Past Exhibitions
2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2002
2011
Italia Bella
September 9-December 18
For over five centuries travelers have sought out the archaeological remains, architectural and artistic treasures, and natural wonders to be found in the Italian peninsula. Long before the various states of this region became unified into the modern nation of Italy, scholars, pilgrims, artists, and tourists traveled to the famous ancient and modern monuments of Rome, Venice, Florence and other cities, bringing back records of their visit in the form of paintings or prints. Already in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a lively trade in engravings and etchings existed and by the eighteenth century the tradition of vedute (view paintings or prints) was well established.
This exhibition begins with examples of the fully-developed genre, including a panoramic city view and so-called “optical” prints, which were meant to be viewed through an apparatus designed to increase the illusion of depth. A technical and artistic high point in Roman vedute of this period is represented by the etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi.
The Venetian etchings of James McNeill Whistler, the nineteenth-century American ex-patriot, embody his more atmospheric and purely aesthetic approach. They were highly influential on later printmakers, who adopted many of Whistler’s compositional strategies as well as his experimental approach to etching.
Drawn entirely from the permanent collection of Saint Joseph College Art Gallery, this exhibition is an introduction to a fascinating artistic genre and to some of its most accomplished masters. It is also a tribute to the late John (Jack) Crockett, generous friend and donor to the Art Gallery, who served in Italy with the U.S. State Department.
Collection Highlights
June 3 - August 28
The Saint Joseph College Art Gallery’s summer installation of the permanent collection features paintings and works of art on paper by American and European artists from the 19th to the 21st century. In addition to highlights from the painting collection, several groupings focus on specific themes. One gallery features American and European abstraction in prints, including works by Joan Miró, Duilio Barnabé, Robert Motherwell, Sam Gilliam and Sol LeWitt. A selection of urban landscapes including works by John Sloan and Theresa Bernstein on loan from the collection of Ken Ratner was chosen by Art Gallery intern Scott Nikola. In another thematic grouping, several author portraits by James Britton, including woodcuts of Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, and Walt Whitman, are being shown with prints by Thomas Hart Benton and Robert Lawson depicting subjects from Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
Persian Visions: Contemporary Photography from Iran
March 24-May 22
An exhibition of 58 works of photography and video installation by 20 of Iran’s most celebrated photographers. It gathers personal perspectives of contemporary Iran filtered through individual sensibilities while simultaneously addressing public concerns.
(For more information click here)
Anti-Irish and Anti-Catholic Cartoons by Thomas Nast
An exhibition of nineteenth-century political cartoons from Harper’s Weekly
January 14-March 13, 2011
Thomas Nast, who has been called “the father of American political cartoons,” was arguably the most influential cartoonist of his day. He is credited not only with creating or popularizing some of our most enduring symbols (the Republican Elephant, Santa Claus), but also with bringing down the corrupt Tammany Hall administration of William M. (“Boss”) Tweed. As a man of his day, however, Nast harbored a number of prejudices which found expression in his work for Harper’s Weekly. Prominent among them were strong anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments, which became a particular focus in his cartoons of the 1870s.
Himself an immigrant from Germany, Nast often expressed sympathy with those seeking equality as American citizens -- recently-freed African-American slaves, Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants. His unrelenting condemnation of Irish Catholics, however, stands in marked contrast to his more progressive views. Through analysis of selected cartoons from Harper’s Weekly, this exhibition examines the political and cultural sources of Nast’s prejudice, identifies the strategies and stereotypes he employed, and reveals some enduring methods for demonizing “the other” that are as common in our own day as in Thomas Nast’s.
All the works in Illustrating Bigotry are drawn from the 2006 gift of Judith and Norman Zlotsky to the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery. Exhibition Checklist (PDF: 12pp., 733K)
Circa 1910: Immigrant life in New York
January 14-March 13, 2011
A selection of works from the Collection of Ken Ratner, including works by John Sloan, Jerome Myers, and others, this installation presents these early twentieth-century artists’ decidedly sympathetic depiction of immigrant life on New York’s lower East Side.
2010
The 42-Letter Name: A Portfolio of Prints by Robert Kirschbaum
September 24-December 19
This exhibition continues the Art Gallery’s series of exhibitions by contemporary artists whose work addresses spirituality. Based in contemplation of the holy name of God, these black and white relief prints are inspired by the first letter of each word in a nearly 2,000-year old, 42-word mystical prayer ascribed to Rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Qanah. The prints’ abstract forms, axonometric drawings based on a nine-square grid, sometimes evoke Hebrew letter forms, and sometimes reference the Temple or suggest Jewish ritual objects, but all allude to creation and the infinite.
American Anthology:
20th-Century Paintings and Prints from Regionalism to Conceptual Art American
September 24-December 19
Anthology surveys a variety of influential movements in 20th-century art, ranging from the representational to the abstract. It includes painters who sought to develop a distinctly American art as well as immigrants who brought European styles to America. Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and Georgina Klitgaard epitomize the regionalist styles of the early 20th century, while American interpretations of cubism and fauvism are represented by Fannie Hillsmith and Jehudith Sobel. Also included are the later abstractions of op art as seen in works by Reginald Neal and Vincent Longo, as well as the conceptual art of Sol LeWitt. This exhibition combines loans from private collections with works from the permanent collection of Saint Joseph College Art Gallery.
PROJECT 35
contemporary artist videos selected by 35 international curators
October 26-January 23
A year long exhibition of single-channel video works selected by 35 international curators, each of whom has chosen a single work, Project 35 will be displayed simultaneously in multiple international venues. Saint Joseph College Art Gallery is among the first to host Project 35 in its entirety. As curator Maria del Carmen Carrión points out, Project 35’s “extended distribution, concurrent presentation, and internationality” go “back to a basic principle that was core to video art at its initial appearance: broad access and circulation, which appear to have gotten lost as this medium became rarefied by the market.” It demonstrates the global reach that video has achieved as a medium of contemporary art. The exhibition will be presented in four parts, each featuring eight to nine videos.
Project 35 is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by iCI (Independent Curators International), New York. The exhibition and tour are made possible, in part, by grants from The Cowles Charitable Trust; Foundation for Contemporary Art; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; The Toby Fund; and iCI Benefactors Agnes Gund, Gerrit and Sydie Lansing, Jo Carole Lauder, and Barbara and John Robinson.
Telling Tales
June 18-September 5
This exhibition features works of art with narrative content; some illustrate novels or popular songs, others are inspired by mythology or historical events. It includes George Bellow's boxing lithograph Dempsey and Firpo, Thomas Hart Benton's lithographs of Frankie and Johnny and Huck Finn, as well as Eugene Higgins' monotype Moby Dick and Utagawa Kuniyoshi's wood block prints Evening Faces (Yûgao), Lady at the Bridge (Hishihime) and The Wizard (Maboroshi).
Eugene Higgins: Religious Themes
March 26-September 5
This is a small installation of works by an early 20th-century painter who is best known for his monumental and ennobling depictions of the poor and homeless. Encouraged by the Reverend Andrew J. Kelly, who was the first donor of art to Saint Joseph College (1937), Higgins also undertook a number of religious subjects, several of which are included in this installation.
With a View To Abstraction
March 26-June 6, 2010
This exhibition presents a group of landscapes that incorporate varying degrees of abstraction. Together they span the 20th century, ranging from a small oil painting by Louis Eilshemius to an aquatint by Pat Steir (a promised gift of the Reverend Charles J. Topper). A recent acquisition painted by contemporary artist Carol Anthony (the gift of the Reverend Thomas J. Barry) is included as well as a drawing of Sunlit Woods by Charles Burchfield, on loan from the Collection of Ken Ratner.
PERFORMANCE!
March 26-June 6, 2010
PERFORMANCE! brings together American and European 20th-century prints and drawings that focus on musicians, dancers, and theatre and circus performers. Many of these works, including drawings by Walt Kuhn and Don Freeman, are on loan from the Collection of Ken Ratner. Also included are prints from the Art Gallery’s permanent collection by Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger as well as a pen and ink drawing by William Glackens.
Life Lessons: Sixteenth-Century Allegorical Prints from the Low Countries
March 26-June 6, 2010
This exhibition features three series of Renaissance engravings that are rich in symbolism. Each of The Seven Virtues, designed by Pieter Bruegel, depicts a female personification surrounded by scenes that exemplify the Virtue. The Vain Hope for Worldly Gain, designed by Maerten van Heemskerck, illustrates the unhappy result when a young man is seduced by the Devil into placing his hope in earthly treasure. Similar reminders of human frailties are found in The Four Ages of Man (The Times of Day), which ends with an engraving of The Last Judgment in which the Theological Virtues sponsor the good man as he kneels before God, while the damned are consumed by Hell.
PRINTS 1950-1980
January 15-March 14, 2010
This exhibition highlights mid- to late twentieth century prints from the Art Gallery’s permanent collection. Many of these works are part of the Sister Mary Theodore Kelleher Collection, established in 1969 in honor of Saint Joseph College’s outgoing president. Also included are eight new acquisitions including works by Isabel Bishop, Anni Albers, Duilio Barnabé, and Luciano Minguzzi.
2009
Edmund Blampied (1886-1966) Master Printmaker
September 25 - December 20, 2009
One of the best-known artists to hail from Britain’s Channel Islands, Blampied achieved renown as a printmaker in the 1920s. He had taught himself to draw as a child living in rural Jersey, which provided inspiration and subject matter throughout his life. Having gained attention for his cartoon drawings of local worthies, Blampied was able to attend London’s Lambeth School of Art, following which he secured full-time employment as a newspaper illustrator. While illustration remained an important part of his career, it is the independent etchings, drypoints and lithographs for which he is best known today. Blampied learned to etch at evening classes around 1910. Just a few years later, he had also mastered the technique of drypoint and had been taken on by the Leicester Galleries in London, which planned to publish his prints (and did so in 1919, after the delay caused by World War I). Blampied’s work was prized by collectors and widely praised by critics throughout the 1920s, but as the boom in print collecting faded in the 1930s, he increasingly painted in oil and watercolor and eventually returned to Jersey. Blampied’s early subjects – the farm workers, the seaweed collectors (“vraikers”), the townspeople of Jersey – were his lifelong inspiration. The island’s old-fashioned way of life held great interest for this artist who so admired Daumier and Rembrandt. Blampied wrote that “the human quality in art has always appealed to me...I have always sympathized most strongly with the human’s effort for existence, his tragic mistakes, his humour...” Blampied’s work embodies not only a deep sympathy for the laborer, but a sharp eye for human foibles as well. The exhibition, drawn entirely from the collections of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery, featured many of Edmund Blampied’s most famous drypoints and etchings as well as drawings and a painting.
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 24, 6:00 - 7:30 p.m.
Members' Preview: 5:00 - 6:00 p.m. - featuring a brief gallery talk by Art Gallery Director Ann H. Sievers
Peaceful Pastures: Aspects of Agricultural America by Early Twentieth Century Artists
July 7 - September 6
Guest curator: Kara Auclair, Intern, Saint Joseph College Art Gallery
During the early twentieth century, American culture was shifting dramatically. The rural lifestyle that once characterized America was being swept away by the development of bustling cities, an economic depression, and the hardships of war. Amidst this new chaotic existence, many artists chose to portray an America that still felt like home. The simple yet productive lifestyle of a farmer was appealing to a suddenly hectic urban society, and the beauty of pastoral landscapes also cultivated interest in many American artists.
This exhibition highlighted the works of artists including Eugene Higgins, Milton Avery and Thomas Willoughby Nason, who each capture characteristics of rural America. Many pieces like Nason’s wood engravings depict the tranquil beauty of New England farms, in contrast to pieces by Higgins and John Edward Costigan, who illustrate the toil of farm work. Each work of art in this exhibition gives a unique perspective of agricultural America, yet they all share the same familiar calmness of a pastoral setting. Peaceful Pastures is an exhibition of works that display the beauty of rural America through the eyes of early twentieth century artists.
Struck by Light: A Retrospective of Photograms by Ellen Carey
April 3 - June 21
This exhibition was the first comprehensive examination of Ellen Carey’s photograms, many of which werer on view for the first time. Long renowned for her abstract Polaroid “Pulls,” the artist has created concurrently a stunning body of work using one of photography’s earliest processes, the photogram. Through this traditional technique of obtaining a shadow image from objects placed directly on photosensitive paper, Carey obtains striking abstractions that are thoroughly contemporary in their conceptual approach to color and light. The most recent works in the exhibition, which feature luminous trails from a hand-held penlight, translate her innovative color photogram techniques into a novel use of Polaroid materials.
Opening reception: April 2, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
Good as Gold: Nineteenth Century Financial Controversies through the Eyes of Thomas Nast
January 13 - March 15, 2009
Renowned political cartoonist Thomas Nast weighed in on a range of financial issues that faced late nineteenth-century American society. His trenchant visual commentaries in the pages of Harper's Weekly helped shape opinion in an age that faced many issues similar to those of today. Monetary policy, taxation, inflation, and tensions between trade unions and business owners were among Nast's most frequent topics in the 1870s, when he was at the height of his powers.
Nast's arsenal consisted of his extraordinary skill as a draughtsman combined with a clever and biting use of puns and symbols both borrowed and invented. The Bible, Shakespeare, and Aesop's Fables provided inspiration, as did popular songs and current colloquial expressions. In the course of his career at Harper's Weekly, Nast codified the use of the Elephant and the Donkey to represent the Republican and Democratic Parties and employed the traditional personifications of the United States, Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam, to bold effect in witty and powerfully persuasive images.
All of the works in this exhibition are drawn from the gift of Judith and Norman Zlotsky to the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery.
A related celebration for the New Year, Gold, Silver, and Greenbacks, will be held on Thursday, January 29 from 6:00 to 8:30 p.m. Creative dress is encouraged at this event, which will feature elegant food and drink, music, door prizes, and a treasure hunt (call 860.231.5367 for information).
2008
Collection in Context
September 26 - December 21, 2008
With this exhibition, Collection in Context, the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery inaugurates a series of installations devoted to in-depth examination of major works of art in the permanent collection. Like our periodic exhibitions by contemporary artists whose works address issues of spirituality, these installations are inspired by Saint Joseph College’s mission and history. While future loan exhibitions may explore the context in which a single painting, print or drawing was created, this first installation highlights seven significant works that find a particularly rich context within the permanent collection. Collection in Context honors an art collection that began in the earliest years of the College and celebrates the inauguration of Pamela Trotman Reid as eighth President of Saint Joseph College.
Carlos Mérida: Mexican Regional Costumes
July 8 - September 14, 2008
A colorful exhibition of screen prints from the portfolio Trajes Regionales Mexicanos (Mexico, DF: Editorial Atlante, 1945). Carlos Mérida artfully depicts beautiful costumes from states all over Mexico.
Face to Face: Portraits and Self-Portraits
July 8 - September 14, 2008
An exploration of portraiture through paintings, etchings, and lithographs from the permanent collection. Featured artists include Gerald Brockhurst, William Heintzelman, Childe Hassam, James Britton, Käthe Kollwitz, Rembrandt van Rijn, and many others.
To Painting/A la pintura: Robert Motherwell's Aquatints for Poems by Rafael Alberti
January 11 – March 16, 2008
One of America's major abstract painters of the 20th century, Robert Motherwell is also renowned as a prolific and innovative printmaker. A la pintura was his first artist's book (livre d'artiste), combining text and images in a series inspired by Rafael Alberti's poem cycle of the same name. Tatyana Grosman, founder of Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE), had urged Motherwell to make a livre d'artiste since the early 1960s, but only upon discovering a translation of Alberti's poems in 1967 did Motherwell find "... a text whose every line set into motion my innermost painterly feelings."
At the ULAE workshop, printer Donn Steward introduced Motherwell to the aquatint technique which, combined with etching, conveyed in ink on paper the nuances of tone and texture the artist had achieved in his paintings. The 24 prints in A la pintura reflect the great care with which the artist selected colors and positioned his images in relation to the bilingual text of the six poems he chose from Alberti's cycle. Critically acclaimed, the book became the first contemporary livre d'artiste exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
Rafael Alberti was himself a painter as well as a poet. With Federico García Lorca he belonged to the innovative circle of Spanish poets that became known as the Generation of '27. A la pintura (1948) was written in Argentina, where Alberti lived in exile following the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War and the upheavals of WWII. An homage to painting, it features poems dedicated to individual colors and to the artist's tools, as well as to individual artists such as Dürer and Picasso.
Thursday, January 17 5:00 p.m. - 7:00 p.m.
Reception for To Painting/A la pintura and
Celebration of the Dr. Vincent J. and Gloria Marcello Turco '45 Print Study Room
• Gallery talks in the exhibition 5:30 and 6:30 p.m.
• Presentations in the Turco Print Study Room 5:15, 5:45, 6:15, and 6:45 p.m.
2007
70/75: 70 Years Collecting Art, 75 Years Educating Women
, a Saint Joseph College Anniversary Exhibition
September 29 – December 16, 2007
Almost as old as the College itself, the art collection has contributed to the education of many generations of students. The anniversary exhibition will highlight the founding collections, the initial 1937 gift from the Reverend Andrew J. Kelly and the 1966 bequest of the Reverend John J. Kelley, as well as the many subsequent major gifts and purchases that have shaped the collection. In addition to the collections' best-known works, such as the paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe and Thomas Hart Benton, a number of less familiar works will be on view, including old master prints and drawings and a selection of recent acquisitions. The exhibition is an opportunity to reflect on the collection's history and glimpse its future through a selection of promised gifts.
Friday, September 28
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. - Members' Preview for Friends of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. - Opening Reception
Needle/Knife/Burin: British Prints 1900-1945
April 13 - June 10, 2007
Needle/Knife/Burin features etchings, engravings and relief prints by major British printmakers of the early twentieth century. In the wake of the nineteenth-century etching revival spurred in Great Britain by James Abbott McNeill Whistler and his brother-in-law Francis Seymour Haden, many British printmakers and collectors of the early twentieth-century were particularly drawn to etching. From portraits to landscapes, British artists such as Gerald Leslie Brockhurst and Graham Sutherland created works characterized by fine detail, superb craftsmanship, and sensitive treatment of tonal effects. Some printmakers, like Robert Sargent Austin, looked elsewhere for inspiration, however. Austin chose to work in the precise and demanding technique of engraving, drawing from late medieval sources of inspiration. Others, including Eric Gill and Clare Leighton turned to relief techniques such as wood engraving, which exploits the stark contrast between areas of black and white.
This exhibition is drawn from the permanent collection of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery. Among the artists featured are Robert Sargent Austin, Edmund Blampied, Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, Eric Gill, Frederick Landseer Griggs, Clare Leighton, Graham Sutherland, Robin Tanner, Charles Tunnicliffe, and Walter Sickert.
Thursday, April 12
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. - Members' Preview for Friends of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. - Opening Reception
2006
From Theatre and Teahouse: Actors and Courtesans in Japanese Woodblock Prints
December 1, 2006 - January 28, 2007
The "pleasure quarters" of Japanese cities provided a wealth of subject matter for woodblock designers of the nineteenth century. In Edo (Tokyo) the Yoshiwara, like Osaka's Shinmachi, and Kyoto's Shimabara, was a licensed pleasure district. At its peak, the Yoshiwara contained some 3000 courtesans of varying grades in almost 200 "houses" where they lived and worked. Actors and other entertainers also helped form the culture of this "floating world" (ukiyo-e) depicted in woodblock prints.
The Yoshiwara, an area of almost twenty acres, was surrounded by a walled moat and entered by a single gate. Its streets were planted with cherry trees and willows (a Chinese symbol of prostitution). Open to any man with money, it was one of the few places in rigidly stratified Japanese society where the classes could mix. Geisha, women who trained for many years to become skilled entertainers, performed at private gatherings or teahouses. The Yoshiwara was also frequented by famous actors who performed in Kabuki theatre, in which men performed both male and female roles. This exhibition presents a selection of prints inspired by the "floating world."
Thursday, November 30
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. - Members' Preview for Friends of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. - Opening Reception
Carol Kreeger Davidson: Selected Drawings and Araby, a monumental sculpture
September 16, 2006 – November 19, 2006
Carol Kreeger Davidson, who was the subject of a national touring retrospective in 2002-2003, has been hailed by art historian and critic Donald Kuspit as accomplishing "the convincing reconciliation of abstraction and empathy, that is, of inorganic geometry and organic nature."
Her sculpture, Araby, will be installed on campus between Lynch Hall and The Bruyette Athenaeum and will be on view through summer 2009. This sculpture was inspired by the artist's reflections on Islamic art and culture. Created in 2005, it responds to her experience of living in Sabah, East Malaysia during the late 1960's as a participant in the Peace Corps, as well as to today's world conflicts that reveal increasing religious and cultural animosities. The abstract forms of Araby create a contemplative architectural space in which one views through calligraphically patterned openings the artist's evocation of peaceful enclosed gardens. Along with the outdoor sculpture, an exhibition of Selected Drawings will be presented in the Art Gallery and will be on view through November 19.
September 15, 2006
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. - Members' Preview with the artist
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. - Opening Reception
Kismet: New Work by Richard Yarde
April 7, 2006 – June 4, 2006
Kismet: New Work by Richard Yarde presents a fresh body of work by an artist who has been hailed as one of the great American watercolorists of the 20th century. These works explore themes of fate, chance, and transformation, and mark the artist's return to bright color from his largely monochromatic work of recent years.
Yarde's dreams and his knowledge of visual traditions from a wide range of cultures supply him with potent images that serve as a springboard for his watercolors. Works featured in this exhibition reference childhood games and African-American folktales, as in The Signifying Monkeys, whose inspiration is a classic trickster figure from folklore. Kismet #2, from which the show takes its title, is based on the board game Snakes and Ladders, originally a Hindu morality game in which ladders, representing virtues, elevated the player toward Nirvana, while snakes (or vices), slid the player away from this goal.
Yarde's new watercolors trace their beginnings to Mojo Hand, the break-through watercolors he created following a life threatening illness in 1991. Monumental in scale, they combine images of the body's interior with coded language consisting of dot patterns in intimate self-portraits that address universal themes of spirituality, healing, and the human condition. "My interior world grew very large," he explains; "I was forced to confront my vulnerability -- my dependence on other people and on my spiritual resources."
Born in Boston, Richard Yarde received a BFA cum laude and an MFA from Boston University. Professor of Fine Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, he is the recipient of the Commonwealth Award for Fine Art (2002) and the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995). In addition to major solo exhibitions, including Visionary Anatomies (National Academy of Sciences, 2005-6) and Ringshout (Worcester Art Museum, 2003), Yarde's work has been seen in many important group shows, among them Pulse: Art, Healing, and Transformation (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2003) and Locating the Spirit: Religion and Spirituality in African American Art (Anacostia Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1999). His work is in the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Kismet: New Work by Richard Yarde is supported in part by the Karen L. Chase '97 Fund.
2005
Famous Views: Japanese Landscape Prints by Hiroshige
December 2, 2005 – January 29, 2006
Hiroshige (1797-1858), the great Japanese master of color woodblock prints, achieved his first fame as a landscape artist with his Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido (1831-34), a series depicting the way-stations along the highway connecting Edo (Tokyo) with Kyoto. The exhibition features prints from this and other renowned series, including the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and Famous Places in the Sixty-Odd Provinces.
Urban Pastimes: New York at Play in Early Twentieth-Century Art
September 30 – November 20, 2005
Urban life - including street fairs, city parks, burlesque shows, and boxing matches -- provided lively subjects for many American artists of the early twentieth century such as John Sloan, Reginald Marsh, George Bellows, Jerome Myers, and Isabel Bishop. This exhibition features works from the Ken Ratner Collection (on long-term loan) as well as from the permanent collection of Saint Joseph College Art Gallery.
Thursday, September 29
5:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. - Champagne Preview for Friends of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery
6:00 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. - Opening Reception
Saturday, October 15
Teachers Workshop (K-12) - Call 860.231.5367 for information
Rolph Scarlett Paintings and Works on Paper
June 10 - September 17, 2005
Timed to coincide with Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Rolph Scarlett Paintings and Works on Paper traces the artist's development as a non-objective painter working in a variety of idioms. It includes geometric abstractions, "lyrical" abstractions, gestural drip paintings, and hard-edged geometric works. For Scarlett, painting was an "attempt to reach for universal order" through the aesthetics of form, color, and rhythm.
The exhibition was drawn from several private collections, and includes works never before exhibited publicly. "Rolph Scarlett is one of several artists active in the 1930s and 40s whose work is finding renewed interest among scholars and collectors," said Ann Sievers, director of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery and curator of the exhibition. "This is an opportune moment to examine his contribution to American painting and present his work to a wider public."
Two special events were planned to correspond with the exhibition: the Art Gallery offered a bus trip to the Guggenheim Museum on Wednesday, June 29, featuring a private tour of Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim. The trip also included a visit to the renovated and expanded Museum of Modern Art. (MoMA).
On Sunday, July 10 at the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery, Ann Sievers presented a gallery talk on the exhibition and a conversation with one collector of Rolph Scarlett's work, who is a major lender to the exhibition.
Protect and Conserve: Caring for Works of Art on Paper
April 1 – May 21, 2005
Using examples from the permanent collection, this exhibition explores the effects of light, humidity, and other agents that over time can damage works of art on paper, and demonstrates museum techniques for displaying and protecting these works. It will include an array of watercolors and prints, many of which have been conserved recently through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library services, a federal agency.
To End All Wars: Kerr Eby's World War I Prints
January 14 - March 12, 2005
The First World War (1914-1918), often called "The War to End All Wars," changed the face of Europe. Some of the bloodiest battles of the war were fought in the towns and fields of northeastern France, where Kerr Eby served in the 40th Engineers, Artillery Brigade, Camouflage Division, which protected artillery at the front. His unit participated in major American offensives of 1918 that prevented the Germans from pushing further toward Paris through northeastern France.
After the war, Eby began making prints based on his wartime sketches, returning to this theme repeatedly throughout his life. Whereas his first prints appear to record vignettes observed, the later prints assume increased symbolic force, sometimes incorporating explicitly Christian references. In 1935, concerned about the threat of another war in Europe, Eby exhibited most of his World War I prints accompanied by an essay that is an eloquent anti-war statement based on his personal experiences. Eby's last World War I prints show increasingly graphic scenes of death. His final etching on the subject presents Mars, the Roman god of war, as an obese and voracious destroyer, the embodiment of Eby's belief that "lawful, not to say sanctified, wholesale slaughter is simply slobbering imbecility."
This exhibition features 27 drypoints, etchings, and lithographs, many of them trial proofs on loan from two private collections.
2004
Objects of our Affection: Art from Private Collections of the Saint Joseph College Community
October 1 - December 18, 2004
This exhibition includes works in a variety of media and ranges from old masters to contemporary art, highlighting the diversity of collections belonging to alumnae, faculty, and friends of the College. Among the earliest works on view are portrait prints by Rembrandt, a drawing by English visionary artist William Blake, Indian miniatures, and William Hogarth's etched self portrait, along with the related satirical portrait of his critic Charles Churchill. A selection of landscapes includes oil paintings by American painters William Chadwick, Bruce Crane, Charles Herbert Woodbury, and watercolors by William Louis Sonntag and Daniel Fisher Wentworth. Among the nineteenth- and twentieth-century European works is an oil painting by Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps and prints by Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault, Chagall, Picasso, and Miró. Early twentieth-century art includes a painting by Robert Gwathmey, drawings by Joseph Stella, and prints by Elizabeth Catlett and Isabel Bishop. Early twentieth-century geometric abstractions by Hilla Rebay and Rolph Scarlett are joined by contemporary works by Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, Jennifer Bartlett, and Sol LeWitt.
This exhibition is dedicated to the late Vincenza A. Uccello '56, D.H.L.'00, Professor Emerita and first Director of the Art Collections and Gallery. It is supported in part by the Karen L. Chase '97 Fund.
Lunar Birth: Recent Work of Ann McCoy
March 5 - May 1, 2004
This installation for Saint Joseph College, which focuses on the theme of rebirth, originated from a series of works dealing with the mental illness and death of the artist's mother. It featured several mural-size (9 x 14 foot) works in pencil and watercolor on paper mounted on canvas, a selection of smaller drawings, a sculptural group in wax, and the artist's signature "light projections," slides of drawings projected on the gallery's walls and floor. As a Catholic who practices Jain meditation techniques, Ann McCoy draws upon a wide knowledge of comparative religion, alchemy, and Jungian psychology for her art, which explores psychological and spiritual transformation. The images in McCoy's large and complex drawings are based on her dreams, through which she finds a path to healing and reconciliation.
The exhibition was supported in part by the Karen L. Chase '97 Fund.
2002
Sol LeWitt – Prints: 1990-2001
October – November, 2002
This exhibition in the newly established Saint Joseph College Art Gallery features Sol LeWitt's prints created between the years 1990 and 2001. A variety of media and techniques are represented including aquatint, etching, linocut, and block print. Although Sol LeWitt's graphics were not shown in his recent retrospective exhibition, they relate quite closely to the imagery of his wall drawings and structures with the added characteristics and subtleties of the media. In addition, through the manipulation of the printing process, a variety of permutations are possible, resulting in serial expansion, and Sol LeWitt is a master of exploiting the many possibilities.
In the 1990s aquatint became his preferred medium, achieving the rich tonalities and muted shades seen in some of the prints in this present exhibition. The earliest works on display, Forms Derived from a Cubic Rectangle, 1990, reflect the subtle tonalities achieved by the aquatint medium and define the dimensionality of these forms. Two prints from a series of six entitled A Square with Colors Superimposed within a Border with Colors Superimposed, 1991, are excellent examples of the simple technique of layering one color over another in aquatint, which produces the rich tonalities that seem to relate to Color-Field Painting. The two diptychs, Wavy Horizontal Lines and Curved Bands, both dated 1996, are amazing examples of the aquatint medium utilized in a painterly manner to achieve the rhythmic undulating lines that evoke harmonious reverie reminiscent of music.
Sol LeWitt's most recent graphics dating 2000 and 2001 explore the relief method of printmaking. Color Bands and Distorted Cubes, both in this exhibition, are striking examples of linocut and block prints. The linocut, Color Bands, a series of eight prints, each composed of a different configuration of vibrant bands of primary and secondary colors are intriguing as well as delightful. The Distorted Cubes series consists of five block prints, three of which are in this exhibition. In each print 21 cubes have been distorted, defying traditional perspective. One print, rendered in grays and black, appears to be the matrix for the others. The four other prints, rendered in vivid colors, appear to be the upside-down and mirror image of the same print. This print was based on a wall drawing which was done in Paris in 1994 and again for the retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum in 2000.
Another interesting set of linocuts, which is displayed in the alcove gallery, is a collaboration between Sol LeWitt and one of his assistants, Sachiko Cho, a gifted photographer. Sachiko Cho provided the photographs of mundane objects, and Sol LeWitt responded with brilliant gem-like prints.
Faith Ringgold – Selections from her painted story quilts and illustrations her book Invisible Princess
March – April, 2002
Faith Ringgold is a renowned artist, activist, feminist, author, lecturer, and teacher. Her dream of being an artist was ever constant. In the 1960s, Faith Ringgold became involved in the racial and social issues that were confronting America during that decade. Her painting style, called social realism, reflected these issues. For her first one-person exhibition, which was held at the Spectrum Gallery in New York City, she painted three large murals: The Flag is Bleeding, U.S. Postage Stamp Commemorating the Advent of Black Power, and Die. Her career as an artist was launched and later expanded to include multi-media sculpture, performance art, illustrated children's books, and her famous story quilts or tanka paintings.
The painted story quilts in this exhibition are on loan from ACA Galleries in New York City. Four of the story quilts are from the "Coming to Jones Road", Part I series. Part fictional, they are based on the racial experience of fleeing to freedom. The original illustrations from the children's book Invisible Princess are on loan from the artist herself.
Faith Ringgold has been rightly described as a "force." She has raised consciousness of the injustices to her race and especially to women artists. She has helped bring about change and has done it with grace and beauty. Her works, be they paintings, soft sculpture, painted story quilts, performance art or children's books, are always significant, imaginative, unique, and innovative. They are thought provoking, challenging, and full of inspiration and hope.
