hollister is a two-degree SIU Carbondale graduate, who along with his wife, founded a Chicago janitorial company. Also included in the exhibition is a series of abstract oil paintings on 8-foot-by-6-foot unstretched canvas of medical slides of black lung disease, along with several charcoal drawings.
In his artist’s statement, Paxton explains the exhibition “is an effort to use my bone deep knowledge and love of what it means to be a native of coal country coupled with my concern and anger at the aftermath of what the greed for coal leaves behind.”
“The term ‘captive coal’ refers to coal that is mined for the sole use by companies that own the mine,” Paxton wrote. “This work reaches both forwards and backwards as a contemporary artist in a desire to investigate more fully what it means to me to be a ‘Captive of Coal.’”
Paxton earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in drawing and painting from the University of Georgia and a bachelor’s degree in art from Marshall University. He retired from the faculty in the Columbia College of Chicago’s art and art history and design department in 2021.
For more information, contact Stoerger at 618-453-5388 or stoerger@siu.edu, or visit museum.siu.edu. Sharp Museum hours are noon to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1-4 p.m. Saturday. The museum is closed Sunday and Monday, and during all SIU breaks and holidays.
As with all exhibitions, the artwork represents the viewpoints of its creators, not SIU. SIU complies with the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act and State Officials and Employees Ethics Act.