2017-2018 Exhibitions

September 29 - November 19

Leech Gallery:

Mirth & Melancholy: The Circus in Modern Art

Curated by Kali Steinberg '17

Louis-Paul Favre, Harlequin, 1948Artists frequently portrayed clowns, harlequins, and acrobats in their work to protest traditional artistic values and to symbolize their loneliness within the modern world. With the rapid industrialization of the West in the late 19th century, theatres, cafes, cabarets, and circuses became popular places of leisure among all social classes. However, the circus also revealed the darker side of the modern age.

The prints and paintings featured in this exhibition show artists’ fascination with the circus. While some express the entertaining and lighter side of the circus, others depict a more melancholy scene. Often, these two sides are represented in tandem, reflecting the artists’ own contradictory feelings about the rapidly changing world around them.

 

 

 

Hoffmaster Gallery:

Our Trans Family

An exhibit of over 20 photographs of transgender people and their families. This project is a partnership with Cream City Foundation, the major financial supporter for the project. Additional support has been provided by Diverse and Resilient and the Mary Nohl Foundation which identified the photographers as "Artists in Residence." More on Our Trans Family and other works produced by "For Good" Photography is here.

 

 

Kohler Gallery:

From how we view black bodies as dangerous, virile, and exotic, to how we judge and objectify women based on aesthetics, to how we encounter difference, are informed by Art’s history and visual culture. We’ve learned to form meaning and value around people and their bodies in part though the images we consume and the narratives we inherit. My work is defined by its ongoing engagement with the history of painting. In part my interest is historical: I study the pictorial, technical, and narrative conventions of Western art to explore the ways in which primarily male artists have imagined the body. Considering such conventions in a contemporary context, I deliver fresh ideals of men and women that both disturb the existing cannon and normalize their presence in public art space and discourse.

January 12 - March 9

Leech Gallery:

Through the Lens: Recent Acquisitions in Photography

New photography in the Lawrence University art collection, including works from The Museum Project by artists Robert von Sternberg, Sheila Pinkel, Darryl Curran, and Todd Walker, and work by LU studio art faculty J. Shimon & J. Lindemann.

 

 

 

 

Liudmilla & Nelson, El ViajeIn 2002 art collector Madeleine P. Plonsker began traveling to Cuba to uncover Havana’s thriving art scene. Her collection focuses on Cuban photography from 1992 to the present. These years cover Cuba’s “Special Period,” a desperate time resulting from the withdrawal of economic support from the former Soviet Union to this tiny island nation. 

Cuba is a tantalizing 90 miles off our southern shores. It is an island that historically has been both our friend and our enemy. Nevertheless, it has always hosted a most fascinating sky, which with changing weather, allows the most perfect balance of light and shadow that has forever attracted its photographic community.

In Cuba, cultural richness clashes with economic depravation, pride chafes against frustration, and beauty mingles with decay. Although constrained by curtailed circumstances, shortages, and the expense of supplies, Cuban photographers more than make up for their material limitations with dedication to their art. Their disciplined imaginations have impelled them to explore and master all of the modernist and even some of the postmodernist experimental genres.

 

Kohler Gallery:

Pulped Under Pressure

Co-curated by artists Reni Gower and Melissa Potter, this exhibition will feature contemporary examples of papermaking art.

This exhibition and community programs are generously supported by AZCO, Inc.

A catalog was published in conjunction with the traveling exhibition is available here via blurb.com and an essay, "Paper with a Purpose" by Ashley Kistler, is available as a pdf here.

March 29 - May 6

Leech Gallery: 

Art of the Book

This exhibition highlights the growing collection of artist books in the Seeley G. Mudd Library's collection. View the entire collection on Artstor (campus log-in required).

As a genre, artists’ books are complex. They can be considered art works in their own right yet are usually found within a library’s special collections. They can take many forms, from handmade fantasy structures to the more traditional codex format, which creates potential difficulties cataloging, storing and preserving them. Artists’ books often examine the form of the book but add their own special twist: they explore the serial nature of the pages, often playing with or disrupting the sequence; they use different types of binding and printing, sometimes utilizing unusual materials; and they vary enormously in their physical form and intention. Some are a pun or a simple joke while others convey layers of very personal meaning from the individual artist.

 

Hoffmaster Gallery:

Unto Itself: New work by Zina Mussmann

Unto Itself refers to the ways micro and macroscopic scientific images awake a new type of existential anxiety. There is no doubt these images have helped humanity in many respects--avenues we had thought unimaginable in medicine and exploration have opened--but they have also caused us to question the essence of what it is to be human. Science has revealed that these systems are autopoetic, and exist within us on the tiniest of scales, and all around us in seemingly infinite space and time. These networks reproduce and maintain their own existences without regard for human activities or concerns. They seem to hold a type of conscious awareness and concern for their own growth and survival. Many compete for control of the resources we require, and some even exploit the human body to their own advantage. The drawings in this series purposefully reveal and conceal the structure of these systems; they are not faithful representations, rather they beg the question of what is still unseen. What is still hidden from us in the ether? And how will that continue to challenge human primacy?

 

Kohler Gallery:

Anna Campbell, Apparatus for a Dream Sequence

Anna Campbell, Chosen NameThis work’s title is an assemblage of diverse strategies and terms that LGBT and other marginalized people have used over generations to mark the labor of making and naming home. Scaffolding operates here as a material metaphor for social constructions broadly. Cordial glasses further call to mind shared spaces where people come together to socialize. Ribboned text from the laser-cut marquetry bar top pronounces “We Must Take Ecstasy,” citing the conclusion of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s nal book Cruising Utopia, in which the operative word is “Take” and the obligation of the communal “We” is to actively construct for ourselves a commitment to ecstatic experience as a tool to work towards a utopic future.

2018 Senior Art Show Postcard Image

May 25 - July 1

2018 Senior Art Show

An exhibition of works by Lawrence University’s 2018 senior studio art majors.

July 13 - August 19

Leech and Hoffmaster Galleries:

Wriston Summer Exhibition Series: The Artwork of Joseph Friebert

Joseph Friebert, Untitled drawingBorn in Buffalo, New York, Joseph Friebert grew up in Milwaukee in a Jewish working class family. A sense of loss and vulnerability after two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War permeate Friebert's artworks, but they also reflect the beauty and range of human experience. This exhibition will showcase works by Friebert in the Lawrence University permanent art collection that were donated by the Kohler Foundation, Inc. of Kohler, WI.

The Wriston Summer Exhibition Series is an annual summer exhibition in the Wriston Art Galleries intended to engage the Fox Valley community in a conversation about artworks and artists of the Midwest.