Defining Space, Producing History

"Producing Histories: African Art In The Housatonic Museum Of Art Collection" is an exhibition curated by Lyneise Williams, Ph.D. candidate at Yale University who specializes in African Art and the Art of the African Diaspora.

This exhibition opens September 3 and continues through October 29, 1999.

Symposium: Saturday September 18, 10:30 am
Lyneise Williams, moderator and discussant, Christa Clarke, Christopher B. Steiner, Omaa Chukwurah-Orezabo, Tim Barringer, Obiora Udechukwu

Storytelling: Saturday, October 9, 12-1 pm
Omaa Chukwurah-Orezabo and Raouf Mama,
Raouf Mama,Ph.D., professor of African Literature at Eastern Connecticut State University, will be telling stories and doing a "Meet the Author" book
signing of his new book on African folk tales.

Curatorial Talk: Monday, October 18, 12-1 pm In "Producing Histories: African Art In The Housatonic Museum Of Art Collection," Lyneise Williams explores the multiple histories attached to African art objects by those who construct those histories: the maker of the object, local tradesmen, collectors, dealers and tourists; museum professionals and academicians to name a few. These histories are further defined by the setting in which the objects themselves are encountered -- a living room, a public museum, and the usually restricted storage area. These spaces have been created and "displayed" in an effort to explore systems of presentation.

According to curator Lyneise Williams, "African objects took the role of works of art in a domestic setting long before museums conferred on them aesthetic value. It seems appropriate that this exhibition should open with the private connection as the key site for the production of histories for African art." The histories produced in these settings, says Williams, where the collector lives, eats and sleeps creates a different relationship to the art -- it may serve as an artifact or merely a curiosity or conversation piece. No understanding of the work may be required or even wanted, nor will the absence of this formal knowledge interfere with the collector's personal enjoyment of the object.

By contrast, the second space is a formal museum installation with the objects placed in vitrines, replete with identifying labels and maps to educate the viewer about the object and the culture that produced it. This setting privileges the object by setting it apart in a variety of ways, including placing it on a pedestal and utilizing special lighting techniques. In other words, Williams creates a space the viewer expects to encounter designed for the purpose of imparting specialized knowledge.

The third gallery recreates a storage space usually "off-limits" to the casual museum-goer. Entry into private storage areas is reserved for visiting scholars, curators and museum staff. And though access is restricted, works themselves are not necessarily treated with the same degree of care and concern that is shown in the public museum space. Rather than being kept in vitrines, works may be rolled, boxed, or stacked thus de-emphasizing the preciousness "exhibited" in the museum space. Williams shows us through this ingenious installation how each one of these locations demands a different type of relationship to the object.

Collectors of African artifacts have been important producers of histories that in turn shape perceptions of what we think we know as African art. Lyneise Williams points out, "As we work towards a greater understanding of our relationship with African art, collectors, collections and institutions will figure prominently as producers of a range of histories. Each of these histories bears some level of 'truth', but as I have worked to demonstrate, any such claim to 'truth' can be contested. If there can be no simple meaning of African objects, there are, nonetheless, many valuable insights to be gained and generated in the complex journeys."

Thomas Rose

July 10 Through August 20, 1999

INSTALLATION ARTIST, TOM ROSE EXPLORES THE CONCEPTUAL
AND THE SENSUAL IN 'ASH GARDEN'

"Ash Garden," an exhibition by renowned American sculptor Tom Rose, is at the Housatonic Museum of Art from July 10 th through August 20 th. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

Rose is best known both for his installation art, as well as his sculptures, which use everyday materials including glass, wood, galvanized steel, stone and water. These materials, which may be carved, etched, painted or stained, are combined to create for the viewer a space that recalls specific experiences.

" Ash Garden" includes sketches, drawings and models of his larger installations. These installations use videos, music, and sculpture to create meditative spaces, that join the conceptual with the sensuous," according to Housatonic Museum Director Robbin Zella.

"His work asks viewers to become active participants in the artistic process by bringing their personal lives and emotional experiences with them

when viewing the works. Thus each viewer will react individually to the various elements of the work.

Rose, a professor at the University of Minnesota has created pieces such as "Searching for the Spiritual" and "Body of Water: Fourth Elegy" which are mediations inspired by the death of his parents.

He described the inspiration for "Searching" by saying, "I set out to examine the experience of people as they individually experienced the death of their father."

He combined video tapes of individuals with inserts from the texts of autopsy reports. "When cut into the narrative, it [the autopsy report] constructs a parallel narrative to that which is being given by the speaker. It is the space between these narratives - that shadow - what I believe in and is most interesting to me."

Also, the artist has given an outdoor sculpture titled "Garden Gate" to the Museum that will remain on permanent display in the courtyard.

Rose is represented in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Minnesota Museum of Art, Minneapolis Museum of Art, the University of Minnesota, the University of New Mexico, San Francisco Arts Commission as well as in many private and corporate collections.

He has exhibited widely including regular exhibitions in New York City at the Steinbaum Krauss Gallery and the Rosa Esman Gallery, the University of Minnesota, St. John's College {Collegeville, Minn.), East Carolina University (Greenville, N. Car.), and galleries in Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis, and elsewhere.

Rose has been commissioned to create works for the Minnesota Zoological Garden, Hennepin Center for the Arts (Minneapolis), and Sacred Heart University among others.

He received his bachelor's degree from the University of Illinois and his masters in fine arts from the University of California at Berkeley.

Edgar and Toby Buonagurio:
Opulence Against The Grain

PRILLA SMITH BRACKET
Remnants: Ancient Forests & City Trees

Remnants: Big Red Reserve, 1997-1998
Acrylic on collaged paper and oil on canvas
42 x 120"

November 9, 2000 - January 12, 2001

Opening Reception Friday, November 10, 2000 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Lecture: 7:30 pm Friday, November 10, 2000
Bob Leverett, Sierra Club Author will discuss the complex ecosystems of forests which are intrinsically connected to climatic stability and biological diversity, the controversies over their protection and the consequences of forest destruction.

Galley of works, click on one to see a larger view...

Installation images, click on one to see larger view...

BUILDING ON A LEGACY: RECENT GIFTS 1997 - 2000

JONATHAN TALBOT / COLLAGE PAINTINGS / 1980-2000

MAY 19TH - JULY 19TH, 2000

View of the exhibition from the front door of the Bert Chernow Gallery.
Photo: Paul Mutino

(Right) Jonathan Talbot and Housatonic Museum Director Robbin Zella discuss the installation of the exhibit Photo: Susan Greene (Below) "TEMPLE," one of the larger works in the exhibition, measures 32 " x 52" Photo: Paul Mutino

(Right) Another view of the exhibit Photo: Paul Mutino

(Left) During a lecture demonstration at the museum Jonathan removes one of the works from the wall to make a point. Photo: Leslie Mueller

Other Works in the Exhibition

"CUADRO FLAMENCO" Photo: The Artist

"ALL THAT JAZZ" Photo: Paul Mutino

To reach Jonathan Talbot's Website Click Here

PAST IMPERFECT: New Work by Deborah Muirhead

Art Inspired by Findings from African Burial Grounds
on View at Housatonic

Deborah Muirhead has created provocative paintings, drawings and books inspired by the 1991 excavation of the African Burial Grounds in lower Manhattan. These works will be on view in The Burt Chernow Galleries at Housatonic Community College from March 4 through April 15, 2000.

Libby, Oil on Canvas 72" x 120", 1998

The exhibition, Past Imperfect: Recovering and Reinterpreting History, represents Muirhead's attempt to trace, define and ultimately recover the past of a people brought to America in bondage and excluded from the historical record. The work presented confronts issues of race, gender and class oppression. It is a form of resistance against the messages of "otherness" still prevalent is our society.

Muirhead is an African-American woman descended from enslaved persons. She uses a variety of media, including texts from 19th century books to construct identities and recapture voices once silenced by oppression and slavery.

The Burt Chernow Galleries are open Monday through Friday from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and on Thursday until 7 p.m. On Saturday the Galleries are open from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.

For more information, call (203) 332-5052.

Fluidity and Fantasy: Susan Sharp's Abstract Paintings

By Donald Kuspit

Susan Sharp's abstract paintings are saturated with an indwelling luminosity on which intricately meandering lines spin themselves out, often composing themselves into free-form planes that seem to throb with a life of their own. As Merge, Lumin, Double Reveal and Orbit (all 2001) indicate, there is a very organic, spontaneous look to Sharp's paintings, suggesting her roots in classical biomorphic vision and her mastery of expressionistic process. In fact, the restless, forceful movement of her gestures emotionally engages us, all the more so because they perpetually change direction, as though uncertain of their purpose. We are, indeed, in an "internal world," which is where Sharp wants to be- a world rich with seductive color as well as impulsive movement, that is, a world libidinously and aggressively alive. In such dense works as Desire, Surge, and Internal Logic (all 1999), there is a surfeit of primordial emotion that rebounds back on itself. The sense of entanglement-of a bizarre Gordian knot of forms, colors, and lines all implicated in each other-stamps Sharp's abstractions with uncanniness. She in effect conveys, in abstract terms, the unresolvable tension in herself, which threatens to tear her apart even as it is the source of her creativity. The convulsive beauty of Sharp's paintings suggests that they are abstractly surreal, in line with Andre Breton's assertion that beauty is always convulsive, especially modern beauty.

But this beauty is not entirely personal-not only expressive of the convulsions of inner life, but, paradoxically, also of social convulsion, more particularly the convulsion of the Holocaust, as Shoah I and Shoah II (both 2001) indicate. There are not many paintings that are pure in the Greenbergian sense--that are committed to the medium as the be-all and the end-all of art-- that can at the same time convey the suffering of the Shoah. And convey it with epigrammatic abstract brevity. The grim black shape in Shoah II-its zigzag evokes a figure, and I can't help but hallucinate a face in its center-epitomizes the agony of the Shoah, while the weirdly ecstatic agitation of Shoah I conveys its violence. In The Beginning (2001) seems related. It is as though the death involved in the Shoah returns us to the beginning of life-demands that we re-affirm our faith in genesis and the life force. In a sense, all of Sharp's abstractions are about elemental germination-a Random Act (2001), as one of her paintings suggests, that occurs at an unpredictable moment. Sharp captures this moment again and again. It gives her paintings emotional as well as aesthetic life. It may be that such a horrendous event as the Shoah can only be suggested by the opposite that evokes it. It is also so humanly awful that it is best conveyed abstractly, for all that remains of it is its emotional effect. Our own feelings about it are all that can bring us near to it, now that it is history, and Sharp's pictures are full of intense, complicated, self-dramatizing feelings.

Love is also emotionally exciting and self-dramatizing, as Sharp's refreshingly abstract Kiss (2001), suggests. I don't know any other "representation" of a kiss like it. It is certainly a long way from those Klimt and Brancusi, as well as Hollywood. Sharp's daring work seems like a summary of all her ideas: the impassioned merger of forms that nentheless remain at odds with one another--that pull apart even as they hold together, tenuously. Sharp's forms meet at a tangent even as they sometimes overlap in grim interplay, as occurs between the black and the brown in the lower left quadrant. For all the abstract fluidity of Kiss, there is a sense of fantasy about the work, as though it was the image of an event that is being dissected before our eyes. Clearly it is about the emotions aroused by a passionate kiss, but they look like the painterly tissue left after the bodies involved have been dissected.

Sharp can paint both thickly and thinly, as the difference between Breathless and Crossing Over (both 1999) on the one hand, and Untitled #3 and #4 (both 2000) on the other, indicate. She is a master of surface, using acrylic, gouache, and graphite among other materials, as well as a variety of printing techniques, including rubbings and transfers. Collage also plays a role in her respect for the medium, however, fraught it is with personal meaning. Again, we come back to Sharp's enjoyment of her medium-her deft way of handling it, sometimes with swashbuckling energy, sometimes with delicate finesse. In The Bone (2000) is an ingenious fusion of both modes. It is a masterpiece of eccentric transformation, with one gesture unlike it yet derived from it, and a mass of gestures that seem to implode. The work has an air of "fragility" and "impermanence", to use Sharp's words, but also of power and durability. However unstable and erratic they seem, the gestures are made too firmly to be erased.

FLUIDITY AND FANTASY - Installation

Paintings by Susan Sharp
In the Burt Chernow Galleries

November 17, 2001 through January 18th, 2002

Click on image to see larger view...

See individual paintings in the Image Gallery...

See individual paintings in the Image Gallery...

Exhibit Home

FLUIDITY AND FANTASY - Gallery

Paintings by Susan Sharp
In the Burt Chernow Galleries

November 17, 2001 through January 18th, 2002

Click on image to see larger view...

See installation photos from the exhibit...

Exhibit Home

FLUIDITY AND FANTASY Paintings by Susan Sharp

FLUIDITY AND FANTASY

Paintings by Susan Sharp
In the Burt Chernow Galleries

November 17, 2001 through January 18th, 2002

Opening Reception November 17th, 3pm - 5pm

Catalog Essay by Donald Kuspit

Evolution: From Figuration to Abstraction
Gallery Talk with the Artist
Wednesday, December 5th, 12pm - 1pm

The artist's web site can be found at www.susansharp.net

Installation of the Susan Sharp exhibit in the Burt Chernow Galleries.

More Installation Photos...

Image Gallery...

Back to Jakobsen Exhibit Home

Innocence of Vision

by Robbin Zella, HMA Director

Interest in American folk art emerged in the 1920s and, by the 1950s, culminated in the founding of museums devoted exclusively to collecting folk art. Three ground breaking exhibitions were mounted in succession by leading folk art scholar Holger Cahill: American Primitive, 1930-1931 and American Folk Sculpture, 1931-32 held at the Newark Museum in New Jersey, and American Folk Art: Art of the Common Man in America 1750-1900 held in 1932 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. These shows were the first comprehensive exhibitions devoted entirely to painting, sculpture, crafts and the decorative arts, awakening a new appreciation for American hand-crafts and art created by untrained artists.

With the advancement of the industrial age and the production of mass-produced objects, nostalgia for simpler times emerged as did a passion for collecting folk art. Artists, like Charles Sheeler and William Zorach, admired American folk art for its simplicity and bold design which, in turn, underscored their own modernist aesthetic values captured neatly by the phrase "less is more."

Today, contemporary folk art, that is, work produced after 1900, splinters into a variation of styles including Art Brut, Art Singulier, Visionary art, Intuitive Art, Outsider Art, and Naïve Art. All except Naïve Art are styles that refer to a wider practice of a much more personal or eccentric kind of art. What distinguishes the Naïve artist from the other practices mentioned above is that the Naïve artist is consciously trying to reach or create an audience for the work whereas the other artists generally eschew exhibiting work publicly. Naïve art is also characterized by the depiction of highly detailed and realistic scenes of animals, people, places and events.

Clearly identified with the Naïve style, Kathy Jakobsen's paintings are abuzz with activity. Vibrant and brilliantly colored, her images radiate with the hustle and bustle of contemporary urban and suburban American life. In My New York, Jakobsen perfectly captures the frenzied motion and ceaseless activity that is Manhattan. She leads us on tour of all her favorite places: The Empire State Building, the famed toy store FAO Schwarz, Chinatown, the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center, The Plaza Hotel and Central Park and several of the city's greatest museums. There's plenty to do and see. And just as you begin to believe you've seen it all, out the window of the Market Diner you catch sight of elephants marching down 8th Avenue! Jakobsen shows us that anything is possible in New York.

 Meet Me In The Magic Kingdom is Jakobsen's homage to an altogether different kind of mega-entertainment center. The fireworks, costumes, parades, rides and attractions are all here. Again, she successfully conveys the wonder and excitement that every child (and adult) feels upon entering the Magic Kingdom. It is that sense of amazement that is at the very heart of the Disney experience and Jakobsen is a master at translating that message through paint.

Through the use of pattern, repeating forms, and rhythmic line she illustrates an idealistic vision of contemporary American life and creates a wonderful positive feeling about each place-- urban, suburban or rural. A sunny cheerfulness infects every inch of her canvases making her hopefulness contagious. In fact, Kathy Jakobsen's greatest gift just may be her marvelous optimism, her amazing ability to see the world with a humble heart and an innocence of vision.

Robbin Zella
Director
July 11, 2001