If NIU art students ever wonder about their professors’ artistic output, they have a chance to see their work on display for a few more weeks.

The NIU School of Art Faculty Biennial, an exhibition featuring work by School of Art Faculty, has been on display in the NIU Art Museum in Altgeld Hall since Oct. 30 and will continue until Dec. 8.

Visitors to the gallery might be surprised to be greeted in the hallway by books and excerpts from scholarly journals rather than paintings or sculptures.

The exhibition features professional output from faculty in every area of the school, which includes the purely academic emphases of art history and art education. This makes for an nontraditional but refreshingly diverse exhibition including such media as scholarly research, medical illustrations and even architectural sketches.

That’s not to say there isn’t a whole lot of the type of painting, sculpture and mixed media that you would expect to see at a top-tier contemporary art museum.

One of the galleries is filled with the distinctive sounds of Jewish wedding music. The music serves as the audio accompaniment to “Ten Plagues,” an entertaining video installation by assistant professor of art education Mira Reisberg.

One of the more striking pieces swathed in the music is “Such A Mess,” a wall-mounted sculpture of a gold-plated human figure barraged by projectile dirty laundry. Associate professor Lee Sido notes in his description that he means for his pieces to portray that certain humor and sarcasm that we all need, “or else our heads will explode.”

It is surprisingly delightful to see less abstract, more utilitarian art on display in the gallery setting. There is a pair of stunningly detailed illustrations of parts of the female anatomy (not that kind, guys) by associate professor Kimberly Martens, who often makes illustrations for covers of medical journals.

There is also a set of architectural sketches of a church lobby done by professor Harry Wirth. The drawings exude unexpected artistic depth.

Visiting assistant professor Suzanne Gorgas’ “Eyes of Blue Dog (For Z.)” is an eye-catching installation made up of dozens of written-upon bar napkins tacked to the gallery wall.

There are dozens more thought-provoking pieces throughout the galleries that convey a gamut of emotions and messages through remarkably diverse means.

The exhibition should be a source of school pride for jaded NIU football fans (or students who don’t care about football at all).

As implied by the name, the School of Art Faculty Biennial comes around every two years. That means all of the work on display has been created in the last two years – the art faculty has been hard at work creating fresh new art for willing visitors to enjoy.

Not everything on display looked like it took a whole lot of time to make, however. Painting professor Charlotte Rollman contributed three photos of the aftermath from this August’s torrential storms.

Her description reads thus: “I love photography but I don’t have any darkroom skills. I don’t even have Photoshop. Wal-Mart printed my photos.”

Fair enough; the pictures are beautiful.