Rebellious creators of the pre-viral era get spotlight in new Rockford Art Museum exhibit

May 21, 2025|By Kevin Haas|In Rock River Current, News, 815 News, Rockford, Top Stories, Arts & Culture, Things to Do

Visitors walk through the Analog exhibit on Friday, May 16, 2025, at Rockford Art Museum. (Photo by Kevin Haas/Rock River Current)

By Kevin Haas
Rock River Current
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ROCKFORD — Before the concept of going viral existed, Doug Connell and Kevin Cronin were creating videos that would have stirred up social media.

There just wasn’t an easy means to share it.

In the 1990s, the Rockford duo led a collective in creating experimental videos that they thrust into public spaces — like when they projected some of their work onto the side of a building during the On The Waterfront Festival.

There was the time they dumped cash over the second-story rail of the CherryVale Mall. Or when antiquated cell phone technology allowed them to use police scanners to inject bits of cell phone conversations into a live show. Or the multitude of ways they cut up TV soundbites to create new politically infused works of art.

“The sad part is that there were not many people who saw the stuff because it couldn’t be broadcast,” Connell said. “There was no real internet, and certainly not video.”

Dozens of those original works are now living on as part of a new Rockford Art Museum exhibit that celebrates the city’s art scene in the 1990s. It’s called Analog: Rockford’s Decade of Creative Rebellion, and it’s showing now through Sept. 28.

“There was no social media. There wasn’t a lot of internet happening at that time,” said Carrie Johnson, the museum’s chief curator. “It was a beautiful time of that raw innocence of the art world before digital.”

The exhibit, in the museum’s downstairs gallery, showcases 20 artists who left a mark on the city’s creative scene in the 1990s. That includes Betsy Youngquist, Scott Long, Matt Herbig, Rick Zillhart, Lynn Fischer-Carlson, John Deill, Jim Julin, Scott Snyder, Mark Blassage and Kim Van Laeke. It also highlights the Skuggi Gallery, which became a hub for creativity on Seventh Street, and the former Café Esperanto, now known as Kortman Gallery, which merged a café environment with an art gallery.

“This is just showing a lot of people who weren’t around at that time — or who were that didn’t know what was going on — just how cool Rockford was,” Johnson said. “What they were doing at the time was really cutting edge. … It was just a young group of artists that were doing anything.”

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Paul Harvey Oswald

If you weren’t familiar with Connell and Cronin’s video work, that’s somewhat intentional. The duo’s group hid behind the moniker of Paul Harvey Oswald, a mashup of the names of radio broadcaster Paul Harvey and assassin Lee Harvey Oswald that was made in the same vein as the punk band JFKFC.

They used an Italian mannequin prototype made out of terracotta as the figurehead for the group.

“Once we could hide behind Paul, nobody had any idea what we were doing or how we were doing it,” Connell said.

Connell and Cronin both had backgrounds at WIFR news, where they would hear sound bites throughout the day. They found humor in cutting them into places out of context, and eventually started creating avant-garde videos that blended satire and social commentary. One, called A Bill Clinton Rap, cut together sound bites of the former president saying “terrorism, narco trafficking and biological and chemical warfare” over a cheering audience. Another spliced together news sound bites to poke fun at Rockford’s ranking near the bottom of Money Magazine’s list of 300 liveable cities.

“It was about as close to physically cutting tape with a razor blade as you could be,” Connell said. “We got to where we could frame accurately, edit, but on S-VHS tape. We listened to the machines and could get them in sync to hit points that we needed to, and then go back and add the video clips afterward.”

In the Analog exhibit, there are 70 Paul Harvey Oswald pieces ranging from two to four minutes each. Now you can play them through a touch screen at the museum, giving them an accessibility it never had before.

“It never got into digital. Everything was all standard def,” Connell said. “The first sampler we used when we would play live could play a six-second sample off of a floppy disk. So I’d have to put in a new floppy every time we wanted to play a different sound.”

Art Zone

Paul Harvey Oswald videos weren’t easily found, but they did find a host in a half-hour TV show created for public access television to highlight Rockford’s art scene.

It was called Art Zone, a minuscule-budget project that debuted in 1992 to document arts, artists and cultural events in the city.

“Television was something that belonged to the networks, to the TV stations, but all of the sudden we had handheld cameras and home cameras and things that allowed you to start doing things yourself,” said Doc Slafkosky, director of Kortman Gallery and the driving force behind Art Zone. “The technology allowed for things that gave you creative freedom.”

Art Zone was an attempt to give the arts the TV time it wasn’t getting on the regular airwaves.

“We didn’t just give people their three-minute soundbite, we talked to them for 15, 20 minutes,” Slafkosky said. “The idea was to encourage people to go out and experience the arts on your own.”

The Analog exhibit highlights that video work, but it extends beyond that as well. It’s not just paintings on the wall, but three-dimensional creations that showcase the ingenuity of artists of the time, Slafkosky said.

“These people were not only good artists, but they were good craftsman,” Slafkosky said.

The artists in the exhibit are all connected by a common thread, not just the decade they were working but intertwining through places like Cafe Esperanto and Art Zone.

“There was so much going on with music and art. It really was a fertile bed of creativity for this town,” Connell said. “It was really a pretty special time to be involved in art.”