PAST EXHIBITIONS

September 12, 2009 through February 21, 2010
This exhibition is sponsored by the Hispanic Alliance.
Guest Curator Gail Gelburd, Ph.D., Professor of Art History at Eastern Connecticut State University

In 1939, the anthropologist Fernando Ortiz characterized Cuban culture as an ajiaco: a rich stew consisting of an array of ingredients cooked until a thick broth is formed. It is this synthesis that is the essence of Cuban art and the subject of the exhibition Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul.

Ajiaco seeks to interpret the diverse social dimensions of Cuban art in a global context through the exploration of its relationship with African, Asian, European, and Indigenous influences and belief systems. The art incorporates the tales of the Orisha of Africa, the calligraphy of Chinese Tao Te Ching, and the rituals of indigenous peoples. The formats change, the materials vary, but the mix remains constant in both Cuban and Cuban American art. Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul is not necessarily about one group however; it explores diaspora, embracing those aspects of Latin American culture that are sympathetic to all. In broader terms, this project addresses both the immigrant experience and the expression of cultural identity in a new place.

The curator, Dr. Gail Gelburd, writes, “Isolated and yet educated, restricted and yet heralded, the Cuban artist embodies the angst of their situation and yet embraces the loftiest of goals. Their syncretist tradition and heritage allows them to go beyond the monotheistic traditions in order to find the origins of their soul, the geist or inner spirit of their art.” Gelburd has been conducting research on Cuban art and artists for over fifteen years. She has regularly traveled to Cuba and has lectured there for the Havana Biennale, Havana University, and Casa Africa. Gelburd’s article "Cuba: The Art of Trading with the Enemy" appears in Art Journal in the Spring 2009 issue.

This exhibition consists of more than fifty objects, including paintings, works on paper, photographs, sculpture, installations, and audio works by 22 artists. Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul will feature such major figures in Cuban art as Wifredo Lam, Manuel Mendive, Jose Bedia and Sandra Ramos. The exhibition is tentatively scheduled to travel to two additional venues: the Chelsea Art Museum in New York City and the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Also on view, and coordinating with Ajiaco, is an exhibition of work by Imna Arroyo, titled Ancestors of the Passage, which will explore the socio-cultural beliefs of Caribbean culture. Raised in Puerto Rico but educated in the United States, Arroyo has been on a quest to visualize her heritage. Like so many other Puerto Ricans, she is of African and Taino descent. Knowing little of those cultures, she journeyed to Cuba where she found a strong acceptance and recognition of that heritage. Arroyo’s work visualizes the Diaspora, the African Orishas, and the spirits of her marginalized ancestors. Her work serves as the catalyst for others of Latin American heritage to find the connections to their heritage in Cuba, which has preserved that culture and visualizes it in Ajiaco.

Flora Fong (b. 1949) Syncretism Oil on canvas, 44 x 36 x 3”	Tomas Sanchez (b. 1948) Paisaje con Orilla, 1986 Oil on canvas, 70 ½ x 89 1/2”	Manuel Mendive Se Alimenta mi Espiritu, 2007, Acrylic on canvas 64 ¾” x 95”

For more information about Ajiaco, visit www.cubanartexhibition.com

Through November 30, 2009

Guest Curator Zina Davis, Joseloff Gallery at the University of Hartford

Language is incorporated into works of art in ways that encourage us to consider the meaning of words and symbols in relation to the visual experience. Sometimes the viewer must look closely to find the words and symbols: in some artworks, the symbols are hidden, scattered throughout the patterns on the paper, while in others text plays a prominent role.

Words and symbols are frequently found in contemporary art; however, there is a strong precedent for works of art that integrate text with image before the 20th and 21st centuries. Language plays a dominant role, for example, in early American samplers; medieval illuminated manuscripts and Farsi marriage documents. All were intended to be read.

Other examples of the early inclusion of text and symbols are a 19th century Chinese bronze ritual vessel and an ancient Egyptian falcon mummy sarcophagus which, along with two ushabti figures, are painted with hieroglyphic inscriptions. Antique Greek red-figure pottery features abstract symbols and as well as symbolic mythological figures relating stories and relaying information that would have been easily “readable” by the people who used these objects. Language is seamlessly integrated into these art objects and the result is a unity of aesthetic and purpose.

March 7 through August 23, 2009

Elizabeth Enders builds microcosms of her very own making. Brilliantly fusing principles of realism with those of lyrical abstraction, the artist brings these formal opposites into a purposeful harmony. In her series of landscapes, with an emphasis on seascapes painted over past several decades, Enders displays a unique balance of the descriptive and of the imaginary. The essential parts of the particular site in nature, such as the horizon line or a color hue characteristic of a certain area of the coast, are always fully acknowledged. It is through the elimination of all nonessential details that the artist transforms these locales into universal statements about the mysterious beauty of the coastal areas.

Enders’ art is very much about communicating a message – about the spirit of the place, about the beauty of flora that is celebrated in a sublime series of botanical drawings, but also about the silence and isolation that can be a painful part of the human experience. To overcome this isolation, to establish a potential discourse with others, Enders began marking sheets of paper or canvas with mysterious marks and fictional alphabets. Our propensity, not only to view these as visual statements but often the inclination “to read” these works, depends on the experiences and temperament of each viewer.

Lyrical and meditative, the work of Elizabeth Enders heightens our curiosity to learn more about the world around us, to penetrate deeper into the often concealed magic of our everyday experience. The power of Enders’ artistic persuasion energizes our perception, enabling us to participate in the wonder of discovery.

Atlantic 1992 Oil on linen 60 x 60 inches	Fast Food/Bananas 2002 Watercolor on paper 11 ½ x 9 ¼ inches	Yellow Anemone/Purple Veronica II Series I 2003 Watercolor, pencil on paper

Through April 12, 2009

Charles Chi-Jung Chu (1918-2008) was a master painter, calligrapher, scholar and professor emeritus of Chinese at Connecticut College. Chu was a highly respected and beloved member of the Southeastern Connecticut community. He was a professor at Connecticut College for 19 years and was responsible for introducing the study of Mandarin Chinese to the campus in 1965. Charles Chu was as well known for his landscape watercolors as he was for his whimsical painted depictions of the college campus and of the college’s camel mascot.

As a tribute to the life and creativity of Charles Chu, the Museum, along with the Departments of Art History and Architectural Studies and the Charles E. Shain Library, will co-sponsor two special exhibitions of paintings by Charles Chu. The artworks in the exhibitions will be on loan from the private collections of Connecticut College faculty, staff, alumni and members of the New London community.

Remembering Charles Chu: A Special Exhibition of Love and Friendship will be on view in the Chu Reading Room at the Connecticut College Library through April 20, 2009.

Exhibition Guest Curator Professor Qiang Ning is the Chu-Niblack Associate Professor of Asian Art and Curator of the Chu-Griffis Collection of Asian Art at Connecticut College.

The playful, inventive and interactive world of Walter Wick will be the subject of Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic on view from Sept. 7, 2008 – Jan. 26, 2009, including photographs and 3-D displays highlighting his children’s books. A stimulating experience for the eye and mind!

Walter Wick is a Hartford-based photographer whose I Spy and Can You See What I See books for children are long-time best-sellers on the New York Times’ and other literary lists. His large-scale photographs, as well as examples of his sets, set-ups and props will bed on view in the second floor galleries of the museum.

“The works will be enlarged to five or six feet wide with details, colors and tones not possible in book reproductions,” says Wick, noting that the exhibition will present a “playful sense of scale, space and the unexpected.”

Walter Wick: Games, Gizmos and Toys in the Attic has been organized by the New Britain Museum of American Art.
Sponsored by the Mohegan Tribe and Mohegan Sun.
Also supported by Essex Savings Bank and Vanderbrooke Caterers.

Through December 31, 2008

Presenting French art from the permanent collection, with paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture from the 17th through the 20th centuries. Works on view include J.A.D. Ingres’s important pencil study for the portrait of Mme. Moitessier Standing (c.1851), Pierre Auguste Renoir’s bronze Maternite’ (1916), and Auguste Rodin’s sculpture Study of a Crouching Woman. Also on view are 17th century drawings by Nicholas Poussin, Hyacinthe Rigaud, and Francois Boucher; and paintings by Pierre Mignard, Gustave Courbet, and Honore’ Daumier.

May 31 through August 17, 2008

Acclaimed photographer Peter Harron shot these beautiful and evocative black and white photographs in the desert in Morocco. His first trip to Morocco was in 1968 when it became part of a documentary film he was doing on the changing culture of the 1960's. In 2007, almost 40 years later, Harron and his Moroccan- born wife Colette returned to Morocco with still camera, loaded with black and white film only, to photograph the breathtaking landscapes, the ancient adobe architecture, the quietness of the desert, the magic light, and to capture a sense of time.

Ellen Carey Blinks Color photogram 2005 20 x 16 inches	Sam Messer Mr. Coincidence 1999 Oil on canvas	Cleve Gray (American, 1918-2004) Zen Garden Acrylic on canvas

March 1 through April 27, 2008

JED is a three-person collaborative who use the first initial of their birth names to form a fictitious contemporary lens-based, conceptual photographic artist in the early 21st century. JED represents their collective alter egos, whose identity is a secret. Borrowing from the Dada and Surrealist’s art movements, which includes stream-of-consciousness to make art and found objects not traditionally used for art making, championed by Marcel Duchamp for example, JED focuses their attention on a selection of photographic images, such as test strips and “bad” prints that were discarded and thrown out by their original picture makers. These found/abandoned images are re-contextualized and elevated to “high” art with a sense of humor that underscores the absurd, the forgotten, and now serves as documents of the human attempt to make art despite constant failure, what is commonly known as the “artist’s struggle”.

At Home and Abroad:
The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch
October 12, 2007 through February 25, 2008

Listen to Helen Harrison's review of the Cranch exhibition on "Art Waves" which aired on December 6, 2007 on 88.3 FM WLIU's "In the Morning with Bonnie Grice." Despite a fifty-year career as a landscape painter, Christopher Cranch’s paintings are little known. Instead, he is best known for his poetry, his ties to the New England Transcendentalists, and, above all, his playful caricature of Ralph Waldo Emerson as an enormous “transparent” eyeball, perched atop a minuscule body in top hat and tails, optic nerve tied in a pony tail. From his first reading of Emerson’s Nature essay (1836), Cranch was inspired to explore Transcendental concepts through visual means; although ultimately it was painting, not caricature, that provided the ideal vehicle for him. Transcribing nature onto canvas became an act of devotion. Like Thoreau writing of the daily trials of life on Walden Pond, Cranch also attempted, in his landscapes, to express the correspondence between nature and spiritual concepts. His brand of Transcendentalism bypasses the quiet, “transparent” aspect to celebrate a nature that is filled with the flux and continual shifting that Emerson and Thoreau also celebrated in their writings. C. P. Cranch was intimate with some of the most innovative thinkers in America and counted among his friends Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George William Curtis, and James Russell Lowell. This study considers Cranch not only as a Hudson River School artist, but also as a participant in the history of ideas, a multi-faceted individual who merged intellectual and artistic life.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 208-page exhibition catalogue; At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813 – 1892). The Foreword is written by Barbara Novak, Professor Emerita at Columbia University, one of the most influential theorists on American art. Nancy Stula, Curator and Deputy Director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, and David M. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Oregon State University authored the catalogue essays.

After closing at Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the show will travel to the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where it will be on view March 17 through May 31, 2008.

At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch has been made possible by generous grants from the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Henry Luce Foundation.

This exhibition is also supported in part by the Frank Loomis Palmer Fund, Bank of America, Trustee, and with support from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. Eli Wilner & Company Period Frames, New York has provided numerous frames.

October 12, 2007 - February 25, 2008

Miles Gallery will present an installation of this environmentally-based artist. Her hermetically- sealed “evidence bags” are actual specimens taken from nature. This unique exhibition is visually intriguing as well as inspirational and is the perfect complement to the Museum’s major fall exhibition At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch, which deals with the glory of Nature as interpreted by the artist.

Guido Garaycochea, a Peruvian painter working in New York, presents a poignant series of three-dimensional painted boxes in this special and personal installation that deals with the political turmoil and personal loss that has plagued his country for many years.  The exhibition includes a video component and encourages audience participation.

Turandot
Silkscreen ¦ Edition of 120 ¦ 2005
42” x 45½"

The relationship between painting and silkscreen prints as seen through the creative eyes of New York artist Larry Dinkin.  He takes the viewer on a visual journey between the two media.  The vividly bold paintings and prints seem familiar and yet distant; perhaps a memory from a dream when one is jarred awake.  Within the brilliant colors and dense brushstrokes, one can almost see a structure, a landform, something recognizable, but not then quite. Dinkin says of his work, “The images depict a personal universe—distilled landscapes bound only by their own reality.  They strive for the flickering ambiguity of paint to dreamy vision, held fast within a structure that is both descriptive and dimensional.”