Remembering a pillar of SIU’s art community

William Thielen sits in the North Hall exhibition in the University Museum surrounded by his close friends and a former teacher’s artwork. He’s surrounded by various watercolor paintings with reds, greens and blues.

He’s the main curator for the EARTH, WIND, FIRE exhibit with works from the late faculty member Sylvia R. Greenfield.

Greenfield taught basic design/foundation, art education, drawing/life drawing, painting, printmaking, and women in the arts.

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“I met Sylvia my first semester of graduate school,” Thielen said. “She was then teaching a Women in the Arts history class and you may think, ‘well, what’s the big deal,’ but that was in 1977. That didn’t exist anyplace.”

Thielen said, after taking the class he fell in love with Greenfield, as a friend and teacher, prompting him to take another one of her classes, which cemented their friendship.

He said he’s still in Carbondale because, while at graduate school he met his now husband who was the director of Shryock Auditorium at the time. Thielen is now a full-time studio artist.

“I asked her, I said, ‘did you prefer undergraduate or graduate students’ and she said she preferred working with undergraduates,” Thielen said. “They wanted to learn. They had that energy and that drive and they wanted to learn and she loved that energy and she loved working with them.”

According to the artist’s statement, a part of the exhibit, Greenfield was born in Buffalo, New York, in 1929. She got her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1965 and her Master of Fine Arts, Drawing, Painting and Printmaking Studio in 1967 from the University of Colorado.

Before coming to Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU)  in 1968, she worked as a medical illustrator for the Roswell Memorial Hospital in Buffalo and a technical illustrator for I.P. Krick and Associates in Denver, Colorado.

During her 29 years of teaching at SIU, Greenfield got her Master of Science in Community Development from SIU in 1977. She retired in 1997.

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Greenfield passed away from cancer in 2019.

“She loved to teach, she was very hands-on,” Thielen said. “I know the past graduates [and] past students… all loved her and speak very highly of her and they said she had a very big impact on their life. A lot of them went on to become educators themselves.”

Greenfield was an abstract artist. The way abstract artists find their passion for that type of art is doing that first piece and it “speaks to you like nothing else”, Thielen said.

“She loved the fact that abstract [art] allows the viewer to have a part in deciphering the work,” Thielen said. “She loved that it gave the viewer the chance of interpretation of the work.”

Greenfield enjoyed doing watercolors and the different things one could do with thin, veiled washes. With watercolors in the exhibit, it was a project that began to give her a lot of frustration, Thielen said. 

“One time she was in her studio, she just got to the breaking point and she took all of her watercolors and just literally tore them all up and threw them on her work desk and they were just kind of all scattered all over,” Thielen said. “She just stood there and was looking at them and looking at it and had that realization or saw what the next step was.”

Thielen said the act of tearing up her artwork was a daring one, but one that pushed Greenfield into the new direction she wanted to go with it, and the extreme act helped her push that work forward.

After Greenfiled passed away, Thielen was given ownership of all her artwork. While he had been helping clean her home before then, he found the prints in the exhibit and was surprised that she’d done them.

“I went to her and I said, ‘Do you remember doing prints’ and she kind of got a shocked look and said, ‘Oh my god… I forgot I’d done these prints,’” Thielen said. “So I brought them up and we went through them and she had never signed them so I had her sign them and we talked about them.”

When people would ask about the watercolors Thielen would make sure to highlight how hard Greenfield worked to get them into the final condition they’re in now, he said.  

“It wasn’t just you know, ‘yeah, I did watercolor, cut it up and you know, here it is,’” Thielen said. “No, it was… a very intuitive thing.”

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With the many small pieces of watercolor in each painting, Thielen said he looks at it as a novel showing chapters in her life.

“We’re getting to look at her life chapter by chapter and each one of them is a different story about her life,” Thielen said. “Some of them are very grand novels and some of them are short stories.”

As Thielen looked emotionally at his friends’ work around him, he said it felt like she was still here through her artwork.

“You know,” Thielen said, pausing to collect his thoughts, “I’ve always felt her work is quiet but yet it’s not. It’s like when you move in and really look at it there’s a lot of depth…and it says a lot about her I think.” 

During her time in Carbondale, Greenfield was a big women’s activist and an avid supporter of what was then known as The Women’s Center, now called The Survivor Empowerment Center. 

The Daily Egyptian interviewed her in 2017 for a women’s march. She was surprised that, to this day, we still are fighting for equality in this country.

“You can either be a positive or negative in a community, she was a positive, so that in itself that says a lot,” Thielen took another emotional pause. “Just in life in general, you can be positive or negative, and she was a positive.”

Thielen said the University Museum will be getting Greenfield’s private art collection and some of the pieces in the exhibit will be sold. 

“I would just say [to] people, ‘take your time when you look at it,’” Thielen said. “Each piece is different. Each piece is unique.”

Before her passing Thielen and Greenfiled discussed that the money made through the exhibit will be donated. Half will go to the Center and the other half to St. Francis Cares, an animal shelter.

Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design Erin Palmer started teaching at SIU in the Fall of 1993 and was a colleague and mentee of Greenfield’s a few years before she retired.

“I would say she was a very important person to me because we had many important conversations about teaching [and] about art,” Palmer said. “As well as just her going that extra mile to introduce me to other colleagues on campus that were not in the art department and resources and just helping me to feel supported.”

When looking at Greenfield’s work, Palmer said she sees a strong connection with various visual characteristics, visual expression in her work and what was important to her when she taught.

“When she was teaching drawing, sometimes people might think, oh, learning to draw is about learning to render three-dimensional form, clearly in space,” Palmer said. “But she would want her students to understand how to render the form and space, but also how to do that with looseness, with gesture, not just to be able to draw with a pencil, but how do you draw with brush and wash and ink.”

With the small format of the watercolors in the exhibit, they tend to look like landscapes. It portrays the loose fluidity of the watercolor to construct very visual relationships, Palmer said.

“She was incredibly knowledgeable and accomplished with regard to her use of visual language, in her own work,” Palmer said. “She was a wonderful teacher, you know, in how she would push her students.”

Palmer said she was influenced by Greenfield, who was a big help to her as a teacher. 

“When I look at the work it’s so beautiful to me,” Palmer paused and looked around at Greenfield’s work. “The number of ways she’s using the media and her process and her distillation of many, many things. To pull that all together in each of these individual pieces of this… just beautiful distillation and synthesis of so much and it’s quite humbling, she was very, very prolific.”

With the exhibition staying in the museum until the end of the semester it gives people the chance to come back and spend time with the work. Palmer plans to bring some of her art classes to the exhibit to experience Greenfield’s work and the visual power of it.

“When I am looking at Sylvia’s work. I feel like I’m talking to her,” Palmer said with tearful eyes. “And that’s a wonderful thing because I miss her and this exhibition just makes me so happy.”

Staff reporter Jamilah Lewis can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @jamilahlewis. To stay up to date with all your southern Illinois news, follow the Daily Egyptian on Facebook and Twitter.

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