Hot
Printing: Late Works by Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman
October 9-January 2, 2005
In the early 1920s, Hendrik Werkman (Dutch, 1882-1945), the operator of
a small printing establishment in Groningen, began using his printing
press more as a mode of self expression than as a means of income. He
called his new endeavor “hot printing” as an overt nod to
the hot jazz that had ignited his interest. For the next two decades,
1921-1945, Werkman used his press to print mostly his own graphic designs,
in small editions, while continuing to accept a limited number of commissions.
This exhibition features Werkman’s late works and includes approximately
forty examples of his printed journals, calendars, and broadsides. It
is organized by Amelia Avdic MA ’04 in collaboration with Senior
Curator for Modern and Contemporary Art Deborah Rothschild. We are greatly
indebted to the generosity of June Braun and Robert Leibowits from whose
collection this exhibition is drawn.
In
the Company of Women:
Selections from the Williams College Museum of Art
October 30, 2004-April 17, 2005
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Release
This exhibition looks at the diverse ways artists from different cultures
and historical periods have visualized groups of women. In some cases,
the context is the everyday world of work, but more often, symbolic or
imaginative meaning provides the artistic impetus. Female figures are
infused with otherworldly powers that beguile, transport, and occasionally
menace the human spectator. The tradition of the powerful woman, whether
goddess of wisdom or fetish figure, continues to this day in the visual
arts; this exhibition provides the viewer with a gallery fraught with
the compelling visual discourse of this “company of women.”
Organized by Nancy Mowll Mathews, WCMA’s Eugénie Prendergast
Senior Curator of 19th and 20th Century Art.
The
Book of Kings: Art, War, and the Morgan Library's Medieval Picture Book
January 29-April 24, 2005
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The Pierpont Morgan Library’s great medieval Picture Bible was commissioned
by King Louis IX of France who reigned from 1226 to 1270. Its large-scale
illuminations depict biblical stories as though they occurred in the 13th
century, visually linking biblical war scenes to King Louis’s Crusades
in the Holy Land and earning it the moniker of “The Crusader Bible.”
Additionally, though the work originally included no text, its pages were
annotated in Latin early in its life, and then later into Persian and
Hebrew. Both the bible and its history tell the complex story of the crusades
and their lasting impact. This exhibition includes stunning facsimiles
of every page of the manuscript and features a variety of medieval objects
that enhance the visitors’ experience of the life and times of this
extraordinary book. This exhibition was organized by the Walters Art Gallery.
Beyond
East and West: Seven Transnational Artists
February 12, 2005-May 15, 2005
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Beyond East and West: Seven Transnational Artists displays recent
work by seven important contemporary artists who come from the region
stretching from Egypt to Pakistan, but who have lived much of their lives
in Europe or the United States. The artists, Jananne Al-Ani, Ghada Amer,
Mona Hatoum, Y. Z. Kami, Walid Raad, Michal Rovner, and Shahzia Sikander,
draw on their experiences of displacement and knowledge of multiple cultures
to offer alternative visions of the contemporary world. They have crossed
or collapsed political, cultural, and religious borders, and disrupted
conventional and stereotypical representations of time and place, and
of history and geography. Their art offers new kinds of intercultural
understanding. The exhibition addresses various experiences of travel,
exile, diaspora, alienation, and integration, feelings of longing and
belonging, memories of places and people, encounters with divergent views
of sexuality and gender, alternate political understandings of the world,
and cultural practices that both divide and unite us. Guest curators:
David O'Brien and David Prochaska. Developed by Krannert Art Museum.
Quilt
Masterpieces from The Newark Museum
June-August 2005
Experience the true fabric of American history. Twenty important selections
from The Newark Museum's renowned quilt collection explore the style,
design, and meaning of American quilts in the 19th and 20th centuries,
as well as the important social and communal role they played in the lives
of those who created them. View works ranging from the early 19th century
to the end of the 20th by European Americans, African Americans, and Native
Americans, each with its own unique characteristics. Ulysses Grant Dietz,
Curator, Newark Museum.
Moving Pictures: The Un-Easy Relationship Between
American Art and Early Film 1890-1910
July 16-November 6, 2005
In Moving Pictures, American art of the turn of the twentieth
century will be viewed in the context of the new medium of moving pictures,
which were first commercially projected in 1895. In an exhibition of about
150 works, including approximately 70 early films, the viewer will be
introduced to a new way of looking at American art from about 1890 to
1910. Installed side by side with the short films, the paintings take
on new meaning as artists and audiences of that period grappled with a
new visual technology. This exhibition and its catalogue will present
a complete and authoritative overview of the opening chapter in the history
of American art and film. Essays by prominent scholars from art history,
film studies, and American studies will give an added dimension to a chronological
account of the issues. Organized by Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie
Prendergast Curator, and the Williams College Museum of Art, the exhibition
will travel to three other American venues: Delaware Museum of Art, December
9, 2005 - March 3, 2006; the Grey Art Gallery of New York University,
September 13, 2006 - December 9, 2006; and the Phillips Collection, Washington,
D.C., Feb. 17, 2007-May 13, 2007.
Masterworks of Chinese Painting: In Pursuit of
Mists and Clouds
September 10-December 4, 2005
Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University
of California, Berkeley, this exhibition presents a stunning panorama
of distinguished Chinese paintings. Included are nearly 75 hanging scrolls,
hand scrolls, and album leaves ranging from a delicate early-thirteenth-century
hanging scroll by the court painter Ma Yuan depicting a quiet detail of
mountain scenery, to a bold mid-seventeenth-century hanging scroll by
the innovative Ming figure painter Ch'en hung-shou reinterpreting a poignant
encounter in Chinese history. The exhibition also includes a monumental
mid-fifteenth-century landscape by Tai Chin, a major painting by the sixteenth-century
Wu School painter Wen Cheng-ming, and several works by Kung Hsien, the
foremost of the Individualist painters based in seventeenth-century Nanjing.
Regeneration: Contemporary Chinese Art from China
and the U.S.
February 4-May 6, 2006
Organized by the Samek Art Gallery at Bucknell University, this exhibition
includes some of the most exciting contemporary Chinese art being made
today: artists who have been prominent in the international scene since
the late 1980s, who have received international attention for their work
in the last decade, and emerging artists who are currently being recognized
internationally. While the work in this exhibition will be diverse and
wide-ranging, the artists do share some thematic concerns. Some employ
or appropriate traditional Chinese art forms in new ways and others investigate
the significant social and cultural transformations occurring in China
today. All represent the vital and rapid regeneration of contemporary
life and culture in China today.
Screening Architecture
Fall 2006
Screening Architecture brings together an international group
of younger artists whose work is linked by an enduring fascination, both
with the subject of architecture, and the mediums of video and digital
animation that they use to depict it. While architecture is static, our
experience of it is not. We move through it, around it, in front of it,
behind it, and sometimes even above it. But we never remain perfectly
still in relation to it. In this way, video and animation are ideal mediums
for the exploration of the space created by buildings. Similarly, the
proliferation and integration of film, television, and video as well as
computers, video games, surveillance technology, and virtual reality into
our everyday lives has influenced the way we think about our surroundings.
Screening Architecture, accompanied by an 88-page full color
catalogue, will consist of recent works by 7-8 artists, including Jeremy
Blake, Oliver Boberg, Jonas Dahlberg, Craig Kalpakjian, Luisa Lambri,
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, and Sven Påhlsson.
