Little City Artists Bring 'Vision' and Verve to Lake County

The David Adler Music and Arts Center celebrates the talents of the Little City's artists with disabilities in their first Adler Center exhibition, Write the Vision, Make it Plain.

Featured artists Jeff Aikin, Tarik Echols, Joe Flasch, Harold Jeffries, Angelo LaPietra and Wayne Mazurek have worked in the studios of Little City's Center for the Arts since the mid-1990s. The Little City Foundation exists to provide opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

For theses six artists, "Art's function as a means of communication has taken on a more insistent role than it plays for mainstream artists," says Frank Tumino, of Little City's Center for the Arts. "As witness to this, all of them play with the idea of text in their images."

From Echols' elegant repeating patterns to Jeffries' linear grids and colorful blueprints, the artists' watercolors, drawings, and collages create a vibrant tribute to the power and feeling of text in art.

"The Adler Center is a new audience, not a lot of people in Lake County have encountered this art and these artists, and that's a plus for us," says Tumino. "When people hear 'artists with disabilities,' they may think they know what to expect. When they enter this exhibition, I want them to enter and expect art that is on par with any other contemporary artist."

Little City's artists have previously exhibited at the Rockford Art Museum, Intuit: the Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, the Elmhurst Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center, as well as internationally in Germany, London, and Belgium. Jeffries and Mazurek have also been featured in a new documentary film about their life and work called Share My Kingdom.

A free, public reception celebrating the opening of Write the Vision, Make it Plain, will be held on Friday, September 8 from 6-8pm at the David Adler Center. This public reception is open to all ages, and offers a chance to meet and speak with many of the artists.

See Write the Vision, Make it Plain through September 30. The galleries, part of renowned architect David Adler's country estate, are open from 9am - 9pm Monday through Thursday and from 9am - 2pm each Saturday. Admission is free.

Located in the historic home of architect David Adler, the David Adler Music and Arts Center is dedicated to making music and the arts an integral part of everyday life. Its year-round activities are designed to foster engagement and achievement in the arts for the people of Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin. The David Adler Music and Arts Center is located at 1700 N. Milwaukee Avenue, Libertyville.