March 19-May 11, 2008

Marcus Garvey: The Centennial Exhibition, a sampling of the rich photographic legacy left by America’s most colorful black nationalist, is on exhibition at The William Benton Museum of Art through May 11. Originally mounted in 1987 in commemoration of Garvey’s 100th birthday, the exhibition is touring nationally under the auspices of the Schomburg Center’s Traveling Exhibition Program.

The exhibition is organized by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library and is sponsored by the William Benton Museum of Art in collaboration with the Institute for African American Studies and is presented in conjunction with the Institute’s conference, “The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts & Letters,” which will be held on the University of Connecticut campus March 27-29, 2008.

The growth of Garvey’s militant Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) is said to be one of the most photographed social movements of the 20th century. The cream of that collection has been assembled for this exhibition. This display, drawn from the bountiful Garvey archives in the Schomburg Center and the UNIA Papers Project of the University of California, Los Angeles, also includes dozens of historical documents, prints and publications. Together they retell the rise-and-fall tale of Garvey’s humble beginning, his ascension to prominence, his comeuppance, and his indelible influence on the course of African-American history.

“The messages conveyed by this exhibit offer new opportunities to increase our understanding and appreciation of the Garvey movement,” said Howard Dodson, Chief of the Schomburg Center.

Garvey’s movement in its 1920s heyday — and even to the present — was extremely controversial and widely misunderstood. A spellbinding orator, Garvey used his public speaking skills to build in this country the first mass movement with a black nationalist agenda. The association founded the Negro World, which with French and Spanish sections quickly became one of New York’s leading weeklies. The group promulgated new standards, strangely new to some, of racial cohesion, internationalism and pride.

UNIA sought to create economic opportunities for its followers. It purchased property and established a shipping line. Wanting to provide capital and technical help to black-owned businesses, UNIA created its own finance company, the Negro Factories Corporation — a private sector precursor of sorts to the federal Small Business Administration.

The authorities reacted with alarm to Garvey’s rising popularity and in time officially accused him of financial misdealings. As a result of the ensuing legal entanglements, UNIA’s empire subsequently fell apart. But, today both Garvey and UNIA have been vindicated. The nationalist precepts which Garvey preached are now gospel to legions.

Marcus Mosiah Moses was born in St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica in August 1887, the youngest of 11 children. He came inconspicuously to the United States twenty-nine years later, traveling around the country for a year before settling in Harlem in 1917. Three years later he presided over the first international convention of his fledgling UNIA. During much of the following decade he enjoyed one triumph after another, earning for himself the nickname of “the Black Moses.” But he was deported in 1927, three years after a controversial conviction for mail fraud. Garvey died in London in 1940, some twenty years before his ideas began to flourish once again.

The Schomburg Center Traveling Exhibition Program is designed to offer graphic interpretations of black history and culture to institutions and organizations in communities throughout the United States. Mr. Dodson explained that “We have produced the traveling exhibitions not only for the enjoyment they may bring to many new viewers across the country, but more importantly, to encourage the study and creative assessment of the subject areas by scholars, students and the general public alike.”

This exhibition is sponsored by the Institute for African American Studies and is presented in conjunction with the 2008 conference, The Harlem Renaissance Revisited.

January 22 – March 30, 2008

In Japanese, the word gaman means, “enduring the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity.”  This exhibition is based upon a ground-breaking book (The Art of Gaman, Ten Speed Press, 2005) by Delphine Hirasuna, who is the exhibition’s guest curator. It presents arts and crafts made by Japanese and Japanese Americans who were interned in concentration camps in California, Wyoming, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, and Arkansas during World War II. The exhibition features nearly 200 objects made primarily from scrap and found materials by those detained in the camps and gives a sense of the full range of artistic activities that existed within the internment camps that saw the forced relocation of 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans. The exhibition also demonstrates the resiliency of the creative spirit—how human beings are able to create objects of beauty and meaning with humble materials and under the most difficult circumstances.

This exhibition is based upon the book The Art of Gaman: Arts and Crafts from the Japanese American Internment Camps 1942-1946 by Delphine Hirasuna (Ten Speed Press, 2005) and was first held at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art. The touring exhibition has been organized by the William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut, and the Oregon Historical Society in collaboration with the National Japanese American Historical Society. The Benton presentation is made possible with the support of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism and the Nathan Hale Inn and Conference Center, and in partnership with the University of Connecticut Asian American Cultural Center, Asian American Studies Institute, and the Foundations of Humanitarianism program.

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January 22 – March 30, 2008

Tagged required three years to complete and is a meditation on the nature of ethnic prejudice. Images are photo transferred onto solid-sculpted glass “tongues.” The majority of the photographs are altered reproductions of photos by Dorothea Lange, taken for the War Relocation Authority during the period that Japanese-Americans were forcibly relocated to internment camps. The “book” shows a family photograph from the Topaz Internment Camp, with the artist’s mother shown as a young girl seated at the right. The newspaper clippings, primarily from The New York Times, are about recent ethnic prejudice directed against Arab-Americans. All the clippings are from September 11, 2001 to 2004, when the work was completed.Tagged is being presented as part of the on-going Dialogues program in conjunction with The Art of Gaman.

January 22 – March 30, 2008

Location recordings were made at these two Japanese American internment camps in California. Using self-built transducers, sounds were recorded from artifacts still at the camps: barbed wire, crumbling foundations of the former barracks, plants, and from the boughs of an apple tree that had been planted by the internees. One also hears windharps, site-specific pieces the artist constructed at the sites.

“For me,” wrote Richard Lerman, “the recording made at sites from the existing objects and plants are about the past—these objects were present at that time and were therefore witness to everything that occurred at the camps. The windharps and constructs are more about the present time and explore how we now regard these places.”

Manzanar and Tule Lake is the second section of a longer work, From Dark to Light…but Dark. In this piece, the other recording locations include Auschwitz, Trinity Site (New Mexico), and Hiroshima.

Richard Lerman works in audio art, installations, and media. For years he has designed and built his own transducers usually using piezo disks. These are able to record sounds too soft for our hearing and allow him to record sounds of the environment that also allow the sonic flavor of each material to emerge. We know these as the devices inside cell phones beckoning us to answer.

January 22 – March 30, 2008

In 1943, distinguished American photographer Ansel Adams (1902-1984) captured through his lens the individuals, daily life, work, and pastimes in the Manzanar War Relocation Center, located at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, approximately two hundred miles northeast of Los Angeles. Of his photos, Adams wrote when he offered the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…. All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document.” While criticized by some for their beauty and seeming cheerfulness, the photographs chronicle the lives and activities of the camp that eventually held more than 10,000 prisoners.

This documentary installation of contemporary prints is drawn from the extensive digital holdings of the Library of Congress; it is exhibited in conjunction with The Art of Gaman, further contextualizing the experience of the Japanese American internees. The photographs in this exhibition are contemporary prints from “Suffering Under a Great Injustice: Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar,” in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress.

September 8 – December 16, 2007

The visual arts in France from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries were varied, innovative and revolutionary, profoundly changing the course of art after 1900. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) created his sculptural masterpieces in this era and, as a complement to the exhibition of his sculpture, 15 works by his contemporaries will be exhibited on the Balcony Gallery.
These include Théodule Ribot’s dramatically dark and realist painting, Portrait of an Old Woman, dating to about 1880. Aged Spaniard by Alphonse Legros and the lithograph The Firewood Gatherers by Camille Pissarro likewise reflect the visual and social realism of the era. Their counterparts of the natural world are the naturalistic landscapes of Adolphe Appian, Eugène Blery and Karl Bodmer. Conversely, Félix Buhot’s etching, L’Hiver de 1879 à Paris, is a stark image of the ravages of a brutal winter in Paris.  The last decades of the century saw the development of a countervision to realism in the Symbolist and Art Nouveau movements. Henry Somm’s Girl Riding a Carp, ca. 1895, is both whimsical and Symbolist, while Edmond-François Aman-Jean’s Girl Holding Her Head evokes the sinuous line of the Art Nouveau style.
No matter how a historic period is stylistically categorized, that era is never simple, nor is it one-dimensional. The swirl of styles and subjects in late nineteenth-century France is testimony to the complex artistic milieu in which Rodin worked.

August 28 – November 4, 2007

For artistic variety, quality and contemporaneity, the annual Art and Art History Department studio faculty exhibition excels. Painting, sculpture, illustration, graphic design, printmaking, photography and installation art are the dominant media. The diverse body of works created by the faculty represents many of the most significant directions in contemporary art as well as the unique vision of each faculty member artist. Twelve full-time studio faculty will be exhibiting. This year’s featured artists are Charles Hagen, photography and Edvin Yegir, graphic design. The exhibition also presents work by Monica Bock, Kathryn Myers, Laurie Sloan, Gus Mazzocca, Mark Zurolo, Judith Thorpe, Janet Pritchard, Ray DiCapua, Olu Oguibe, Frank Noelker, Randall Hoyt, and Cora Lynn Deibler.

August 30-October 16, 2011

The history of European music is a history of its sounds, instruments, composers, performers, and patrons. The history of its sounds and instruments is generally known through performances and recordings, but the visual history of music in Europe is far less known even to the audience that enjoys the music. Musical Prints is an exhibition that presents the composers, the performers, and the patrons who are the major figures in European music from the 16th to the 20th centuries. The sixty-four images in the exhibition range from a 1568 portrait of Massimo Troiano to a 1949 etching of the Budapest String Quartet. The musical artists of the Renaissance, the Baroque, the Rococo, the Romantic, and the Classical eras are represented. Seeing the persons and performances adds a new dimension to the music itself.