While it may not have retractable wings or a Downtown Milwaukee view of the lakefront, the Racine Art Museum (RAM) features a fascinating building of its own, a modern-looking paneled structure that, at its foundation, turns out to be anything but modern. The museum actually comprises two buildings from the 1850s and 1860s – renovated and restyled into a modern museum setting in 2003 – with a unique history.

"We have about three safes in the building because it was a bank for a good part of its life," said Jessica Shafer, marketing and publications manager for RAM. "It was most recently an M&I Bank, but it was also the bank that John Dillinger robbed in 1933. We actually had the tommy gun that was used in the robbery for a short while on display; that went back to the Racine Police Department, who has it on display all the time."

Luckily, what’s currently housed and featured inside the art museum is just as interesting and compelling as the building itself: an expansive two-part exhibition called "in(Organic)," a compilation of art works that combine the natural and unnatural – in terms of thematic meaning and artistic medium – in ways both beautiful and often unnerving. The show – which opened back in October and runs through Feb. 1 – serves as a sequel of sorts to RAM’s "Terra Nova" polymer exhibit from 2011.

"The previous exhibition was built and really focused on making a splash with polymer," said RAM curator of exhibitions Lena Vigna. "There were artists that we identified as groundbreaking artists. Those were people who had made steps with polymer but were also already being recognized by other communities, not just within polymer. There were people buying their work because it was art jewelry, not just because it was polymer jewelry. It sounds like a funny distinction, but it can make a difference."

Developed in the ’30s and known popularly as Sculpey, polymer clay is a fairly new artistic medium. And as still the new medium on the block, polymer is often not taught in academic settings or considered a high art material, but rather one for crafting, hobbyists and small pieces. Vigna even noted polymer’s reputation in the art world often means she occasionally has to look in unconventional places, such as craft shows, for artist’s work. However, over the decades, polymer has gained some traction in the artistic community.

"Because of the newness of it, it’s encouraged people who’ve really been taken with the medium to really start to push the medium," Vigna said. "It’s similar to other areas, like photography and even ceramics to a certain extent, that had a do-it-yourself component. There’s a real sort of grassroots effort to make more work in polymer and, now with some artists, an even stronger push to elevate the medium."

RAM has taken on a significant role in helping to bring polymer to a new level and raise the artistic profile of polymer. The museum has a hefty collection of polymer works, and it recently hosted a second polymer-focused symposium in the hopes of gathering together artists and people at the forefront of the polymer push to have a conversation and discuss the next step.

"If we’re talking about elevating the medium," Vigna said, "what does that even mean?"

From what Vigna gathered at the symposium, a part of growing polymer as an artistic medium is not just exclusively shining a spotlight on those works, but putting them and integrating them with pieces of other mediums and seeing how they function with the rest of art. As a result, RAM’s "in(Organic)" brings a focus to several polymer works but also incorporates a variety of diverse mediums.

"When we had the symposium and the artists came to see the shows, over and over they said, ‘I really appreciated the expanded context because it helps me see my work a little bit differently,’" Vigna said. "It’s not as if there are artists here that are necessarily brand new to everybody, but the combination of them together was what was really striking them."

To help accomplish that goal, Vigna wanted to pick a theme that would allow polymer and other mediums to work well together in a unified exhibit. The result was "in(Organic)," a melding of the natural and unnatural to fascinating and occasionally eerie effect.

"The natural world is a long time art staple theme," Vigna explained. "There’s a reason for that. Nature is present everyday, and there’s an ongoing interest in conversations about the environment and climate change. It’s a topic that never really goes away."

The unnatural and somewhat creepiness aspect of nature, however, was what really moved Vigna and helped her develop "in(Organic)." She became fascinated and intrigued by nature overtaking space, such as mold or parasitic plants. This is natural behavior, Vigna noted, but also somewhat unwanted, gross and unsettling.

"There’s a creepy factor in some of what we’re talking about here, when nature gets a little bit beyond itself," Vigna said, "or you find something beautiful in something that’s not good, like the kudzu vines that grow in Florida over everything. They coat trees, telephone poles and wires, and the formation they make can look lovely, but it’s absolutely invasive and deadly. It’s that line between something that’s beautiful and gross at the same time."

The neck piece pictured above by Maggie Maggio officially confirmed the idea for "in(Organic)" in Vigna’s mind, embodying everything she hoped the new exhibit would represent. Its design – looking like a leafy vine, root or tentacle clinging and overtaking a human form – perfectly captures that visually compelling but mildly uneasy balance of nature.

In addition, the piece is made of polymer, pushing the medium and bringing attention to its progress.

"Not many people had done that kind of thing with polymer before," Vigna said. "They really broke it out of the boundaries of what we had seen the material do. It’s getting a little bit bigger, and it’s really integrated with the body. I was already thinking I might want to go this way, and now this is what I want to do."

Maggio’s piece also plays on the irony of using a synthetic substance to evoke a naturalistic object. It’s yet another play on the theme of "inorganic" that reoccurs throughout the exhibit, with amoeba and bacteria made of polymer, artist Jessica Drenk’s stalactite made up of carefully organized wooden pencils and a mold-like spore created out of books. 

On the second floor of RAM is a companion piece to the main "in(Organic)" exhibit, "in(Organic): Labs," featuring thematically related pieces from two artists, Wendy Wallin Malinow and Edgar Mosa. Polymer is less a part of the theme in the second floor portion of the exhibit, but the idea of nature’s interplay with people and itself is still fully on display.

Between the two floors, it’s a riveting tribute by RAM, not only to the riveting potential of polymer but to the imposing potential of nature, as well.