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.

 

 

 

January 17-March 11, 2012

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.

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.

January 17 – March 11, 2012

In concert with the campus-wide initiative UConn Reads and inspired by the stories recounted in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women WorldwideM by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, the William Benton Museum of Art presents Half the Sky: Historically. This exhibition takes place on the Benton balcony and consists of a selection of works giving historical perspective to the issues raised by Kristof and WuDunn.

Half the Sky: Historically runs concurrently with Half the Sky: Visualized, an exhibition of contemporary work exploring gender-based oppression on view at the Contemporary Art Galleries at the School of Fine Arts, Art Building from March 5 – April 19.

 

January 17-March 11, 2012

Classical mythology has a long relationship with the visual arts, but the representation of myth in painting, sculpture, and print is never simple illustration. The collection of stories and characters that we know from the poetry of classical writers like Virgil, Ovid, and Homer were once the components of the ancient Greek and Roman religion. Early representations of deities stood larger than life in temples as the physical manifestation of the divine presence. Removed from a pagan context in the Middle Ages, classical mythology fueled the imagination of later artists who often conflated classical subject matter with classical style. Even after the taste for classical proportions and for academic art was upset by subsequent artistic movements in the 19th century, classical mythology continued to provide rich thematic material for generations of artists.

This exhibition examines the enduring appeal of classical mythology in the 19th and 20th centuries even for artists with no interest in classicism. Drawing only on works from the Benton’s permanent collection, Classical Mythology in Modern and Contemporary Art demonstrates the myriad uses to which a diverse group of artists have put classical subject matter. Among the artists are Arthur Bowen Davies, George Bellows, Max Slevogt, Heinrich Campendonk, Reuben Nakian, Nancy Goldring, and James Fee. Many of the objects are works on paper though examples of photography, painting, and sculpture with mythological themes are also included.

October 29-December 18, 2011

The year 2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the School of Fine Arts and, while the Benton did not become a part of the School until 1997, it is a part of the history of the School. Since 1967 the Museum has hosted the annual art department faculty exhibition. In celebration of the 50th anniversary, the Museum is proud to present a visual time capsule of the Art Department from 1961 to 2001. Emeriti faculty from every decade and from all across the country will exhibit work created during their time at the University, and the history of the styles, media, and individuals from these times will be recreated on the walls of the Benton.

October 25-December 18, 2011

Barkley L. Hendricks: Some Like it Hot focuses on the artist’s work created in response to his travels to Jamaica and West Africa. With their compelling scenery and inhabitants, these tropical regions have provided him with a wealth of inspiration, and the resulting photographs and paintings represent a significant portion of his creative output. The exhibition includes large-scale figurative paintings, a series of landscapes on lunette and tondo shaped canvases, renderings in oil and watercolor of fruits and vegetation, and photographs selected from his prolific production in that mediumamong them a suite of photographs of activist and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti that will be exhibited for the first time.

August 30 – October 16, 2011

This popular showcase of current work by the studio faculty of the Art and Art History Department is a yearly event that introduces the work of the permanent faculty. The exhibition presents a variety of media including painting, sculpture, illustration, graphic design, printmaking, photography and video. This diverse body of works highlights many of the significant directions in contemporary art as well as the unique vision of each artist-faculty member. Seventeen faculty members from the Storrs and branch campuses will be exhibiting. Printmaker Laurie Sloan and photographer Frank Noelker are this year’s featured artists.

 

August 30 – December 18, 2011

ICI has invited 35 curators from around the world to each select one single-channel video work, culminating in the four-part touring video program that is Project 35. Mining on ICI’s extensive international network of professionals, the project is a budding model for organizing, sharing and circulating art videos as cultural objects. In selecting works and inserting them into new contexts, ICI has borrowed from the organizing principle of montage. But Project 35 goes beyond this model of editing, and its final form is more open; it exceeds the limitations of montage, and bares greater potential for audience participation. Indeed, the selection process is deliberately idiosyncraticone curator selects an artist work and the compilation is organized along structural rather than topical lines. The result is a greater engagement from the spectator who will imaginatively produce meaning across the videos. The possibilities for decoding these works are infinitely richer, as the traditional boundaries between curators and audience become blurrier in this new type of montage. In turn, the distinction between producer and consumer fades out, giving rise to new possibilities and potential of video as a medium.

 

May 31-August 7, 2011

This summer the Benton returns to a popular practice of presenting mini-exhibitions from its permanent collections of works from the 16th to the 21st centuries. The familiar and the not-so-familiar will be hung in a variety of theme-related groupings beside new acquisitions, many that have never been exhibited before. Highlights will include 17th-century Italian drawings, paintings and pastels by American artists Dwight Tryon, Maurice Prendergast and Mary Cassatt, a selection of photographic portraits by Malian photographer Seydou Keita, Pop Art-inspired prints by German artists working in the 1960s, and a selection of contemporary photography.

 

May 31-August 7, 2011

The colored woodcut was ubiquitous in 19th-century Japan, and for Europeans a source of artistic influence and of pleasure in collecting them. The late 19th-century artistic influence of the woodcut lay in its disavowal of Western perspective, an ingrained facility for two-dimensional patterning, and an unwavering sense of coloration. The pleasure of collecting the color woodcuts in the late 19th and 20th centuries lay in a more profound interest in Asian arts, Chinese as well as Japanese, than had been expressed by the decoratively brilliant but very western Chinoiserie of the 18th century.

Serious collecting of Japanese woodcuts in the West began in the late 19th century, followed closely by scholarship aimed at organizing, identifying, and researching the objects in these collections by artists, schools, periods, styles, and subject matter. In the last three to four decades of the 20th century, however, the basic cataloguing of collections was superseded by a broadened interest in the cultural contextualization of the prints in the totality of Japanese society of the 18th and 19th centuries. The beauty, technical facility, and historical place of the Japanese colored woodcut are, perhaps, no more appreciated now than in the past, though it is arguably more broadly understood today.

Two of the most important centers of woodcut production were Edomodern-day Tokyoand Osaka. Osaka was famous for its theaters, actors, and plays, and in the 19th century a market for colored woodcuts depicting popular actors and familiar scenes from the Kabuki theater flourished. It was Osaka theater prints that comprised the George Lincoln bequest to the Benton in 2005, a gift that became a new area of collecting for the Museum. Since then the Museum has added new works to the Lincoln collection and has expanded the range of subjects to include the female beauties that were so popular in Edo prints.

One important genre of 19th century colored woodcut production that has yet to be represented in the Benton collections is the landscape. Landscape was as significant as the beauties and the actors, and the very generous loan to this exhibition of landscape prints as well as selected others from the collections of St. Joseph’s College (West Hartford, Connecticut) has enabled the Benton to present a fuller and more rounded cross-section of work from this era. Regardless of how one views the beauties, the actors, and the landscapesas cultural artifacts or artistic landmarks in this exhibition, they hold our attention, broaden our knowledge, and, above all, add immeasurable beauty to our daily lives.