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By AMANDA MALMSTROM
C
oming from a family of machinists and tool and die makers, Peter Gelker
chose a different path by developing a successful career in the medical
field. Gelker holds a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis and is a practicing psychiatrist
in California. It was not until Gelker inherited his father’s tools, used to create
whirligigs in his father’s retirement, in 1999 that Gelker felt the deep desire to
create whirligig art. Created for over five hundred years since the medieval era,
whirligigs are wind-driven or hand-driven devices that function as a toy, a work
of art, an object of amusement, or a kinetic garden ornament. Loyola University
Museum of Art will be showing Peter Gelker’s art, created in the American folk
art tradition, in the new exhibition
Whirligigs: The Art of Peter Gelker
, on view
from February 4th through June 3rd.
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Doctor by Day,
Artist by Night