Stanley Museum of Art Magazine Spring 2022 by University of Iowa Stanley Musuem of Art

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STANLEY MUSEUM OFART

TEMPORARY OFFICES

OLD MUSEUM OF ART BUILDING 150 N. Riverside Drive OMA 100 Iowa City, IA 52242 By appointment 319-335-1727 stanley-museum@uiowa.edu

NEW STANLEY MUSEUM OF ART BUILDING

160 W. Burlington Street

TEMPORARY LOCATION

FIGGE ART MUSEUM 225 W. Second Street Davenport, IA 52801 563-326-7804 Free admission for University of Iowa students, faculty, and staff with UI ID cards and SMA members with membership cards Hours Tuesday–Saturday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Thursday: 10 a.m.–8 p.m. Sunday: 12–5 p.m.

THANK YOU

to our magazine sponsor John R. Menninger

La Guitare Noire [The Black Guitar], 1926 Oil on canvas 27 3/4 x 36 1/2 in. (70.49 x 92.71 cm) Gift of Owen and Leone Elliott, 1968.20 Juan Gris Spanish, 1887–1927 2

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SPRING 2022

COVER East façade, January 6, 2022. Photo by Justin Torner

DIRECTOR’S WELCOME

22 CALENDAR OF EVENTS

SHAPING THE STANLEY MUSEUM OF ART

COLLECTIVE VISION

ADVISORY BOARD SPOTLIGHT Dr. Jacki Thompson Rand

23 LEARNING & ENGAGEMENT Grant Wood Fellows smART Talks Stanley Creates Stanley Reads

WITH A NEW BUILDING, THE STANLEY RETURNS TO AN OLD MISSION

20 STAFF SPOTLIGHT Kathryn Reuter

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28 FROM THE UI CENTER FOR ADVANCEMENT See Yourself as a Stanley Member From the Director of Development 30 PARTING SHOT

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Dear friends, 2022 is finally here and construction of the UI Stanley Museum of Art is complete! Whether strolling through Gibson Square Park during the day or driving past the building in the evening when its lobby is glowing with light, people can’t help but smile to see this beautiful addition to campus. Over the next several months, as the university’s talented team of master gardeners finishes the landscaping around the building, the Stanley staff will bring the museum’s celebrated art collection home and prepare to welcome UI students, faculty, and staff as well as Iowa schoolchildren and members of the public to the new museum. When we open our doors to the public at 3:00 p.m. on August 26, the museum will feature an original mural by the Nigerian American artist Odili Odita in the lobby, an engaging and thought-provoking inaugural exhibition will be on view in our second-floor galleries, and the classrooms on the third floor will be ready to support close looking, critical thinking, and discussion. The Stanley’s inaugural exhibition will receive lots of attention in the coming months. The museum’s curators have brilliantly repositioned and reframed selections from our incredible collection of artworks from around the world in ways that will raise questions and engage new audiences. I know how excited we all are to greet old friends like Jackson Pollock’s Mural, Sam Gilliam’s Red April, Alma Thomas’s Spring Embraces Yellow, and the museum’s celebrated African art collection in this fresh context. But I want to talk a bit more about the Stanley’s third-floor classrooms, which include a seminar room, a visual classroom, and a visual laboratory. In these spaces, UI faculty and students, visiting school groups, and members of the public will be able to interact with artworks from the museum’s collection that are not on view in the galleries. Here, students will consider how objects are constructed, learn about materials and techniques, come to better understand the creative process, and plan to curate exhibitions of their own. These classrooms make the museum’s entire collection of more than 17,000 objects an active resource for teaching, learning, and research. We have traveled a long way from the summer of 2008 when the swollen Iowa River swept through the Old Museum of Art, compromising the building and threatening the Stanley’s irreplaceable collection. It has been a bumpy road at times. Who could have predicted fourteen years ago that we would complete a successful capital campaign for a state-of-the-art building during a global pandemic? We have arrived safely on high ground because of you and hundreds of other museum supporters around the world who love this museum and this campus, who believe in the power of art to transform lives, and who never lost faith in our educational mission. I am so honored to be the director who opens the doors of the new UI Stanley Museum of Art to welcome you in. Sincerely,

Photo by Elizabeth Wallace

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Lauren

Shaping Stanley Museum the

of Art

IF YOU LOOK FROM THE EAST,

it resembles a Tetris piece balanced on glass. If you look from the south, its walls seem perforated, like graters, until you realize their gaps are just deep-set bricks. If you enter the lobby, walk beyond the welcome desk, and wander into the lightwell, you’ll see the heart of the new museum rising overhead: a rectangular prism of outdoor space, framed by three stories of brick and glass and topped by a square of visible sky. I can picture the new Stanley Museum of Art clearly, not because I’ve ever been inside—at present, few people have, as the building won’t open officially until August—but because the faculty, staff, administrators, community members, and architects I’ve spoken to all have vivid visions of what it will look like, how it will function, and where they’ll fit in.

By Cassandra Jensen, a graduate of the UI Nonfiction Writing Program and an editor in New York. Photo by Levi Robb 6

“From the beginning,” says Allie Tokarski, “I’ve had the ‘Stanley Museum of Art Construction Camera’ bookmarked on my computer.” Just before the groundbreaking ceremony happened in June 2019, Tokarski had just graduated from the University of Iowa and was working as a gallery attendant at the museum’s interim space in the Iowa Memorial Union. The arts were a big deal to her, and not just as a day job. Though an art history major, she hadn’t even seen the museum’s collection until a survey course brought her to the IMU. “I had coworkers at my first job on campus who would make fun of me and my degree choice and how ‘useless’ they thought it was,” she recalls. So when she heard that the interim space employed students, Tokarski realized she had found her niche. S TANLEY M U S E U M O F A RT

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Without a dedicated building to house all the art, however, the term “niche” remained unfortunately apt. The visual classroom in the IMU had limited capacity and wasn’t easy to find on a map. As Tokarski tells it, “Almost daily in the four years I worked at that front desk, I would hear people walk past and remark, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that was here.’” In her new role as the Stanley’s campus engagement coordinator, Tokarski will help ensure UI students discover and enjoy the new museum. The Stanley used to have a bigger presence. A few years before Tokarski enrolled at Iowa, the Stanley—then the University of Iowa Museum of Art—like several other ill-starred buildings along the Iowa River, was damaged by flooding. After the staff managed to rescue the artwork, they were forced to find it a makeshift home. The Obermann Center for Advanced Studies’ director Teresa Mangum—who teaches gender, women’s, and sexuality studies—remembers the original building wistfully, as a place where she co-curated a show on humananimal relationships that drew from the extensive print collection. “If you had receptions there you could gaze across the lawn in view of the river, so the location was very special.” Special, but not perfect. According to University Architect Rod Lehnertz, who attended the UI in the 1980s and recollects seeing Jackson Pollock’s Mural on the gallery wall, “We did some studies after the flood that indicated that as many as half our students didn’t know we had a museum of art.” Part of the reason, Lehnertz reckons, was that despite its esteemed designer—Max Abramovitz, the architect behind New York City’s Lincoln Center and United Nations headquarters—the old museum “didn’t look like it welcomed you.” Lehnertz has no such criticism of the new building; in fact, he’s pleased as punch about it. The Stanley’s story is an underdog one: during the decade after the flood that marred its predecessor, the museum missed out on the federal government’s partnering funds, which went instead toward other campus buildings. For thirteen years, its artwork, including one of the world’s most prominent African art collections, lived in the IMU and at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, safe but largely unshowcased. To build a large enough replacement museum, donor funding became crucial—“and we’re very proud today,” says Lehnertz, “that we have a $50 million art museum project, and over half the funding for that project is by private donations.” Along with Russell Construction, the UI hired BNIM, the Des Moinesbased architectural firm led by the award-winning Rod Kruse, to design the museum. Kruse and his team have masterminded other structures on campus, such as the Seamans Center and the Psychological and Brain Sciences building. They’ve been conferring with the Stanley’s staff and the museum’s future users since 2014. “It was very action/ 8

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Photos by Justin Torner (above) and Elizabeth Wallace (left)

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Photos by Justin Torner

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reaction,” explains BNIM Associate Levi Robb, “where we would have conversations, get the vision of what they wanted, do some work, come back to talk with them, and then change that or react to it based off what they said.” One of the trickiest discussions involved the building site, which needed to be a prudent distance from potential flooding but also centrally located, so visitors from all walks of life could gather there. Eventually, the UI chose a former surface parking lot next to grassy Gibson Square, between the Main Library and the Campus Recreation & Wellness Center, and across from the Colleges of Education and Engineering. Bookworms, athletes, teachers, and builders would be able to walk there in minutes. Even I, a graduate student during the time construction began, remember passing by bulldozers daily and wondering whether I would ever get to see the finished product. I didn’t—or, at least, I haven’t yet. A couple months before I graduated, and midway through the building process, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. People weren’t leaving their houses, and the Stanley project seemed to have hit a temporary wall. “The world paused,” says BNIM Principal Carey Nagle. Job site visits slowed down, and had smaller groups, but were still held as needed. Until the architects could venture out again, dialogue with the construction partners became a challenge. Rod Kruse recalls the adjustment at first between BNIM, the contractors, and the university: “It was, ‘Well, if we’re going to go look at the building, do we all jump in a car together or should we all drive separately?” He, Nagle, and Robb agree, however, that in the end the project was a true feat of collaboration, one that fittingly enough resulted in a space where even more people would be able to collaborate. A “living room of the campus,” in Nagle’s words. Most living rooms, however, have a bit more natural light. One of the stipulations the team had to navigate, for the safety of the artwork, was that two-thirds of the sixty-thousand-square-foot building could not let in sunlight. “Some people, when they first saw it, were concerned about how large it was and how few windows it had,” says Kruse. That’s where that rectangular prism of light came in—the lightwell. It “stitches through the core of the building,” explains Nagle. “As you move up through the primary circulation stair, you’re circulating vertically adjacent to that lightwell up into the gallery level, and then again, beyond, up into the third level.” It was a way to pour sunshine into the center of the structure, to orient visitors, to let light “become a heartbeat of this building that starts to navigate you through this space intuitively.”

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Though access is still limited, passersby have already noticed a peculiarity of the museum’s façade. Around noon, the south-facing side turns from black into, well, something else. Rumor had it, for a time, that the UI’s newest edifice had a graffiti problem. Were the walls supposed to glow red—or was it silver? BNIM chalks this up to the manganese ironspot brick, which is coated and kiln-fired in a way that causes it to reflect light differently depending on the hour. Kruse is also quick to mention the wall’s texture: some bricks protruding, others recessed. “There are going to be days when we get a subtle snowfall that isn’t windblown, that’s going to land on those brick ledges,” he says. “It’s going to animate it in a way that’s just going to be quite incredible.” His colleague Levi Robb, an artist himself, enthuses similarly about the museum’s look, but makes the point that it’s modest compared to its contents. “I’ve always looked at it as a building that acts in the same way a jewelry box does,” he observes. “It’s about the artwork inside.” When the glass doors open in September and a new generation of art lovers lines up for admission, the Stanley Museum of Art will reveal quite a treasure trove. Allie Tokarski is excited to revisit her favorite works in the collection, The Torture of Mothers by Elizabeth Catlett and Philip Guston’s Edge. Rod Lehnertz wants to see Jackson Pollock’s Mural again—arguably one of the world’s most influential modern artworks—which has been magnificently conserved and will have just returned to Iowa from a world tour. Leslie Finer, director of Arts Share with the Office of Community Engagement, can’t wait to watch in-person performances there. “We also have an Arts Share/Grant Wood Art Colony summer camp,” she says. “The students participate in workshops in music, theatre, dance, creative writing, and the visual arts. And we’ve talked about having this camp be actually at the new space.” As I think of the many different hopes people have pinned on this place, it strikes me that once we have stepped inside the new Stanley Museum of Art for the first time, our mental images of Tetris pieces and glowing façades will be replaced by the day-to-day reality of the building: its echoes, its scents, the changing light, the views from its third-floor terraces. After a while, few will remember what the lot next to Gibson Square looked like without it. Then again, perhaps that’s as it should be. When I talked to Rod Lehnertz, who’s spent his life in Iowa City and seen many a campus structure come and go, he ended the conversation by quoting Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.”

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Photos by Justin Torner (clockwise, starting with large photo), and Elizabeth Wallace (bottom right image)

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Collective Visions WHEN THE NEW STANLEY MUSEUM OF ART OPENS THIS FALL it will launch a three-year inaugural period

[Dr. Jacki Thompson] Rand and [Katherine Simóne] Reynolds will be embedded as part of a ten-person cohort of artists, faculty, and community leaders whose practice, scholarship, or civic engagement are committed to creating generative environments for Indigenous and Black Midwesterners.

that brings new perspectives to bear on the museum’s permanent collection. To this end, last spring, the Stanley received a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art to organize two guest-curated exhibitions that will activate the museum’s collection of American art. These exhibitions also aim to create a more diverse and inclusive museum that concretely invests in communities that have been historically underrepresented in museum spaces. The first exhibition will be curated by Associate Vice Chancellor for Native Affairs at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Jacki Thompson Rand. Slated for fall 2023, Dr. Rand’s show will explore the Indigenous Midwest through S TANLEY M U S E U M O F A RT

Kiowa Sundance, from page 93 of the Julian Scott Ledger Ca. 1890 Charcoal, natural colors on paper 15 1/16 x 20 1/16 in. (38.26 x 50.96 cm) Gift of Gerald and Hope Solomons, 2010.43 Unrecorded Kiowa artist; Americas

responses to the Stanley’s collection of Native American ledger drawings. Katherine Simóne Reynolds, curator at The Luminary in St. Louis, Missouri, will curate the second exhibition. Reynolds’ show, opening in fall 2024, will engage the Stanley’s American art collection in new ways by presenting nuanced narratives about the Black Midwest. Dubbed Collective Vision—Curating in Cohorts, the two exhibits take an innovative approach to exhibition design by sharing curatorial authority at the outset, a novel process among whose pioneers the Stanley is proud to count itself. Rand and Reynolds will be embedded as part of a ten-person cohort of artists, faculty, and S P R IN G 2 0 2 2

community leaders whose practice, scholarship, or civic engagement are committed to creating generative environments for Indigenous and Black Midwesterners. The cohort will support the guest curators’ work, culminating in two intensive workshops. During the weeklong workshops, cohort members and guest speakers will engage the university and larger Iowa City communities in conversations about the ways in which the Stanley’s permanent collection of American art might amplify the voices of underrepresented communities in the Midwest. Additionally, the cohort’s participation from the beginning will allow for the simultaneous production of online exhibition catalogs that highlight new research based on the exhibitions, curricular modules 15

produced by and for faculty and students, as well as outreach. Walking Blindly, from For My People 1992 Lithograph 22 3/4 x 18 3/4 in. (57.79 x 47.63 cm) Museum purchase, 2006.74F Elizabeth Catlett American-Mexican, 1915–2012 © 2022 Mora-Catlett Family / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Native American ledger art, which earns its name from the ruled pages from account (ledger) books they are drawn on, is a Plains Indian style established in the last third of the nineteenth century. Ledger drawings were largely made by artists held in reservations or prison. Employing the tools and materials of a foreign culture, including crayons, pencils, and paper, these artists expanded on the Plains Indian artistic tradition of renderings of battles, heroic deeds, ceremonies, and everyday customs on buffalo hide robes and tipi covers. The Stanley’s collection of ledger drawings features thirty-two works, many of which will be central to Dr. Rand’s exhibition, which, as she notes, “will focus on the role that the arts have played in Indigenous peoples’ recovery, reproduction, and creation of knowledges that sustain our communities, preserve our history, and decolonize the environments in which we live, work, and create.” Katherine Reynolds, whose exhibition will open the following year, looks forward to harnessing works from the museum’s vast collection of American art to introduce audiences to similar narratives of recovery, reproduction, and creation as they pertain to the Black Midwest. She is especially eager to recenter the longoverlooked impacts made by women artists and artists of color. A Black Midwesterner herself, Reynolds is interested in “what it really means to be in something together.” She recognizes that language often fails us, and so she aims for the exhibition to help break down “the complexities, the complications, and the materiality” inherent in society’s present challenges. Derek Nnuro is curator of special projects at the Stanley Museum of Art

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ADVISORY BOARD SPOTLIGHT Dr. Jacki Thompson Rand

n spring 2021 Dr. Jacki Thompson Rand became, as she puts it, “a proud member of the Stanley Advisory Board.” At the time, Dr. Rand was a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Iowa; she’d worked for more than two decades as professor of history and American Indian Studies (AIS), mining the intersections of AIS, history, and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies through her teaching and scholarship. Having also been engaged in the museum world— including eleven years in various Photo courtesy of the roles at the Smithsonian Institute University of Illinois in Washington DC—Dr. Rand was Urbana-Champaign naturally drawn to the Stanley. So when Director Lauren Lessing shared her vision for the new Stanley Museum of Art with her, Dr. Rand was sold. “I was so impressed with [Lessing’s] intention to feature Native American and Black art objects from the collection as part of the inaugural exhibit schedule,” Dr. Rand says. “When she asked me to serve on the board, I gladly accepted.” Dr. Rand’s storied tenure at the University of Iowa came to an end last summer, but her association with the UI will continue through her involvement with the Stanley. In her new role as the inaugural Associate Vice Chancellor for Native Affairs and Senior Adviser to the Chancellor on Native Affairs Issues at the University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, Dr. Rand stewards the university’s engagements with Native tribal and Indigenous communities. And as a member of the Stanley’s Advisory Board, Dr. Rand is a pivotal voice in the museum’s efforts to implement standards and strategies appropriate for its outreach to Native American Nations. Not even a year into her S P R IN G 2 0 2 2

advisory role at the Stanley, Dr. Rand is making an extraordinary impact, particularly through her work guest-curating an exhibition on the Indigenous Midwest funded by a grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art. At the heart of Dr. Rand’s 2023 exhibition is the Stanley’s collection of Native American ledger drawings, objects in which she has distinctive expertise. “I suggested that we focus on the drawings primarily because I had used drawings for my dissertation on the Kiowa reservation period, which became a book,” she says. As a historian Dr. Rand is especially attracted to the ledger drawings because they represent a nexus between the visual arts and history. She emphasizes that the historical context is important to understanding the significance of the drawings: “After the Civil War until the end of the century, the United States focused on defeating the Plains tribes by military means, settler incursion, starvation, and ensuring the destruction of their economies. Natives resorted to drawings to preserve the memory of traditional attire and social practices, to make money from tourist sales, and to tell their side of the story.” Dr. Rand’s work on the exhibition will be supported by a ten-person cohort, a feature she highlights as important to her work as a curator: “I am excited to create an exhibit that is based in collaborative work with colleagues from the University of Iowa, Native peoples from Iowa, and Native artists.”

With a new building, the Stanley returns to an old mission

FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS,

the University of Iowa Museum of Art sat shaded by sycamores in a quiet enclave, protected from the bustle of the main campus by the gently flowing Iowa River directly to its east. This setting, good for contemplating the great works the museum contained, had nevertheless two big problems. One, the river does not always flow gently. The grassy plain has flooded twice in the span of just 25 years—thanks to climate change these are no longer 500-year floods—first in 1993 and then in 2008. The other issue was that not many University of Iowa students knew the museum was there, even though it was built for them. The museum’s new home, which opens this August, trades flowing water for flowing traffic along Burlington Street. But Lauren Lessing, the director of what’s now known as the University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art, thinks the spot

The visual classroom offers wood, pull-out easels, a drop-down screen, and an AV projector that retracts into the ceiling. A hearing loop ensures accessibility for all. Photos by Justin Torner

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is even more ideal, nestled as it is between the university library and the wellness center, across the street from the colleges of engineering and education, and a stone’s throw from the English and communication departments. “I couldn’t have designed a better location,” she said. “We want to be much more integrated in the fabric of the campus and partner wherever we can with whomever we can.”

While at Colby College in Maine, where she was the art museum’s Mirken Director of Academic and Public Programs before joining the Stanley, Lessing used paintings of textiles by Terry Winters to help a mathematics professor teach knot theory. Now at Iowa, she hopes to develop a certificate program in art conservation with help from the chemistry department. She says that artist renderings could enhance a course on animal evolution.

The mission of all museums is to educate. A curator might select paintings to show the early roots of modernism, for example. But as an academic art museum, the Stanley’s main purpose is to serve as a tool for instruction across all fields. Pieces from the collections are selected specifically for their educational use. The Stanley rotates its exhibitions like all museums do, but it also functions similarly to a library in that students and the public can access pieces even when not on display.

For more than a decade, the Stanley’s ability to be a teaching tool for university students has been blunted by the lack of a permanent home. During this interim period the museum’s collection has been split between the Iowa Memorial Union and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, while Mural embarked on an eight-year international tour.

Students who did venture across the river before the flood would have seen some hugely influential works. It was home to Jackson Pollock’s Mural, an eight-by-twenty-foot behemoth given by Peggy Guggenheim in 1951, and one of the largest African art collections in the country. Lessing sees the museum as the embodiment of a long tradition at Iowa of using the arts to shape a student’s educational experience. This philosophy, which became known as the “Iowa Idea,” was first developed in the 1920s by then-UI President Walter Jessup along with Carl Seashore, the dean of the graduate program. Thanks to Jessup and Seashore’s vision, Iowa was the first school to offer a Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art and eventually became the world-renowned hub for writers through the Writers’ Workshop and International Writing Program. “It was this idea that creating and making things could be part of the academic curriculum,” Lessing said. “You could blend studio art with other programs, like art history, or history, or English, and the process of seeing how things are made and directly participating in making it would help people learn in a different and more powerful way.” S P R IN G 2 0 2 2

One positive outcome, Lessing says, is that the Stanley’s staff have worked to make the collection available online for people anywhere to see. “Almost by necessity, we kind of reconceived ourselves as the art museum of the entire state,” she says. Lessing wants to retain that reach and is looking for other ways to expand the museum’s audience beyond those who ventured to that quiet enclave on the bank of the river. But as the museum broadened its audience, its core mission—to use artworks to help university students learn—was impacted. The new location on Burlington Street will naturally bring more traffic to the museum’s vicinity, and Lessing is thinking about how the museum can take advantage of its proximity to student engineers, writers, journalists, educators, and fitnessenthusiasts—or anyone else on campus who wanders by—to further enhance their education at Iowa. “I want students to leave with a toolkit for how to enrich their lives as adults in the world,” she says. “I want people who have a University of Iowa degree to have art be a part of their life.” Jim Snyder is a graduate of the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication and a free lance writer based in Washington, DC. 19

STAFF SPOTLIGHT Kathryn Reuter

athryn Reuter remembers the bracing sensation that struck her whenever she walked into a museum or a library. Growing up in Southern California, part of the abrupt change was atmospheric: stepping from a hot sidewalk into the cold blast of air conditioners protecting the art and artifacts inside. But as a child from a low-income, immigrant neighborhood in Orange County, Reuter didn’t always feel welcome in the severe silence and cold ambiance of these kinds of cultural institutions. “They felt like such special places that sometimes I didn’t feel were designed for me,” she says.

That feeling is one that Reuter keeps at the forefront of her mind as the new academic outreach coordinator for the University of Iowa Libraries, Special Collections and Archives, and Photo by Veronica Burns the Stanley Museum of Art—a position she started last fall. At both the Stanley and the UI Libraries, Reuter’s mission is to create a warmer environment—figuratively if not literally (the art itself still prefers cooler temperatures and low humidity). “It’s so important to make art accessible, and to make students of all types know that the museum is for you,” she said. “It’s important to be enthusiastic, which is kind of my teaching pedagogy, to explicitly say to students, ‘You are welcome here.’” Reuter’s job is to use the collections at the Stanley and the library—which include an extensive selection of “concrete poetry”—to inform and enhance a class at the university.

During her interview for the position, Reuter talked about a Kara Walker print in the Stanley collection called Cotton and its relationship to graphic art from the Iowa City Women’s Liberation Front newspaper from 1970. Walker’s print depicts a black figure suspended above a bed of cotton. The newspaper, which Reuter found in the library, shows a profile of Sojourner Truth over an outsized arm and fist. “The artists both used simple outlines and shading to represent Black women—in the Walker print this reduces the identity and agency of the figure, whereas the WLF art makes Sojourner Truth into an icon, and the emphasis on her fist expresses her power and autonomy,” she wrote in an email. She sees the objects as helpful for teaching students about how Black bodies have been portrayed in history, or the need for diversity in feminist movements, or simply as a visual aid to enrich the dramatic story of Sojourner Truth’s life. “There are plenty of thematic connections across the collections, and I’m excited to see what students respond to,” she said. The great thing about art, Reuter believes, is that it can help students, or anyone for that matter, escape their own self-centeredness and begin to see other perspectives about the world. “Your experience is not universal. People have different backgrounds, and it affects our opportunities in life today.” Reuter’s relationship with art truly began outside of museums, with a “Meet the Masters” program that her mom, who ran the local PTA, helped to bring to the elementary school every year. Its goal was to introduce young minds to famous artists, and then to task the students with trying to replicate what they had seen. She remembers being shown Large Decoration with Masks, a 1953 Matisse collage that looks like a quilt, except perhaps for the two sketched faces on either side. The vibrant colors, the simplicity and “down-toearth” quality of the cut-outs appealed to Reuter.

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Cotton 1997 Intaglio 18 1/4 x 14 3/4 in. (46.36 x 37.47 cm) Edwin B. Green American Art Acquisition Endowment, 1997.142A Kara Elizabeth Walker American, 1969– © Kara Walker Image from Curt Teich Postcard Archives Digital Collection (Newberry Library)

She began school wanting to be a librarian, spending three years at Orange Coast Community College, paying her own way, before finishing her bachelor’s in history at California State University– Long Beach. She then traded warm, sunny days for midwestern cold at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, where she graduated last spring with a master’s in library information science and history. Reuter credits paid internships for her professional development and for becoming familiarized with the art world. She interned at the Getty Research Institute, which is associated with the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and focuses on promoting understanding of visual arts, and at the Thomas J. Watson Library, which is connected to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. These internships also connected her with a group of like-minded people who were, like Reuter, getting their start in the arts. Determined to expand access to the places where they now found themselves working—ending the exclusivity of art and museums has been a motivating force for Reuter to work in the field—this cohort helped one another navigate the privileged and exclusionary spaces of cultural institutions. S P R IN G 2 0 2 2

She stays in touch with her cohort using what some might consider rare these days: snail mail. As a child of southern Californian car culture, Reuter says she loves to take road trips, which sparked her fascination with postcards, particularly from the Curt Teich company. Making and sending postcards helped maintain her sense of community while she moved around for school and work. “It’s a lowbrow, low stakes way to send your art to your friends,” she said. As outreach coordinator, Reuter wants to develop a professional network in Iowa City with campus groups that represent subsets of the broader Iowa City community, like the Pride Alliance Center or the Afro House. Reuter, who is biracial, is interested in learning what those cultural institutions have been doing on campus, and how they might see the Stanley as a space where they can continue their work. But part of the role is just being a friendly face when a student of any stripe walks into the Stanley or the special collections at the library. On Iowa’s sweltering summer days, visitors will still enjoy the cool air. But Reuter wants everyone to also feel like the spaces are designed with them in mind—without having to brace themselves for a cold ambiance, they’ll be able to walk into a more equitable and accessible museum.

STAN L E Y M US EU M .U IOWA.EDU

STANLEYMUSEUMOFART EXHIBITIONS

As we prepare to open our new home in August 2022, our current exhibition will remain on extended view.

ONGOING

Pollinators, Figge Art Museum

PUBLIC PROGRAMS

*Registration required, see links below

FEBRUARY 18

11:00 a.m.

Zoom smART Talk, “Picturing The Tale of Genji” with Kendra Strand

FEBRUARY 19

2:00 p.m.

Zoom* Stanley Creates, “Possibilities with Pencil” with Megan Dehne Register: https://tinyurl.com/StanleyCreatesFeb2022

FEBRUARY 21

7:00 p.m.

Zoom* Stanley Reads Book Club, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Presented in partnership with Prairie Lights Books Register: https://tinyurl.com/1000acres

FEBRUARY 28

7:00 p.m.

Zoom Grant Wood Fellow Talk, Elena Smyrniotis

MARCH 21

7:00 p.m.

Zoom* Stanley Reads Book Club, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Presented in partnership with Prairie Lights Books Register: https://tinyurl.com/1000acres

MARCH 24

7:00 p.m.

Zoom Grant Wood Fellow Talk, Johnathan Payne

MARCH 26

2:00 p.m.

Zoom* Stanley Creates, Cardboard Loom Weaving with Angela Barr Register: https://tinyurl.com/StanleyCreatesMarch2022

MARCH 28

7:00 p.m.

Zoom Grant Wood Fellow Talk, Josh Henderson

APRIL 15

11:00 a.m.

Zoom smART Talk, “The Art of Process—Exploration, Expression, and Meaning Making through Creative Acts” with Angela Barr

APRIL 25

7:00 p.m.

Zoom* Stanley Reads Book Club, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley Presented in partnership with Prairie Lights Books Register: https://tinyurl.com/1000acres

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ELENA SMYRNIOTIS FEBRUARY 28, 2022 GRANT WOOD FELLOW IN PRINTMAKING

LEARNING & ENGAGEMENT

Anxious Landscapes

Anxious Landscapes revisits human constructs such as maps, topography, space, and architecture to highlight tensions between the realities and fictions of fabricated landscapes. Smyrniotis’s work seeks to demonstrate art’s ability to provoke emotional responses to climate change by focusing on humans’ relationship with their environments. Smyrniotis’s installation Dispossessed represents a surreal seascape of icebergs floating in the middle of a dark ocean. The icebergs are formed from layers of compressed snow that fell thousands of years ago. Each layer contains a mystery that will vanish as the ice melts. Dispossessed creates an atmosphere of melancholic nostalgia for the disappearance of this primeval ice.

Smyrniotis’s work seeks to demonstrate art’s ability to provoke emotional responses to climate change by focusing on humans’ relationship with their environments.

Elena Smyrniotis is a multimedia installation artist with a background in architecture. She earned an MFA in printmaking from the University of Notre Dame, an MA in printmaking and drawing from the University of Saint Francis, and an MA in Architecture and Engineering from State Petroleum University (Ufa, Russia). Smyrniotis is interested in cross-disciplinary, collaborative, socially engaged practices that seek to address environmental justice and the climate crisis. Her large-scale installations investigate the relationship between architecture, abstracted topography, space, sound, and light to underscore environmental anxieties in constructed landscapes. As the 2020–2021 Grant Wood Fellow in Printmaking, Smyrniotis developed The Bee Project, a sustainable art installation created in collaboration with the UI Office of Community Engagement, the Grant Wood Art Colony, Indian Creek Nature Center, and Czech Village/New Bohemian District in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Her recent exhibitions include a solo show at PINEA-LINEA DA COSTA (Rota, Spain), Artlink Contemporary Gallery (Fort Wayne, IN), and the Snite Museum of Art (Notre Dame, IN), where she received the Walter Beardsley Award in 2017. She is a regular participant in the International Art & Design Exhibition at Selcuk University (Konya, Turkey), and in 2018 was a guest of honor. Smyrniotis has held fellowships and teaching positions in cultural institutions around the world. Most recently she was a fellow at the Rome Global Gateway in cooperation with the Capitoline Museums, the Hertziana Library, and Geographical Society of Italy in Rome; led a printmaking workshop at the Gems Metropole School in Dubai, UAE; and participated in a painting workshop at the Painting School of Montmiral in Montmiral, France. She has taught printmaking and drawing courses at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Saint Francis, and was the 2019 Visiting Artist at the School of Creative Arts at the University of Saint Francis. She is also a founder and director of the Art and Architectural School for Children in Ufa, Russia. As a member of a global community Smyrniotis embraces her international involvements and her commitment to education through culture.

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JOHNATHAN PAYNE MARCH 24, 2022 GRANT WOOD FELLOW IN PAINTING AND DRAWING

A Growing Payne: Self-Meditations, Chronologies, Surrendering. Who Am I Now? Taking an alternative approach to the traditional artist lecture, Payne will share personal and professional vignettes to construct a more emotionally complex narrative of an artist’s life. These stories will be supplemented with original artworks, photographs, sketchbook ephemera, and research material. How does an artist negotiate their own intersectionality alongside their studio work? Or a teaching practice? Or against the backdrop of a patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist national history/culture? Or the larger uncertainties of an increasingly entropic world? Payne will meditate on these questions and many more in this lecture.

How does an artist negotiate their own intersectionality alongside their studio work? Or a teaching practice? Or against the backdrop of a patriarchal, capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist national history/culture?

Johnathan Payne (he/him/they/them) obtained a BA in art from Rhodes College in 2012 and received his MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2018. Recent exhibitions of Payne’s work include The Bridge to Uncertainty at Columbus College of Art and Design’s Beeler Gallery Project Space (2021; Columbus, OH), Threads at Foxy Production (2021; New York, NY), and Miss Lizzie’s Lattice at Deli Gallery (2020; Brooklyn, NY). He is featured in New American Paintings (MFA Annual #135), and has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Observer, and Vice. Payne was a Spring 2020 Artist-in-Residence at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, TN, and is currently the 2020–2022 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting and Drawing at the University of Iowa. Payne was the inaugural recipient of the Aminah Residency in summer 2021, named after the late Columbus-based artist and MacArthur Grant recipient Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson.

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JOSH HENDERSON MARCH 28, 2022 GRANT WOOD FELLOW IN INTERDISCIPLINARY PERFORMANCE

LEARNING & ENGAGEMENT

A session exploring Contemporary Regionalism in Musical Contexts Henderson will discuss the rejection of the abstract in the sonic world along with a musical demonstration. Josh Henderson is enjoying a multi-faceted career as a cross-genre violinist, violist, and composer. As a classical soloist, he has performed with the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, China Performing Arts Broadcasting Troupe, Starling Chamber Orchestra, Accent X Festival Orchestra, Colour of Music Festival Orchestra, Bard Conductors Festival Orchestra, Colour of Music Virtuosi, Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra, Harlem Chamber Players, Contemporaneous, New-Gen Orchestra of Curacao, Ensemble Du Monde, and the CCM Showcase Orchestra, and in venues such as Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, and The Forbidden City Concert Hall of Beijing.

Carving out a reputation for his dynamic performances in jazz, rock, hip-hop, and country fiddle, Josh is a founding member of Warp Trio.

Carving out a reputation for his dynamic performances in jazz, rock, hiphop, and country fiddle, Josh is a founding member of Warp Trio, and has led the group on hundreds of concerts and university residencies throughout the United States, as well as on international tours throughout Africa, the United Kingdom, Spain, Switzerland, Holland, Germany, and the Caribbean. He has served as music director for the Emmy award-winning Damien Escobar (of Nuttin’ But Stringz), and in this role has performed at a number of events across the globe including a performance at the 2013 Hip-Hop Inaugural Ball hosted by Russell Simmons and honoring Barack Obama. Other bandleader positions include serving as music director to pop singer Zahra Universe on her South Korea tour, and to the spoken word artist LikWUid Stylez. A soughtafter freelance musician in New York City, Josh has performed, recorded, and collaborated with popular artists such as Chris Brown, Bilal, Solange, The Sugar Hill Gang, David Byrne, Sufjan Stevens, Courtney Love, Anne Hathaway, Amanda Palmer, Mirah, Amine, Angel Olsen, Jherek Bischoff, and members of bands such as Beirut, Deerhoof, Blue Oyster Cult, and The Eagles. Josh studied at the Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music with professor Kurt Sassmannshaus, and at New York University with professor Naoko Tanaka.

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Paper Magic (detail), 1959 Collage and oil on canvas 38 1/8 x 42 3/16 in. (96.84 x 107.16 cm) Lil Picard Collection, 2012.212 Lil Picard American, born German, 1899–1994

smART Talks

Picturing The Tale of Genji FEBRUARY 18, 11:00 a.m.

Kendra Strand will discuss a selection of pictorial representations of The Tale of Genji (Murasaki Shikibu, ca. 1008), a masterpiece of premodern Japanese literature and, according to some, the world’s first novel. Strand will begin by introducing her research on the Illustrated Scrolls of The Tale of Genji, an exploration of the relationships between text, image, allusion, and memory in the earliest extant manuscript of The Tale of Genji from the twelfth century. She will then discuss her work on creating a model of one chapter from the Illustrated Scrolls using authentic materials in collaboration with faculty in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and UI Center for the Book. This talk is based in part on Strand’s recently published chapter in the Norton Critical Edition of The Tale of Genji (Dennis Washburn, trans. and ed., 2021). Kendra Strand is Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian and Slavic Languages and Cultures. She specializes in premodern Japanese literature and visual culture, with expertise in travel writing, poetry, calligraphy, and picture scrolls (emaki). Her research is founded in examining the historical contexts in which works of literature and art were created. She is currently working on a manuscript that explores three fourteenth-century travel diaries and the landscapes they describe, entitled An Unfamiliar Place: Poetry, Power, and the Travel Diary in Medieval Japan.

The Tama River [Tamagawa no kei], from the series People of Edo Dressed as Genji in Ancient Purple (the Purple of Edo) [Edo-murasaki yatsushi Genji] (center panel), ca. 1867 Color woodcut tryptich 13 3/4 x 27 1/2 in. (34.93 x 69.85 cm) Gift of Ruth and G. Robert Carlsen, 1986.64E Yoshitoshi Tsukioka Japanese, 1839–1892 26

The Art of Process: Exploration, Expression, and MeaningMaking through Creative Acts APRIL 15, 11:00 a.m.

In this smART talk, we’ll look at the history of process art from its roots in various spiritual practices, philosophy, and psychological research that inspired modern artists, to abstract expressionism, performance, and land-based art. We’ll explore artists from the Stanley’s collection and beyond whose process-driven work transcends the boundaries of the body, time, setting, and traditional mediums and forms to create spaces for witnessing pure human expression. Finally, we will discuss the educational potential of open-ended creative exploration, and the benefits of integrating a philosophy of process into our daily lives. Angela Barr is a master’s candidate in Art Education and current Graduate Assistant in Learning and Engagement at the Stanley. Angela is an artist, educator, lover of nature, and advocate for harnessing the power of art education to help create a more compassionate, just, collaborative, and open-minded world. S TANLEY M U S E U M O F A RT

LEARNING & ENGAGEMENT

Stanley Creates Stanley Creates is a free, interactive program for children and teens to learn art-making techniques using everyday materials. Taking inspiration from the museum’s collection, participants play with materials to create unique projects at home. Video instructions will be available after the event for those who are unable to attend but would like to make the projects.

Possibilities with Pencil

Cardboard Loom Weaving

While a pencil is one of the simplest art tools artists use, it is filled with creative possibilities of expression, meaning, and fun! In this lesson, we will explore and learn from the drawings of Margot Kren, Augustus Wall Callcott, and Caroline Durieux. Then we will experiment with different pencil techniques that can be used in unique and inspired drawings of your own. All you need is a pencil, eraser, and some paper. Come draw with us! Megan L. Dehner, a master’s candidate in art education at the College of Education, demonstrates the process and provides feedback to participants.

The art of weaving has a rich history across cultures, as you can see from the many beautiful woven artworks in the Stanley’s collection. In this Stanley Creates program, you will learn how to use household materials to create a simple loom and how to create small multicolor woven pieces of your own, which can be transformed into wall hangings, coasters, bookmarks, or other creations of your choosing. Angela Barr, a master’s candidate in art education at the College of Education, is your host and guide.

FEBRUARY 19, 2:00 p.m.

MARCH 26, 2:00 p.m.

Stanley Reads A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley

FEBRUARY 21, 7:00 p.m. MARCH 21, 7:00 p.m. APRIL 25, 7:00 p.m.

This spring, as part of the UI 175th anniversary celebrations, the Stanley Reads book club will be reading A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. You can register for Stanley Reads at: tinyurl.com/1000acres Programs will take place over Zoom with closed-captioning available. To encourage a lively discussion and connection, video and audio will be enabled for all participants. Please contact Josh Siefken (joshua-siefken@uiowa.edu) with any other accommodation needs or questions. We are excited to partner with Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City for the series. The Stanley’s virtual programs in 2021–2022 are supported in part by Yvonne McCabe. S P R IN G 2 0 2 2

Become a Part of our Inaugural Year! At the new UI Stanley Museum of Art, you can be part of the art by investing in one of our many extraordinary exhibitions, engagement programs, or school experiences. Our new annual giving program offers special recognition opportunities for generous contributors who make gifts of $500 or more to the Friends of the Museum of Art Fund. Should you choose to donate at this level, we’ll work with you to identify exhibitions and programming that align with your passions—and to acknowledge your support of those experiences accordingly.

We will announce additional details later in the spring; however, here is a preview of some of our 2022–2023 recognition opportunities: • • • • •

Exhibitions of new artists and works, alongside familiar favorites K–12 school tours that excite curiosity and encourage critical thinking Community events that encourage connections and present the galleries in fresh ways UI student experiences that spark conversations and enrich scholarship Family programs for art lovers of all ages

Gifts made by June 30, 2022, will support our inaugural year. For more information about giving and recognition opportunities, please contact Susan Horan at 319-467-3407 or at susan.horan@foriowa.org.

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FROM THE UI CENTER FOR ADVANCEMENT The first time I worked in a museum, I staffed the front desk, and it gave me the opportunity to learn about visitor experiences in a way I hadn’t while earning my art history degree. I discovered that some people enjoyed engaging with a docent-guided tour, while others preferred a moment of solitude with a few meaningful paintings. When schoolchildren visited on field trips, teachers used art objects to make new connections across a wide range of subjects, and students found inspiration in art and artists who gave voice to their lived experiences. I saw that interactive programming (and food!) drew in new folks from the community. Most importantly, I learned that for a museum to have its greatest impact on visitors, it must be a place where everyone can see themselves.

We’ve thoughtfully considered how to make art accessible— both physically and intellectually—to everyone who visits when we open our doors again next fall.

All of us at the Stanley understand this, too. We’ve thoughtfully considered how to make art accessible—both physically and intellectually—to everyone who visits when we open our doors again next fall. Beginning with our inaugural exhibition, we are re-envisioning the scholarship and installation of familiar works so they will better represent underserved artists and audiences. We’ve created a new docent program and are training those volunteers to guide tours tailored to schoolchildren visiting a museum for the first time. We also are considering how to introduce new audiences to the Stanley through approachable programming such as yoga classes, family nights, and tailgate events. These innovative exhibitions and engaging learning opportunities reflect our mission of being an inclusive and welcoming resource for discovery and creativity—and private philanthropy makes that possible. On the opposite page, we’ve included information about how we might recognize your support when we open in August. Please contact me, at 319-467-3407 or at susan.horan@foriowa.org, if you’d like to donate to our school programs, exhibitions, and more! Gifts made by June 30, 2022, will support the work we do in our inaugural year. We want everyone to see themselves at the Stanley. I hope you will make a gift to help make this possible. Thank you!

Susan Horan, Director of Development The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art The University of Iowa Center for Advancement susan.horan@foriowa.org 319-467-3407 or 800-648-6973 S P R IN G 2 0 2 2

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PARTING SHOT The education suite on the museum’s third floor houses three classroom spaces. •

A visual classroom where works of art can be quickly brought out from storage and rotated to serve visiting classes

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A visual laboratory with built in casework where works of art can be installed for longer periods of time to support class assignments and research projects

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A seminar room for focused conversations

Photo by Justin Torner

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University of Iowa

Stanley Museum of Art 160 W. BURLINGTON STREET IOWA CITY, IA 52242 319-335-1727 stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu

See yourself at The Stanley. Become a member for free!

Opening August 2022 Join online today: stanleymuseum.uiowa.edu

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