At MOWA, Insects Become the Art

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Photo via Museum of Wisconsin Art

"Into the Blue" exhibit by Jennifer Angus

"Into the Blue" exhibit by Jennifer Angus

Regular visitors to the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend expect to be enlightened, enlivened and entertained by the carefully curated artwork on display. However, few will expect what is likely to be the most innovative exhibition ever to grace its galleries.

“Into the Blue,” an immersive exhibition created by Madison-based artist and academic Jennifer Angus that opened Nov. 23, is unlike the work of any other artist. The Canadian-born Angus has combined her specialty in fabric design with a strong entomological empathy for the insect world, combining both in multiple settings and motifs in which the insects become the art to the delight and wonder of gallery-goers.

“Jennifer’s career has been on an upward trajectory nationally and internationally for the past several years,” says Thomas Szolwinski, MOWA’s curator of architecture and design who worked with Angus on the exhibit. “‘Into the Blue’ is our most intricate and elaborate installation to date.” 

Multi-Sensory Environment

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Photo via Museum of Wisconsin Art

Jennifer Angus

Jennifer Angus

Visitors entering the museum’s Hyde Gallery are greeted by vivid blue walls and 10 chandeliers fitted with blue lights, creating a multi-sensory environment meant to invoke a moonlit woods at night. The dim light requires viewers to look closely at the individual displays, building greater empathy between viewers and the displays’ insect inhabitants, many of which have been anthropomorphized into performing everyday human tasks, such as having meetings, the artist says.

“I always had a growing interest in insects, but my first love was creating patterns,” says Angus, a professor in the design studies department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “On a whim I put the insects into the patterns. It’s a compulsion and repulsion. We like patterns because they repeat themselves, but we don’t necessarily like the idea of insects inside those patterns.”

The artist was visiting Southeast Asia’s “Golden Triangle”—the mountainous intersection between Myanmar, Thailand and Laos—when she saw women dressed in garb that sported the shining wings of the Buprestidae, an insect family some of which are known as “jewel beetles” for their glossy, iridescent colors. Women throughout the region went to great pains using the beetle parts to create striking patterns on their clothing, a combination that immediately clicked with the pattern designer.

Citizen Scientists

The design and insect content blend in a variety of ways throughout the gallery, including insects pinned to the walls in large, ornate patterns. Angus also reaches back to the Victorian era, a time when “citizen scientists” collected and displayed insects in glass bell jars, bubbles and other means. A curio cabinet also has insects on display in unique settings, all set to an audio background of old-fashioned music native to the same era.

According to Szolwinski, more than 4,000 insects have been used throughout the display, including 3,500 pinned to the gallery walls and 600 that appear in jars of “insect jelly” which feature their entomological content in a mix of pectin, sugar and natural colors. The jelly can be eaten, he says, although he doesn’t advise it. Instead, the jelly filled jars serve as lenses through which the blue light shines to create a visual focal point that draws viewers through the gallery to the end of the exhibit. Moreover, the 4,000 insects do not include those appearing in bell jars tableaus and others small displays within the exhibition.

Angus buys her insects from breeders throughout the world, maintaining an active inventory of some 20,000 beetles, cicadas, grasshoppers and other hard-shelled insects able to stand up to repeated use from exhibition to exhibition. (Butterflies, moths and other lighter creatures are not durable enough to meet display demands. She also stays away from cockroaches because of the negative feelings they invoke in some viewers.)

Given the nature of her art, an exhibit like “Into the Blue” is totally unique to MOWA. Different but similar exhibits have been done before, but this particular rendition can never be done again, Angus says. But she hopes her message for the importance of the role insects play as the first step in the food chain is something more people will take to heart.

“If the insects all disappeared, we as a species would have just six weeks before the planet would disappear,” Angus says. “My art is a subversive way to get people to confront the dangers of climate change. It’s an opportunity to create a discussion.”

“Into the Blue”, Jennifer Angus’ immersive exhibition celebrating art and ecology, runs through March 2, 2025, at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Ave., West Bend. Details at wisconsinart.org.