Tom Robinson & Loralyn Kumlin

The gallery will be open Friday, Sept 22 from 5-7 pm and Saturday, Sept 23 from 12-4 pm, and by appointment.

A new exhibition opens at SoNa Chicago Contemporary Art featuring Tom Robinson and Loralyn Kumlin, Creative Emergence from the Pandemic: Paintings, Miniatures, Wood Mosaics, and Imagery Boxes. 

In the early months of isolation during the pandemic, artists Tom Robinson and Loralyn Kumlin began renovating a huge vintage dollhouse that they found discarded in a Chicago alley. They collected and furnished the rooms with miniature furniture and accessories and then made miniature copies of their full-scale artwork to adorn the walls of the dollhouse. Wonderful work emerged from that effort as they moved on to create their own structures, paintings, and miniatures. Their new work and the dollhouse are featured in the exhibition. 

These two artists have been colleagues and friends for decades. Tom Robinson is a multi-media artist who uses woods, watercolors, oils, acrylics, and other components to create portraits, oil paintings, sculptures and more. Loralyn Kumlin’s  paintings are rich in color, figurative, and expressive. They both make companion pieces in three dimensions that incorporate their paintings in miniature and give further expression to the paintings. 

Tom’s work on the dollhouse morphed into a series of miniature galleries that have elaborate construction including spectacular wood flooring and lighting, and which incorporate miniatures of his different series of artwork over the years. Also on view is a piece from his “Twins” series, which are large wood mosaics made from his portraits using the natural color of the wood not stains. Loralyn’s paintings and imagery boxes feature an array of images from fanciful to figurative. The current show features several pieces from her series of colorful portraits of Women Who Have Resisted and a poignant tribute to the four young girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963.

The work of other SoNa Chicago artists is on view in the Gallery Annex. They include Kermit Berg, Sharon Bladholm, Tita Brady, Monica J. Brown, Jill Kolker, Nicholas Sistler, and Paul Somers.