Crux of the Matter
Work by Margo Mensing and Sayward Schoonmaker
October 15 – November 9, 2025
Opening Reception and Artists’ Talk: Wednesday, October 15, 5 – 6:30 p.m.
(Artists’ Talk starting at 5:30, with Sayward Schoonmaker, Tang Teaching Museum Dayton
Director Ian Berry, and artist Susie Brandt)
Crux of the Matter presents work by Margo Mensing, (1941 – 2024), Skidmore College Fiber Arts professor, interdisciplinary artist and poet; and Sayward Schoonmaker, Skidmore ’06, interdisciplinary artist, writer, and former student of Mensing. Both artists play with language, using subtle humor as underpinning, and both approach their work through a conceptual lens, starting with an idea and then finding the physical form to best serve it.
Mensing’s works range from weavings and quilts to her sculptural response to Ghiberti’s 15th Century Gates of Paradise, monumental bronze doors that feature ten Old Testament scenes in square panels. Mensing’s wooden doors, also monumental, feature ten household tips (such as, Tenderize tough meat in 1 Tbsp vinegar and 1 pint water) each incised in a square linoleum panel. The purpose of much of her work, as critic John Yau writes, is at once direct and subversive, she wants to reveal the kinds of hierarchical thinking that defines an individual’s notion of self-worth.*
The interactive Hanging Out the Laundry (words cut into sheer fabric pieces that viewers may arrange into lines of poetry) and Dead At (a multi-year project in which she explored the lives of eminent figures and created works that recognize some aspect of their identity) are among Mensing’s works in the gallery.
Exhibited widely in one-person and group exhibitions (such as the Institute for Women and Gender, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI and the Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL) Mensing’s work also included writing, curation (including A Very Liquid Heaven at the Tang Teaching Museum in 2005-06), collaborations, and site-specific projects.
Schoonmaker writes that her own work “most often begins with questions of how words, materials, and structures inform - or construct - ways of seeing and being….Each piece is written and built simultaneously— the material form looking for the content, and vice versa.”
From vintage Rolodexes that contain a series of messages between two friends,
To poems written in letters formed by pencil shavings, to Slice, a table with a glittering black surface interrupted by slivers of white substructure, she employs exquisite craftsmanship throughout. Her works feel like unadorned truths, simultaneously urgent and familiar, plainly-stated and enigmatic.
Schoonmaker’s work has been exhibited at many venues, including Weinberg/Newton Gallery in Chicago, IL; the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, NY, and the Brattleboro Museum in Brattleboro, VT. She earned her BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College, an MFA in the Fiber and Materials Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MLIS from Syracuse University. She is currently the artistic director of Stone Quarry Art Park, an outdoor contemporary art space located in central New York State.
There will be an Artists’ Talk on October 15 at 5:30 p.m. with Schoonmaker, Tang Teaching Museum Dayton Director Ian Berry, and Fiber artist Susie Brandt; both Brandt and Berry collaborated with Mensing on numerous occasions.
*John Yau, from essay accompanying Natural Inclination exhibition at Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, Michigan, 1995.
All exhibitions and events at the Schick Art Gallery are free and open to the public.
Schick Gallery Hours: Mon – Thurs, 10 – 6; Fri/Sat/Sun, 11 – 4
Please direct questions to:
Rebecca Shepard, Schick Gallery Director rshepard@skidmore.edu
518-580-5027