2012

Shimon Attie: MetroPAL.IS.

October 30-December 16, 2012

MetroPAL.IS. (video stills), 2010
MetroPAL.IS. (video stills), 2010

MetroPAL.IS., the creation of the contemporary artist Shimon Attie, is presented in an oval configuration of eight video screens with the viewer standing within the oval. The artist’s intention is for the artwork to re-imagine and re-configure the seemingly intractable Middle East conflict between Palestinians and Israelis by engaging their shared secondary hybrid identitythat of being New Yorkers. In many ways, the artwork is as much about what it means to be a New Yorker, to live in the United States, and to have a layered identity as an Israeli or Palestinian as it is about conflict in the Middle East. The artist invited twenty-four members of both communities, of various genders and occupations, into his studio to be filmed individually. They reflect in pairs not only their Palestinian and Israeli identities, but comparable occupations and conditions. Each participant read a scripted part from a hybrid document that Attie created, that merges the Israeli Declaration of Independence from 1948 with the Palestinian Declaration of Independence from 1988. When a few obvious key signifiers are removed, it is remarkable how much the two documents overlap and mirror each other. MetroPAL.IS. has been crafted and edited such that, like a Greek chorus, there are times when only one individual is speaking, or two, or eight, or none. Attie conceived of the piece in musical terms, with the relationship of individual voices being thought of as a score. The overall outcome results in the viewers finding themselves in a quasi endless hall of mirrors, of uncannily similar claims, assertions, and visages, alternating between a boisterous chorus and a single plaintive voice.

MetroPAL.IS. (video stills), 2010
MetroPAL.IS. (video stills), 2010

The success of MetroPAL.IS. is predicated in the belief that political discourse is best carried out by the personal voice of individuals, not by governments or political entities. Reconciliation is at the heart of MetroPAL.IS., yet ultimately the artist’s intention was to create a layered artwork that resists easy interpretation and defies expectations or preconceived notions as what it means to be an Israeli, or a Palestinian-and a New Yorker, or by extension, an American. The commissioning and presentation of this multiple-channel immersive HD video installation originated with and was supported by the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT. Its presentation at the Benton is supported in part by the Human Rights Institute, University of Connecticut, Storrs. Shimon Attie with Vale Bruck MetroPAL.IS., 2011 Eight-channel high-definition video installation Digital video, color, sound; 11:41 minutes Editor and audio post-production: Paul Hill, Wexner Center for the Arts Production Managers: Neta Zwebner-Zaibert and Hilla Medalia (kNow Productions) Field Producer: Jamie Abrahams Commissioned by The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Taking Shape: Building The Benton’s

October 23-December 16, 2012

Alfred J. Frueh, Poster for Horace Brodzky Exhibition, Linocut, 1918. Gift of Alfred J. & Nancy Frueh.
Alfred J. Frueh, Poster for Horace Brodzky Exhibition, Linocut, 1918. Gift of Alfred J. & Nancy Frueh.

How do you build a university museum collection? In the case of the William Benton Museum of Art, it all began in 1933, when former Connecticut College of Agriculture President Charles Lewis Beach donated to the College many of the works that would comprise the Museum’s founding collection, accompanied by a trust fund for future acquisitions. By 1967 when the Museum was founded, the University’s collection had grown to include nearly 200 paintings and prints, and the Museum opened as the University Art Museum. The Museum was renamed the William Benton Museum of Art in 1971, and, in the years since, generous donations and endowments have allowed for the continued growth of the collection. Today, the Benton holds approximately 6,000 objects that span a period from the 15th century to the present and encompass a variety of styles, media, and cultures.

Taking Shape: Building The Benton’s Permanent Collection offers a behind-the-scenes look at various stages in the development of the Museum’s institutional holdings. The exhibition considers the multifaceted process of building a museum collection, acknowledging such factors as the geography, size, and mission of the collecting institution, the expertise of the director and curator, and the often unpredictable character of donations and funding.

Artists featured in the exhibition include American Impressionists Childe Hassam and William Irvine, whose works were among the first to grace the Benton’s walls. Works from well-known artists of the Abstract Expressionist era, such as Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell, that became part of the collections in the 1970s, are also among those on display. Additionally, thematic areas within the Benton collection are highlighted through examples of portraiture, ephemera, and genre scenes of urban America.

Alongside the diverse factors that have influenced the character of the Museum’s collection over the years, the Benton’s holdings have blossomed with form and intention. Taking Shape foregrounds the manner in which the Benton has emerged as a place for art, education, and culture for the University community and beyond.

The 46th Annual Art Department Faculty Exhibition

September 4-October 14, 2012
Reception: Thursday, September 6, 5-7:30 pm
The East Gallery

For artistic variety, contemporaneity and quality, the annual Art and Art History Department studio faculty exhibition excels. The exhibition features a variety of media including painting, sculpture, illustration, graphic design, printmaking, photography, and installation art. This diverse body of works represents many of the most significant directions in contemporary art as well as the unique vision of each artist-faculty member. Thirteen faculty members from the Storrs and Torrington campuses are exhibiting this year. The featured artists in the exhibitionall of whom were on sabbatical during last academic year are Monica Bock, sculpture and installation; Cora Lynn Deibler, illustration; and Pamela Bramble, painting

“The Dark Side of Life”: 19th-Century Narrative Cycles by Rethel, Klinger, and Kollwitz

September 4-October 14, 2012
Reception: Thursday, September 6, 5-7:30 pm
The Evelyn Simon Gilman Gallery

Max Klinger, A Glove, Plate 3, 1881, etching. The Naomi and Robert Dennison Fund.
Max Klinger, A Glove, Plate 3, 1881, etching. The Naomi and Robert Dennison Fund.

“The dark side of life” is a quote from the German artist Max Klinger (1857-1920) when comparing painting to the graphic arts. Klinger said that the black and white abstraction of the graphic arts was better suited to depicting the emotional and social realities of contemporary life than the coloristic optimism of painting. His work embodied this dichotomy as did that of his fellow artists Alfred Rethel (1816-1859) and Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945). During the latter half of the 19th century, all three created narrative cycles of thematically related works in print media that dealt with the realities of life directly and indirectly. Their picture stories, as a genre of storytelling, were hardly new, and their most immediate predecessors were from the 18th century: William Hogarth’s “modern moral tales” and Francisco Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres. The three 19th-century artists confronted contemporary society with narratives about the consequences of societies deeply divided by class and economics or with imagery that dwelled on individual psychology.

Rethel’s Another Dance of Death (Auch ein Totentanz, 1849) is the best-known visual commentary on the revolutionary events in Europe in 1848. While the title of the six woodcut images is based on Hans Holbein the Younger’s Dance of Death published in 1538, Rethel’s image of Death is as a seducer of the lower classes to riot to subvert the social and political order, but their actions result only in death and destruction. The thrust of Rethel’s visual commentary is reactionary and anti-republican, and has little sympathy for the lower and middle classes. His imagery, however, is both powerful and sarcastic, and found such a huge audience that the number of folios printed between 1848 and 1849 ran into the thousands.

Käthe Kollwitz’s 1897 narrative cycle The Weavers’ Revolt (Ein Weberaufstand) stands in striking contrast to Rethel’s position. Based on Gerhart Hauptmann’s 1893 play The Weavers (Die Weber), the narrative relates in generalized terms the events of an equally abortive revolt by Silesian weavers in 1844; an uprising that again leads only to death and destruction and not to change. Kollwitz’s sympathies, however, lie with the peasant workers and the intensely difficult economic circumstances under which they lived. Both Rethel’s and Kollwitz’s narratives serve political ends, and their differences reflect the increasingly complex social picture of 19th-century Europe.

Max Klinger, like Rethel and Kollwitz, focused on the “dark side of life,” but for him it was more the individual than the social group. By “dark side,” Klinger meant psychological figments of the imagination, the sordid and the abnormal, the good and the bad of reality and of the psyche. In varying degrees these qualities are seen in Klinger’s narrative cycles that carry titles like Eve and the Future, Dramas, A Life and On Death, Part I and Part II. The most famous of his narrative tales and the most psychologically complex, however, was the cycle of ten etched plates comprising his 1881 story, A Glove (Ein Handschuh), which centers on the psychological turmoil of the protagonist who has found and kept the dropped glove of an unknown and beautiful woman. This sexual and fetishistic fantasy resonates in the 20th century, and it predates Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams by two decades.

Besides these three folios, two other narrative series by Klinger and Kollwitz are presented in “The Dark Side of Life.” The five sets together represent the emerging interest in 19th-century Europe in narrative series that thematically engage the modern world and whose visualization does not rely on religious or mythological premises. Rather the modern world is seen in an unconventional and oft times searing light.

From Objects to Object: Found Sculpture by Leo Sewell

June 2-August 5, 2012

Leo Sewell, Scotty, mixed media.
Leo Sewell, Scotty, mixed media.

Philadelphia sculptor Leo Sewell (b. 1945) grew up in Annapolis near a naval community dump where he began playing with its found objects before he was ten. With the help of his father and access to his father’s workshop, he began creating assemblages using fasteners and welding. While in college in the 1960s, he studied modern artwriting a Master’s thesis on the Use of the Found Object in Dada and Surrealismand decided to dedicate his life to making sculptures from manufactured objects. Over the subsequent fifty years, he has produced more than 4,000 sculptures. Sewell’s naturalistic creations are composed of recognizable objects of plastic, metal and wood that are selected for their color, shape, texture, durability, and patina. Using nails, bolts and screws, he assembles the sculptures into a variety of subjects and sizes including a house cat and other animals, a life-size lady and other figures, a forty-foot Statue of Liberty hand and torch and other installations. On exhibition will be more than a dozen of his colorful works, all of them green, both whimsical and serious, and the offspring of trash heaps, yard sales and flea markets.

Leo Sewell, Boxer, mixed media.
Leo Sewell, Boxer, mixed media.
Leo Sewell, Teddy Bear, mixed media.
Leo Sewell, Teddy Bear, mixed media.

 

 

Four Seasons

June 2-August 5, 2012

Sam Barber, Summer Path, 1989, oil on masonite. Gift of the Artist.
Sam Barber, Summer Path, 1989, oil on masonite. Gift of the Artist.

Four Seasons takes visitors on a visual journey through the diverse scenes and activities that characterize a year. Drawn from the Benton’s collection of late 19th- to late 20th-century American art, the works in this exhibition reflect the artists’ enduring interest in the surrounding world and a lasting tradition of defining American identity in time and place. Among the featured artists are Reginald Marsh, Maurice Prendergast, Winslow Homer, and Fairfield Porter.

American fascination with the landscape has generally expressed itself in rural settings, but the urban environment has provided inspiration as well. Spring in the City, a wood engraving after Winslow Homer, offers one example. Although Homer is best known for his seascapes, he began his career as an illustrator working in New York City. Originally published in the April 17, 1858 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Spring in the City is an urban scene and among the earliest works included in the exhibition. It is joined by five other Homer wood engravings also from the famous New York journal.

Outdoor editorialist Hal Borland wrote, April is a promise that May is bound to keep, a sentiment embodied in Frank Alfred Bicknell’s painting April Morning (ca. 1920s). It transforms the hope for warm days into pastel tones. In Unfolding Year (1924), Carleton Wiggins presents his version of springtime optimism in the form of a flock of sheep grazing in a verdant pasture. Landscape (1891) by Robert William Vonnoh has the warm tones of a summer afternoon, with strong sun and saturated colors. The same attention to the effects of light on the landscape during a long summer’s day appears in Sunset and Lilies (1960) by Fairfield Porter.

Fairfield Porter, Sunset and Lilies, 1960, oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Fairfield Porter.
Fairfield Porter, Sunset and Lilies, 1960, oil on canvas. Gift of Mrs. Fairfield Porter.

“Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower,” remarked Nobel Laureate Albert Camus, and many artists have shared his delight in the beauty of the fall season. Among them is Maurice Prendergast, whose watercolor Early Fall, New Hampshire (ca. 1912) is dominated by brightly colored trees that dwarf both the houses and the horse and carriage that compete for the viewer’s attention. The rich reds and deep oranges that characterize Landscape (ca. 1890) by William Louis Sonntag remind us of the warmth of an autumn day.

In the painting Mantle of Winter (1924), Guy C. Wiggins, son of Carleton Wiggins, depicts the solitary and mysterious nature of winter. The painting mimics a thick layer of snow that covers the countryside revealing the contours of the land but not what lies beneath. Contemporary artist Lori Nix, who credits 19th-century landscape painting as an important influence, reflects on the dangers of winter in her photograph Ice Storm (1999). The subject here is not an actual landscape, but a constructed scene built from models and miniatures.

The four seasons have been an artistic theme dating back to the Middle Ages. It speaks to the yearly renewal of the natural world and the cycle of human experience.

Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Early Fall, New Hampshire, oil, ca 1912. Gift of Mrs. Eugenie Prendergast.
Maurice Brazil Prendergast, Early Fall, New Hampshire, oil, ca 1912. Gift of Mrs. Eugenie Prendergast.
Robert William Vonnoh, Landscape, oil, 1891
Robert William Vonnoh, Landscape, oil, 1891

 

 

The 2012 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition

March 31-May 6, 2012

The Benton is pleased to present an exhilarating exhibition of works by the MFA degree candidates in the Class of 2012: David Cool (video/installation / new media); Yelizaveta Masalimova (mixed media / sculptor and printmaker); Alyssa Matthews (painter); David Sinaguglia (sculpture and multimedia); and Heather Stamenov (painter).

Screenshots

March 22-May 20, 2012

Daniel Gordon, July 19, 2009 from the series Thirty-One Days, C-print, 2009.
Daniel Gordon, July 19, 2009 from the series Thirty-One Days, C-print, 2009.

In concert with the School of Fine Arts’ digital media initiatives and the debut of the interdisciplinary Digital Media Center early last year, the Benton presents an exhibition focused on the social and creative impact of digital media’s most ubiquitous arena: the Internet. From the development of the largely text-based and specialized World Wide Web of the 1990s through to the highly visual, user-generated Web 2.0 of the past decade, artists have continuously found inspiration in the form, context, and material of the Internet for their art practice.

Screenshots brings together a group of national and international artists working in response to the production, circulation, and consumption of visual material online. Starting at the site of the computer screen, these artists appropriate and alter images and video from websites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Craigslist. Reformatted and reframed through the process of collating, the digital image finds a place within the physical space of the gallery. This shift in environment moves the focus from the technology of the Internet to the activities, behaviors, and experiences that technology fosters for users both online and offline.

In his 1927 essay Mass Ornament, cultural theorist Siegfried Kracauer stated that to understand the character of a moment one should look to the inconspicuous surface-level expressions of that time. Kracauer’s investment in analyzing the unconscious production of his surroundings for its larger meaning offers an apt approach for confronting the deluge of Web-based visual content. The screen and the images it offers are all surface; yet, through accumulation the six artists in Screenshots aim for depth, highlighting collective experiences of our contemporary moment and considering the impact of the Internet on the field of art. Screenshots features works by Pauline Bastard, Natalie Bookchin, Daniel Gordon, Phillip Maisel, Jon Rafman and Penelope Umbrico.

Curator: Ally Walton, University of Connecticut M.A. candidate, Art History, 2012.

Women of New England: Dress from the Industrial Age, 1850-1900

Cranberry brocade bodice and maroon silk taffeta skirt, 1880. 1974 gift from Mrs. Fitch Cheney to the University of Connecticut Historical Clothing and Textile Collection.
Cranberry brocade bodice and maroon silk taffeta skirt, 1880. 1974 gift from Mrs. Fitch Cheney to the University of Connecticut Historical Clothing and Textile Collection.

January 17-March 11, 2012

As a land-grant university, the University of Connecticut has a long history of acquiring and preserving garments and textiles pertinent to the history of the State of Connecticut. Since 1898, when the Home Economics Department was created, many talented professors and students have worked to amass over 8,000 items, 3,500 of which are garments, making the University’s Historical Clothing and Textile Collection the largest such study collection in New England.

Cloth-making in New England had long been the responsibility of women who were central to the region’s industrial transformationas domestic producers of clothing; as workers in the textile and shoe industries; and as consumers and wearers of clothing and fashions. While Boston, New York, and other urban centers supplied capital, manufacturers seeking skilled labor and water-power established textile mills across rural New England, bolstering the economies of Mansfield, Manchester and Willimantic, Connecticut and scores of other settlements.

At the same time Isaac Singer began a revolution in home sewing for women with his design of an affordable sewing machine with interchangeable parts. Singer’s sales jumped from 2,564 machines in 1856 to 13,000 by 1860. Women all over New England honed their sewing skills by making Civil War uniforms on their home machines. In 1866 after the end of the Civil War, Ebenezer Butterick began producing patterns for women’s fashions in various sizes. Suddenly women, even in the modest townships of New England, could create the latest styles from New York and Paris.

This comprehensive exhibition displays fifty exceptional garments that express the development of women’s clothing in New England in the latter half of the 19th century.

Guest curator: Laura Crow, Director of Costume Design, Department of Dramatic Arts and Curator, University of Connecticut Historical Clothing and Textile Collection.

 

dress2 dress3

 

Themes from the Collections: The 16th to the 21st Century

January 17-March 11, 2012

Ercole Bazzicaluva, Tuscan Road with Travelers, pen & brown in over laid paper, ca. 1635. Gift of The Friends of the Museum.
Ercole Bazzicaluva, Tuscan Road with Travelers, pen & brown in over laid paper, ca. 1635. Gift of The Friends of the Museum.

The works chosen for this exhibition fall into thematic groupings that reflect the strengths in the Benton’s collections and relate to a variety of programs on the spring schedule.

Ellen Emmet Rand’s life-size portrait entitled The Singer complements a Sunday afternoon performance of French vocal music on February 19 and Ben Wilson’s 1943 painting Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is meaningful in conjunction with the January 22 musical program Noch frei in der Kunst!

A selection of landscape views from the 19th and 20th centuries comprises another thematic grouping. These works range from the classical, ca. 1810, Borghese Gardens painted by Giovanni Maldurra, to Karl Bodmer’s 1850s naturalistic Barbizon forest on the outskirts of Paris, Stephen Parrish’s charcoal and pencil drawing of the moonlit coast of Marblehead (1880s), and George Bellows vibrantly colored painting of the island of Criehaven off the coast of Maine, ca. 1915.

Romare Bearden, Family, color aquatint and photo-engraving, 1975. The Louise Crombie Beach Fund.
Romare Bearden, Family, color aquatint and photo-engraving, 1975. The Louise Crombie Beach Fund.

The Benton’s old master collections are represented by a selection of Southern European works dating from the late 16th century to the very early 18th century. Italian and French drawings, French, Italian and Spanish etchings, and Italian sculpture are the principal focus of this group of works. Some are anonymous such as the terra cotta sculptures, but others are firmly attributed to artists like the Frenchman Phillipe Verdier or the Italians Ercole Bazzicaluva and Remigio Cantagallina.

A recently acquired rare and early lithographic figural work from 1952 entitled Despair by the African American artist John Biggers will be exhibited together with a selection of other works by African American artists.

And finally, among the many other new acquisitions included in this exhibition are photographs by Andreas Feininger (1906-1999), who was most famous for his photographs of New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.