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Students walking through the lobby of the Williams Center for the Arts today through Thursday can create some impromptu art with folk artist Gregory Warmack, also known as “Mr. Imagination.”
From 10 a.m.-noon and 1-4 p.m., Warmack will help students create small, handmade carvings from sandstone. His residency is part of Lafayette’s annual Roethke Festival.
A self-taught artist from Chicago, Warmack took on the name “Mr. Imagination” after surviving two gunshot wounds to his stomach in 1978. His art reveals a fascination with human faces that appear in images ranging from garden tools to feather dusters, using sandstone, used paint brushes, bottle caps, and an amalgam of discarded items.
Warmack’s work is represented in the collections of the American Museum of Folk Art, New York; the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C.; the American Visionary Museum, Baltimore, Md.; and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Ga. Exhibitions have included a show at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago and others in Amsterdam and Paris.