Featured Artist: Elizabeth Klise

Klise currently serves as artist-in-residence at the Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria, where she uses vintage art to create personal sequences that explore themes of media, language, education, and identity. Her primary interest is the intersection between writing, education, and visual arts. Klise received a BA from the University of Notre Dame and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. In addition to her visual art, she is a writer and widely-published poet, with literary honors including an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Award, two IAC Literary Awards, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Award, and others. Klise also edited and produced a five-part educational art history video series entitled "Exploring Art: Forms and Ideas in Art of the Western World", which has been used in classrooms across the country. Her current work "Check Them Out" is on view in The Keefe Gallery September 1 - October 31.

"Check Them Out" is an art installation that features hundreds of vintage library due-date cards upon which people have shared personal memories of encounters with famous people. The artist has paired these sightings with vintage card catalog cards that relate in some way to the encounter or the celebrity. In this way, viewers can “check out” library books at the same time as they “check out” celebrities.