Image credit: Danny Lyon (American, born 1942). A Toddle House in Atlanta has the distinction of being occupied during a sit-in by some of the most effective organizers in America when the SNCC staff and supporters take a break from a conference to demonstrate, 1963. Gelatin silver print. William Benton Museum of Art, Gift of Sheldron and Helen Seplowitz.
Image credit: William Hogarth (English, 1697-1764). The Four Times of Day: Night, 1738. Etching and engraving. William Benton Museum of Art, Robert S. and Naomi C. Dennison Fund for Acquisition.
Image credit: Sir Realist by John Francis Putnam, 1958.
Image credit: Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922–2007). I Am A Man, 1968, from the portfolio I Am a Man. Gelatin silver print, edition 19/25. William Benton Museum of Art, Louise Crombie Beach Memorial Fund.
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H. Fred Simons African American Cultural Center: Celebrating 50 Years of Service and Activism
William Benton Museum of Art Storrs, CT October 25 - December 16, 2018 From Hogarth to Daumier: Satirical Prints in the Benton’s Collection, 1720-1848
William Benton Museum of Art Storrs, CT August 30 - October 14, 2018 What’s the Alternative? The Art and Outrage of the 1960s Underground Press
William Benton Museum of Art Storrs, CT August 24 - October 14, 2018 Close Third Person: 2018 Studio Art MFA Thesis Exhibition
William Benton Museum of Art Storrs, CT April 3 - May 6, 2018 I AM A MAN: Photographs by Ernest C. Withers
William Benton Museum of Art Storrs, CT February 1 - May 6, 2018 Tabletop Sculpture
Art Palace Gallery Austin, TX July 14 - August 22, 2007 Curated by Amanda Douberley Exhibition Design by Erin Curtis Artists: Richie Budd Hunter Cross Bill Davenport Katalin Hausel Mark Schatz Jared Steffensen |
The Benton salutes UConn’s H. Fred Simons African American Cultural Center upon its fiftieth anniversary with an exhibition of photographs by Danny Lyon. As staff photographer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) from 1962 to 1964, Lyon documented the leading role of students in the struggle for civil rights.
Mounted in collaboration with the African American Cultural Center at the University of Connecticut. Caricature and graphic satire flourished in Western Europe during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when widespread social change and tumultuous political events inspired new forms of humorous printmaking. This exhibition samples satirical printmaking’s golden age with works by William Hogarth, James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Francisco Goya, J. J. Grandville, and Honoré Daumier.
Drawn largely from the Alternative Press Collection at the UConn Archives & Special Collections, What’s the Alternative? The Art and Outrage of the 1960s Underground Press surveys the efforts of cartoonists, illustrators, photographers and painters to warn against public impassivity in the face of political oppression, war, systemic racism and censorship of free speech during the mid-twentieth century. The exhibition is guest curated by cartoonist Dwayne Booth (a.k.a. Mr. Fish).
Mounted in collaboration with Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library; Thomas J. Dodd Research Center; CLAS Dean’s Office, Humanities; Humanities Institute / Humility & Conviction in Public Life; Departments of History, English and Journalism; and the School of Fine Arts. Close Third Person highlights new work by the MFA class of 2018. The exhibition features painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, ceramics, installation, and digital animation. Participating artists: Kelsey Miller, Jelena Prljević, Kaleigh Rusgrove, Erin Koch Smith, and Claire Stankus.
Mounted in collaboration with the Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art program at the University of Connecticut. I Am a Man is a portfolio of ten photographs by African-American photojournalist Ernest Withers that tells the story of the civil rights movement from the perspective of one of its most important chroniclers. Withers covered key events such as the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama; the integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas; and the numerous marches that epitomize the nonviolent resistance advocated by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Originally published in newspapers and magazines as reportage during the 1950s and 1960s, these images now serve as a record of momentous events and document the struggle for equal rights for a new generation.
Mounted in collaboration with the African American Cultural Center at the University of Connecticut. It seems the simplest way to introduce “Tabletop Sculpture” is by way of a photograph, of mid-century architect Gordon Bunshaft’s living room. I cannot reproduce it here, so I will try to describe it for you: On one side of the frame, there is a low white sofa. In the back, right-hand corner, an Eames lounge chair. At the center of the image hangs a large tapestry by Pablo Picasso, which is flanked by a couple of small, late Surrealist paintings. But outnumbering all of these things, covering nearly every available surface, the room brims with a type of object one wouldn’t necessarily expect to encounter in such profusion, at least not in a collector’s home today: Bunshaft’s living room is full of sculpture.
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Interchange: An Exhibition in Three Parts
Creative Research Laboratory Austin, TX Part I: June 30 - July 14, 2007 "The Eternal Moment" Curated by Amanda Douberley "The Burden of History" Curated by Deborah Spivak Artists: Alec Appl Peter Johansen Anna Krachey Kurt Mueller Cecelia Philips Laura Turner Joshua Welker Joseph Winchester Virginia Yount |
From its modern inception in the late nineteenth-century, binary concepts have been central to art history. The so-called “father” of the discipline, Heinrich Wölfflin, is most famous for his binary distinctions between the formal characteristics of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, appropriately accompanied by his innovative double-slide lectures. The plurality of postmodern methodologies—not to mention PowerPoint presentations—have done much to change our ways of looking at objects. But, it would seem that even in the twenty-first-century, if you give a group of art history graduate students two back-to-back exhibitions to curate from a group of MFA studio art students, it almost goes without saying that a binary distinction will separate the two shows.
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Object / Type / Transform
Work by undergraduate students in Design at UT-Austin. Gallery 3 at the Co-op Austin, TX March 29 - April 21, 2007 Designers: Ben Hasson Caspar Lam Allison Lura Marti Manship Robin Peeples Rachel Tepper |
Object. Type. Transform. Looking over my notes from meetings with the six Design students whose work is featured in this exhibition, I found these three words repeated over and over again. They interweave and overlap between the projects included here, sometimes describing an action, sometimes a product, and at other times a method of approach.
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Outside Area
Recent work by UT-Austin MFA students in Studio Art. Gallery 3 at the Co-op Austin, TX August 31 - September 30, 2006 Artists: Jarrod Beck Erin Curtis Aron Johnston |
Studio art graduate students at the University of Texas at Austin each choose an area of concentration as a focus for their studies in one of seven fields: ceramics, metals, painting and drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and transmedia (time-based art). On an administrative level, these divisions establish the makeup of students’ advisory committees and the location of their studios. Within artistic practice, however, the boundaries between areas can be quite fluid. Outside Area engages three MFA students who work outside their academic area of concentration, combining disparate media and modes of production to create hybrid forms that resist easy categorization.
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No Place Like Home
Gallery 3 at the Co-op Austin, TX September 8 - October 1, 2005 Artists: Ali Fitzgerald Erick Michaud Jared Steffensen David Woody |
Where is home? Is it the place you live, the town where you were born, or the house you grew up in? How does a new environment become home, or at least like home? Is home even a place at all, or is it no place, more a memory or illusion than an actual location? We typically think of home as a stable place, fixed in one location, embedded in our everyday lives as a source of comfort and ease. Being at home is a physical state as well as a psychological condition, however, and just as where you’re living now may not feel quite like home, where you’re from may eventually end up being a place you can only visit in your memories. These competing interpretations of home are examined in No Place Like Home through paintings, photographs, sculptures, and videos inspired by the places where these artists live and work.
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Katherine Bash: Tracing the Wind
Upstairs Project Room Glassell School of Art Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX March 31 - May 10, 2005 |
Katherine Bash’s video installation, Abrisamento, captures a natural phenomenon that, for all its visual interest and beauty, is so common as to be unremarkable: images produced by the sun filtered through tiny gaps in a tree’s canopy. These beams of light pierce the shadows beneath the tree, and create abstract patterns, sometimes called “sun-pictures,” that change according to the movement of the tree as it sways in the wind. Bash chose to project her video from the ceiling onto elliptical supports that seem to hover in mid-air, mimicking the projection of the sun’s light down through the leaves of a tree and onto the ground, and perforating the space of the gallery with an event from the outside, or “natural,” world.
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