UIMA Magazine Fall 2017 by University of Iowa Stanley Musuem of Art

UIMA University of Iowa Museum of Art

Fall 20171

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Fall 2017 Calendar of Events

Lectures

From the Interim Director

Ghana and African Art History

Fall Exhibition

Polk Smith Conservation

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Artist Residency

Educational Outreach

Legacies for Iowa

New Staff

UIMA@IMU Visual Classroom

Museum Party

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The J. Richard Simon Collection

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From the University of Iowa Foundation

Nigeria; Yoruba artist Ere ibeji (twin figure) 20th century Wood, beads, fiber H x W x D: 12 x 8 1/2 x 3 1/4 in. The J. Richard Simon Collection of Yoruba Twin Figures

Editor: Elizabeth M. Wallace Copy editor: Gail P. Zlatnik Design: Pederson Paetz Copyright ÂŠ 2017

temporary offices OLD MUSEUM OF ART BUILDING 150 North Riverside Drive / OMA 100 Iowa City, IA 52242 319-335-1727

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temporary locations IOWA MEMORIAL UNION UIMA@IMU VISUAL CLASSROOM BLACK BOX THEATER 125 North Madison Street Iowa City, IA 52242 319-335-1742 Free admission Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, 12–5 p.m.

FIGGE ART MUSEUM 225 West Second Street Davenport, IA 52801 563-326-7804 Free admission for University of Iowa students, faculty, and staff with UI ID cards and UIMA members with membership cards. Hours: Tuesday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Thursday, 10 a.m.–9 p.m. Sunday, 12–5 p.m.

a e m o c e B ! y a d o t r e memb STAND BY YOUR MUSEUM!

JOIN ONLINE

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FALL 2017 CALENDAR

E X H I B IT I O N S July 1, 2017– January 7, 2018

Philip Guston and Iowa

UIMA@IMU, third floor Iowa Memorial Union

August 26– November 26, 2017

What’s Your Sign? Retail Architecture and the History of Signage

Figge Art Museum Davenport, IA

September 16– December 10, 2017

Art and the Afterlife: Fantasy Coffins by Eric Adjetey Anang

Black Box Theater, third floor, Iowa Memorial Union

P U B LI C P R O G R A M S August 31 7:30–8:30 p.m.

EXHIBITION LECTURE Victoria Rovine, “Fashion as Fine Art: African Expressions”

116 Art Building West 141 N. Riverside Dr., Iowa City

September 1 5:00–7:00 p.m.

FIRST FRIDAY

FilmScene 118 E. College St., Iowa City

September 21 7:30–8:30 p.m.

2017 JEANNE AND RICHARD LEVITT LECTURESHIP: AMERICAN CRAFTS IN CONTEXT Eric Adjetey Anang, “Art and the Afterlife: Fantasy Coffins”

240 Art Building West 141 N. Riverside Dr., Iowa City

October 6

UI HOMECOMING PARADE – no First Friday

Iowa City

October 10 7:30–8:30 p.m.

EXHIBITION LECTURE Silvia Forni, “From the Street to the White Cube: The Multiple Trajectories of Ga Fantasy Coffins”

116 Art Building West 141 N. Riverside Dr., Iowa City

October 21 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.

SYMPOSIUM Philip Guston and the University of Iowa

Art Building West 141 N. Riverside Dr., Iowa City

October 26 7:30–8:30 p.m.

EXHIBITION LECTURE Matthew O’Neal, “Conservation Is Beautiful: The Art of Saving Insects”

116 Art Building West 141 N. Riverside Dr., Iowa City

November 3 5:00–7:00 p.m.

FIRST FRIDAY

FilmScene 118 E. College St., Iowa City

November 16 7:00–8:00 p.m.

CURATOR TALK Vero Rose Smith, “What’s Your Sign? Retail Architecture and the History of Signage”

Figge Art Museum Davenport, IA

December 1 5:00–7:00 p.m.

FIRST FRIDAY

FilmScene 118 E. College St., Iowa City

January 5, 2018 5:00–7:00 p.m.

FIRST FRIDAY

FilmScene 118 E. College St., Iowa City

DIRECTOR'S CIRCLE RECEPTION

The University Club 1360 Melrose Ave., Iowa City

FOR MEMBERS October 12

S AV E T H E DAT E May 5, 2018

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MUSEUM PARTY

Hancher Auditorium 141 E. Park Rd., Iowa City

FROM THE INTERIM DIRECTOR

Athens of the Midwest In June the university submitted to a Regents’ committee the detailed architectural schematics for a rejuvenated Museum of Art. This submission and follow-on presentation were welcome markers in the planning of an inspiring new home for the UIMA collection. Final review of the architectural proposal is expected at the Regents’ August meeting. Once a formal stamp of approval is given, a comprehensive fund-raising initiative will commence. Situated between the university library and the recreation center, the new venue will provide students and the public ready access to one of America's premier university art collections. As the tour of Jackson Pollock’s Mural through Europe has underscored, this eight-by-twenty-foot masterpiece is taking on legendary proportions. Given that it will be coupled with UIMA’s extraordinary African collection, its Asian and Pre-Columbian sculpture and ceramics, and its extensive survey of twentiethcentury European and American paintings, prints, and ceramics, the likelihood is high that the new museum will come to be considered a cultural highlight of the heartland. One of the distinctions between university and traditional community museums is that academic institutions have the capacity to facilitate crossdisciplinary approaches to art appreciation. Accordingly, the new UIMA will be as much “about” as “of” art. For instance, in the wake of a century that encompassed two world wars and the diabolical refinement of “isms” of hate, we intend to address visually how the lower instincts of humankind can lead to external aggression and internal oppression,

even genocide. Hence, in a gallery that might come to be considered a fine arts-centered Holocaust memorial, Mauricio Lasansky’s thirty-three-piece Nazi Drawings will be featured. Designed by Rod Kruse and his architectural associates at BNIM, this uplifting new venue will be a fitting complement to the recently completed performing arts, music, and studio arts buildings. Indeed, when finished, the museum will anchor the university’s arts community and share avenues of architectural creativity with nearby structures designed by world-renowned architects like Cesar Pelli, Steven Holl, Frank Gehry, Charles Gwathmey, and Norman Foster. As home to a broad spectrum of the creative arts, Iowa City’s reputation as an “Athens of the Midwest” will be embellished by the new museum. Likewise, the university’s role as a leader in the liberal arts will be magnified by the cultural values it will showcase and reflect. Respectfully,

James Leach Interim Director

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Art & the Afterlife FANTASY COFFINS BY ERIC ADJETEY ANANG SEPTEMBER 16–DECEMBER 10, 2017 Black Box Theater • Iowa Memorial Union

or the first time in over twenty years, UIMA will present a solo exhibition of work by a contemporary African artist. Through an installation of six representational “fantasy coffins” by the Ghanaian artist Eric Adjetey Anang, as well as video-recorded interviews with Anang and other coffin-makers from Ghana, and gallery labels providing further context, Art & the Afterlife explores one of the most celebrated (and debated) forms of African art today. As the exhibition demonstrates, the “afterlife” of Anang’s work refers at once to a funerary tradition among Ga peoples of southern Ghana and to an artistic practice that reconfigures the scope and meaning of mortality and cultural identity.

As in many places in the world, there is in Ghana a widespread reverence for and interaction with ancestral spirits. Individual and communal wellbeing is directly dependent upon a successful relationship with these ancestors, who form an integral part of the family and whose blessings ensure stability and prosperity. Because death among Ga and others in Ghana marks a transition, rather than an end, the journey to the afterlife requires offerings that will accompany the deceased in the otherworld. From that world, ancestral spirits oversee important events, such as initiation, inauguration, and homowo—an annual

Photos by Steve Erickson

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FALL EXHIBITION

festival for Ga gods and the dead. Offerings such as music, dance, libation, and sacrifice commonly animate such exchanges with the spirit world. Since the mid-twentieth century, abebuam adekai (proverb containers), or “fantasy coffins,” have become the most important art forms and funerary offerings in southern Ghana. Fantasy coffin patrons throughout the country use the objects differently. Funerary processions among non-Christians in Ghana, Christine Mullen Kreamer notes, involve pallbearers who carry the coffin through the town as a public farewell and a way to rule out suspicions about the cause of death before burial. The scholar Regula Tschumi states that, as a mortuary custom, gifts received by the deceased during kpojiemo (progressive stages of initiation into society) are returned to the donors. Priests and priestesses of Ga religious associations must relinquish regalia destined for a successor. Fantasy coffins for these prominent members of society commonly refer to the okadi, a protective family symbol associated with the ancestors. Christians use a hearse, truck, or taxi to transport fantasy coffins to the grave, and design motifs are primarily secular in meaning and significance. Instead of referring to okadi, for example, they may refer to the status and profession of the deceased.

The siblings or children of the deceased hold authority on which coffin design to use for a funeral. Eagles, leopards, and elephants, for example, commonly belong to high-ranking individuals, while a variety of fish and food crops are common for anglers and farmers. Personal character and temperament of the deceased may also inform the coffin motif. “A red-hot chili pepper,” notes Anang, “is something you would give not only to a pepper farmer, but to someone who was punctual, assertive, and hard-working.” The scholars Roberta Bonetti and Regula Tschumi maintain that there is no single inventor of fantasy coffins. However, many recognize Anang’s late grandfather Kane Kwei (c. 1925–1992), as a leader of the artistic tradition that began in the mid-twentieth century at Teshie, a coastal city of Ghana. Prior to European missionary and colonial interventions in the nineteenth century, Ga peoples wrapped the dead in mats and buried them beneath the family house, where the living could maintain regular contact with ancestral spirits, while by the 1930s, Ga peoples used baskets to wrap corpses. Bonetti notes that British colonial law enforced the use of cemeteries at Ghana in 1888, although intramural burials remain common among Ga peoples today. Fantasy coffins also stem from the Ghanaian carpentry workshops that produce representational palanquins designed to convey high-ranking individuals in public processions. Anang states that Kwei’s first coffin,

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which he made in the shape of an airplane for his grandmother, was inspired by a chief’s palanquin in the shape of a cocoa pod. Upon his own death, Kwei had approximately twenty-five models in his design portfolio. Anang has more than doubled this number for himself, with the help of eight apprentices working in Teshie and Kumasi. When Vivian Burns organized the first art exhibition of Ga fantasy coffins at her Los Angeles gallery in 1974, she focused on Kwei’s work in a biographical and Ghanaian funerary context. Art & the Afterlife also explores the work of a Ga artist, but it is important to recognize that the function of Ga fantasy coffins today is no longer limited to Ghanaian funerals. For funerals in the United States and the Netherlands, for example, patrons have commissioned Anang to make coffins in the forms of a beer bottle, lobster, seahorse, wrench, and piano. Since the curator Jean-Hubert Martin included fantasy coffins by Kwei and Paa Joe in Magiciens de la Terre, an exhibition held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1989, scholars have increasingly explored the afterlife of objects in the art world. In Nii Quarcoopome’s essay “Majestic Rides into the Afterlife,” he argues that this accelerated shift toward secular meaning, however, began through Christian patronage in Ghana.

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Numerous exhibitions since have examined the role of fantasy coffins as art. Indeed, Anang made his coffins in Art & the Afterlife for this museum exhibition, rather than for a funeral, and it would be disingenuous to suggest that human mortality in Ghana is the only context of value or significance for the objects. Among the six fantasy coffins in this exhibition, two types have never been made before. The Mami Wata coffin, in fact, arose from conversations with Anang about a motif to engage school audiences for museum outreach programs. While the red-hot chili pepper reminds him of his favorite dishes in Ghana, the corncob refers equally to his second home in the American Midwest. Anang’s sensitivity to ecological change in developing areas of Ghana informs the honeybee coffin, and the airplane is a proud reference to the birth of his family tradition. Anang’s adaptation of the original motif here, however, signals the rebirth of the object as art, and the way in which the inevitability of death has become his own fantastic mother of invention. This exhibition is curated by Cory Gundlach, UIMA curator of African and non-Western art. Support for Art & the Afterlife: Fantasy Coffins by Eric Adjetey Anang is provided by the Members Special Exhibition Fund.

FALL EXHIBITION

Bonetti, Roberta. “Absconding in Plain Sight: The Ghanaian Receptacles of Proverbs Revisited.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 55–56 (spring–autumn, 2009): 103–118. _____. “The Media-action of abebu adekai (Ghana’s Sculptural Coffins) in the World Market and Design. The Case of Eric Adjetey Anang.” Cahiers d’Études africaines 56, no. 223 (2016): 479–502. Quarcoopome, Nii. “Majestic Rides into the Afterlife.” In Ghana: Hier et Aujourdhui/ Yesterday and Today, edited by Christiane Falgayrettes-Leveau and Christiane Owusu-Sarpong, 261–283. Paris: Musée Dapper, 2003. Tschumi, Regula. Concealed Art: History, Transformation and Use of the Figurative Palanquins and Coffins of the Ga in Ghana. Bern: Till Schaap Edition, 2014.

Previous exhibitions of fantasy coffins include A Life Well Lived: Fantasy Coffins of Kane Quaye (1994); Africa Explores TwentiethCentury African Art (2001); Ghana: Hier et Aujourd’hui (2003); and Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent (2005).

Eric Adjetey Anang (Ghanaian, b. 1985) Chili Pepper coffin, Business Shoe coffin, Mami Wata coffin, 2017 Northern white pine, acrylic paint, satin fabric Chili Pepper and Business Shoe coffins, courtesy of the artist Mami Wata coffin, UIMA School Programs Collections, AAS.56

Art & the Afterlife will be the focus of the television/radio/internet program WorldCanvass on December 7. Please join us at Hancher as a member of the live audience from 5:30–7:00 p.m. Speakers will include artist Eric Adjetey Anang and Professor Roberta Bonetti, University of Bologna. Information can be found here: https://international.uiowa.edu/connect/programs/worldcanvass uima.uiowa.edu

Eric Adjetey Anang

ith generous support through the UI International Programs Major Projects Award, Eric Adjetey Anang will serve as a UIMA artist-inresidence this fall, from October 1 to November 18. Working in a space at the Old Museum of Art, Anang will focus his residency upon the completion of two Ga “fantasy coffins,” commissioned by UIMA for the permanent collection. During his time at UI, which overlaps an exhibition of his work in the Black Box Theater, Anang will also work with UI students who enroll in “Topics in Sculpture: Journeys through Installations, Site Specific, and Objects (SCLP:3895:0001),” a course led by Isabel Barbuzza, professor of sculpture in dimensional practice. As part of the overall project with Anang, John Richard of Bocce Ball Films will create a short film on key aspects of the residency, commission, exhibition, and fall lecture series. UIMA will use the film for educational purposes in future exhibitions and events.

Photos by Steve Erickson

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The goals of the residency are to acquire two major works of art by a contemporary African artist, and to

ARTIST RESIDENCY

provide UI students and the public an opportunity to explore the ways that people in Ghana and beyond create and use fantasy coffins today. In Anang’s work with UI students, he will provide ongoing demonstrations on the proper use of materials, methods, and carpentry techniques for the construction of Ga fantasy coffins; select students may also have the chance to collaborate directly with the artist. Student assignments will consist of small-scale objects incorporating the carpentry techniques demonstrated by Anang. According to Professor Barbuzza, the course will also require students to demonstrate the performative function of their objects, which will be on exhibit at the new Visual Arts Building toward the end of the semester. For the UIMA commissions, Anang will create two full-scale coffins, representing a fish and a firefly. Since the inception of the fantasy coffin tradition at Teshie in the mid-twentieth century, the fish has served as one of the most common coffin motifs in Ghana. UIMA Curator Cory Gundlach selected this motif as an important reference to an aspect of life for many in coastal Ghana. Anang himself proposed the firefly form of the second commission, using an insect motif that has never before been represented in these artworks. Based on his observation of declining firefly populations in increasingly developed areas of the country, his oversized insect becomes a center for the exploration of complex tensions among ecological habitats, urban development, and mortality in Ghana. Anang’s works—in the fish and firefly forms—therefore respond to both the natural and built environments. At the same time, the two objects suggest a dialogue on tradition, innovation, and the inception of art forms created in response to historically specific conditions in West Africa.

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WHAT’S YOUR SIGN? Retail Architecture and the History of Signage Symposium, September 8–9, 2017 | University of Iowa, Iowa City

For as long as goods have been bought and sold, shopkeepers and traders have communicated their wares visually through signs. This breakfast symposium explores the evolution of signage, from the shutter paintings of ancient Pompeii to the wooden trade signs hanging along medieval English streets to the neon of twentieth-century American signs. How have symbols of selling shifted over the centuries? How do retail signs reflect or reject broader visual cultures? What technological shifts have precipitated the most dramatic design departures? Visiting scholars will examine the iconography, typography, and materiality of retail signs as well as the cultural, financial, and geopolitical forces that have shaped them in the past. Presenters may also contend with the future of retail signage in an increasingly digital and global economy. Assistant Curator Vero Rose Smith will discuss related holdings from the UIMA permanent collections. This public event will occur, live-streamed, in conjunction with the City of Iowa City Downtown District’s CoSign project, which partners local artists and craftspeople with small businesses to create exciting and distinctive new signs. Emil Ganso (American, 1895–1941) Electric Sign, 1927 Lithograph 19 3/4 x 13 7/8 in. Gift of Charles R. Penney, 1981.597

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For more information, please visit the Legacies for Iowa Collection-Sharing Project’s website: http://uima.uiowa.edu/exhibitions/ legacies-for-iowa/

LEGACIES

Rocio Ramírez and Germán Ramírez, Arrazola Iguana Copal, acrylic paint 7 x 19 x 20 in. Museum purchase, 2015.98

CRAFTING TRADITION: Oaxacan Wood Carvings On view November 6, 2017–January 22, 2018 Sioux City Art Center | 225 Nebraska Street, Sioux City, IA Fantastically colored and imaginatively shaped, wood carvings from the Mexican state of Oaxaca are a globally celebrated art form. Although often inspired by historical legend, these vibrant sculptures are also influenced by both contemporary change in Mexico and the artistic tastes of buyers in the United States and Europe. This exhibition demonstrates the sometimes unexpected creativity that can evolve from tourism and trade to straddle the border between popular craft and fine art.

For more information, please visit Sioux City Art Center’s website: https://www.siouxcityartcenter.org/ This exhibition, curated in 2005 by Professor Emeritus Michael Chibnik (Anthropology, University of Iowa) and adapted for travel by the UIMA, is funded in part by the John K. and Luise V. Hanson Foundation. It is organized under the aegis of Legacies for Iowa: A University of Iowa Museum of Art Collections-Sharing Project, supported by the Matthew Bucksbaum Family.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the UIMA and the Sioux City Art Center are partnering to produce a series of events that will highlight themes of Mexican American identity in Iowa, Latino economic development in the state, and the ever-evolving classifications of art versus craft.

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Philip Guston (American, 1913–1980) Ramp, 1979 Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 in. Gift of Musa Mayer, 1987.8

Philip Guston and Iowa JULY 1, 2017–JANUARY 7, 2018 UIMA @ IMU Visual Classroom • Iowa Memorial Union The twelve works by Philip Guston in this new exhibition, drawn from the UIMA collections, emphasize this renowned artist’s production during the three and one-half years (fall 1941–spring 1945) he was a painting and drawing instructor and visiting artist at the (State) University of Iowa. Just months before the Pearl Harbor attack, the university invited Guston to replace his friends from Woodstock, New York, Emil Ganso and Fletcher Martin, who had stepped in for Grant Wood. Guston was regarded as a young artist-muralist of great promise, but he had become weary of mural painting and art commissions and wanted to work independently on personal imagery. 14

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Please join us for the symposium Philip Guston and Iowa, October 21, 2017, 9 a.m.–5 p.m., Art Building West. See uima.uiowa.edu for the full symposium program.

UIMA@IMU

Philip Guston (American, 1913–1980) Untitled B from A Suite of Five Non-Objective Prints, 1966 Lithograph, 19 3/4 x 26 3/4 in. Mark Ranney Memorial Fund, 1994.132

Guston was prolific during his Iowa City period. He successfully embraced easel painting in oils on canvas with compelling compositions of family life (his daughter Musa Jane was born in January 1943) and university activity both downtown and around the places he lived on Summit, Beldon, and East College Streets. He was the first professor at the university to introduce live models to the classroom, and he worked closely with his students, among them Paul Brach, Byron Burford, Stephen Greene, and Miriam Schapiro. One student described evenings of conversation about Beckmann, Picasso, Piero della Francesca, and Giorgio de Chirico, “about whom he was mad!” War intervened in Guston’s studio when he participated in the War Art Workshop, generating murals designed for Camp Dodge and visual aids for instruction in Iowa City at the Navy Pre-Flight School. Commissioned by the United States Navy and on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1943 and 1944, Guston illustrated three articles with sixteen drawings. He wrote of the Fortune work, “I had a grand time, flying every day and in almost every kind of Army Bomber and Fighter plane. I wasn’t so much interested in portraying the nuts and bolts of the planes as I was in showing the faces of the men, their tenseness and determination.” By the mid-1950s, well after his Iowa City stay, Guston had achieved critical success as an abstract painter and was considered a leading figure of the New York School. After his years in the Midwest, he had moved away from figuration to explore the tenets of abstraction, yet he never kept the figure completely at bay, embracing it again in his radical works of the 1970s. The exhibition is curated by UIMA Senior Curator Kathleen A. Edwards and supported by the Members Special Exhibition Fund. Tensely waiting for the green light, pg. 130. Troop Carrier Command. The Common Carrier of Death and Destruction. Destination: The Enemy’s Rear for the series The Working Front 2. Fortune, October 1943, vol. 28, no. 4. Fortune reproduction of original watercolor and gouache on paper.

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The J. Richard Simon Collection of Yoruba Twin Figures

Nigeria (Ilorin); Yoruba artist Ere ibeji (twin figures), late 19th to early 20th century Wood, beads, cowry shells, metal, fiber, encrustation Left: 12 5/8 x 3 3/4 x 3 in. Right: 13 1/4 x 3 7/8 x 3 1/4 in. The J. Richard Simon Collection of Yoruba Twin Figures

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Photo courtesy of Alissa Simon

In an artistic tradition that developed between 1750 and 1850, Yoruba artists create ere ibeji to house the spirits of deceased twins. Bereaved mothers and/ or priests adorn and make regular offerings to these figures to appease the inhabiting spirits, which are also linked to Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder. Heavily worn surfaces and brilliant patinas found in many examples from the Simon Collection attest to years of handling and use.

J. Richard Simon

As a former UI professor of psychology and industrial engineering, Simon began collecting African art following his retirement. His interest in the subject was first piqued, however, during his enrollment in the university course “Arts of Africa,” led by Professor Christopher D. Roy. Not long afterward, Simon and Professor Roy made plans to use the collection for a seminar in which graduate students mentored undergraduates in researching the collection. The results, in part, provided a written cultural context for a major exhibition of the Simon Collection at UIMA in fall 2010. A panel discussion with experts on Yoruba art accompanied the exhibition. Many of the objects from the J. Richard Simon Collection of Yoruba Twin Figures are now available for viewing on the Art & Life in Africa website.

onnoisseurship in traditional African art is something rarely discussed today, and it is even less common to be familiar with a collector and an art collection that demonstrate it clearly. The late Professor J. Richard Simon (or Dick, as he preferred to be called) and his extraordinary collection of ere ibeji (Yoruba twin figures) from Nigeria exemplify connoisseurship to an extent rarely seen elsewhere in the U.S. Simon's selective method of collecting was by no means only a reflection of his good taste. Because of his commitment to the aesthetic and educational aspects of African art, many of the objects in his collection have already served as a public resource in Iowa for learning about African art. Simon ensured a permanent legacy through a bequest of his collection to UIMA this year.

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DR. VICTORIA ROVINE

FASHION AS FINE ART: AFRICAN EXPRESSIONS 7:30 P.M. THURSDAY, AUGUST 31 • 116 ART BUILDING WEST Lecture support provided through a UI International Programs Major Projects Award This lecture will address the innovations of African fashion design. Africa’s fashion production, past and present, tells vivid stories about local histories and global networks of goods and images. These garments reveal profound ideas about changing conceptions of tradition, modernity, and the balance of these broad categories in contemporary African cultures.

Dr. Rovine is associate professor of art history at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She received her PhD in the history of African art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and served as the curator of African and non-Western art at the University of Iowa Museum of Art from 1995 to 2004.

Women’s boubous, Maïmour Style, designed by Maimouna Diallo, FIMA (Festival International de la Mode Africaine), Niamey, Niger, 2009. Photograph by Victoria Rovine

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LECTURES

Jeanne and Richard Levitt Lectureship: American Crafts in Context

ERIC ADJETEY ANANG

ART AND THE AFTERLIFE: FANTASY COFFINS 7:30 P.M. THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21 • 240 ART BUILDING WEST Born in Teshie (Accra), on the coast of Ghana, Eric Adjetey Anang began helping his family in the carpentry workshop at the age of eight. He joined the family business, Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop, as an apprentice following high school, and assumed leadership of the shop at twenty. Anang is a third-generation coffin-maker and, along with his father and apprentices, passionately stewards his family’s legacy as he refines and elevates this culturally significant art form.

Photograph by Steve Erickson

Anang’s work has been shown in exhibitions across West Africa and Europe and is held in private collections around the globe. Since 2008, Anang has participated in a dozen residencies, conducted workshops, and been featured in multiple documentaries worldwide. He maintains dual residency in Madison, Wisconsin, and at Teshie, where he continues to produce coffins for funerary patrons, art collectors, and museums, including the University of Iowa Museum of Art.

Image courtesy of the artist

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DR. SILVIA FORNI

FROM THE STREET TO THE WHITE CUBE: THE MULTIPLE TRAJECTORIES OF GA FANTASY COFFINS 7:30 P.M. TUESDAY, OCTOBER 10 â&#x20AC;¢ 116 ART BUILDING WEST Lecture support provided through a UI International Programs Major Projects Award This talk explores multiple facets of the historical and contemporary uses of Ga fantasy coffins. From the workshops to funeral processions to gallery displays, these spectacular sculptures illustrate shifting values and concepts of prestige and cultural display in Ghana and on the global art scene.

Dr. Forni is the curator of anthropology (African arts and cultures) at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada. Dr. Forni received her PhD in cultural anthropology from University of Turin, Italy.

Eric Adjetey Anang (Ghanaian, b. 1985) Fish coffin, 2009 Kane Kwei Workshop Teshie, Ghana Wood, paint, fabric, and foam This acquisition was made possible with the generous support of the Louise Hawley Stone Charitable Trust, 2009.39.18.1-2 Photo by Brian Boyle, courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum

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LECTURES

DR. MATTHEW O’NEAL

CONSERVATION IS BEAUTIFUL: THE ART OF SAVING INSECTS 7:30 P.M. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 26 • 116 ART BUILDING WEST Lecture support provided through a UI International Programs Major Projects Award Human impact on biodiversity is a significant contributor to an unprecedented rate of extinction, noticed by many in the decline of once common insect species, like those featured in the work by Eric Adjetey Anang. Despite this trend, human intervention can prevent this lost. Dr. O’Neal will discuss a novel conservation practice developed in Iowa that has scientists and farmers interested in taking land out of agricultural production and replacing it with native, prairie habitat. This practice has positive impacts on many species, including bees, leading to a more sustainable, aesthetically interesting landscape.

Dr. O’Neal is an associate professor of soybean entomology at Iowa State University. He received his PhD and did postdoctoral research at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Daniel John O'Neal (American, b. 1956) Scream, 1997 Oil on board Private collection

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An Important Year for Ghana and African Art History Sixty years ago, Africa and African art history reached important milestones. In 1957, Ghana became the first African nation to achieve independence from European colonial rule, and the University of Iowa awarded Roy Sieber (1923-2001) the first PhD in African art history in the U.S. In order to raise an awareness of these historical moments, an installation at the UIMA@IMU Visual Classroom features art from Ghana spanning the 20th century and objects from the Max and Betty Stanley Collection related to Sieber’s legacy. Collectively, the objects invite an exploration of the birth and heritage of a nation and a discipline. The exhibition also includes two important loans from UI Special Collections. First is a hand-colored, first edition (1819) copy of Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantee with a statistical account of that kingdom, and geographical notices of other parts of the interior of Africa, by Thomas Edward Bowdich. The book display specifically features the author’s panoramic foldout illustration, “The First Day of the Yam Custom,” which provides important visual documentation of this highly complex ceremony. “Part of Adoom Street" depicts a royal weaver making kente cloth. Sieber’s 1957 doctoral dissertation, “African Tribal Sculpture,” is also on display and a digital copy is available to peruse in the gallery.

Côte d’Ivoire; Guro artist Mask, 1970s Wood, oil paint 13 3/8 x 5 1/4 x 5 in. The Stanley Collection, 1979.73

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UI Art History Professor Christopher D. Roy, who was among Sieber’s first group of distinguished graduate students, writes that “from the early 1960s through the ’80s, Roy Sieber emphasized the importance of connoisseurship—being able to distinguish fakes from authentic objects, to identify objects of outstanding quality, and to identify accurately what an object was for and who had made it.” In order to expand on this area of Sieber’s work, the exhibition features a series of comparisons among objects of varying artistic quality. The Stanley’s acquired roughly half of the objects prior to working with Sieber. Curatorial comments invite discussion about judgements on artistic quality, authenticity, and the role of connoisseurship in African art history today.

CONSERVATION

POLK SMITH CONSERVATION The Rosazza family visits the painting in storage at the Figge Art Museum. L to R: Stephanie, Trudi, Becky and Dave, UIMA Curator Joyce Tsai, Jack, Anthony, and Mark.

he UIMA has an impressive collection of modern art, including a pivotal work by Leon Polk Smith from 1946 titled Center Columns, Blue Red. This painting makes use of primary colors organized within a gridded system, the colors syncopated across its surface. In photographs, most striking is the clear design, but in person, the surface of the painting reveals painstaking brushwork, applied with deliberate care. Polk Smith’s mode of hard-edged abstraction relies on geometry and primary colors to capture a vision that emphasized the possibility of universally shared experience, rather than the expression of singular genius. His commitment to this vision was shaped in part by what he endured as a polio survivor, and as a Native American and gay man. In spite of these challenges, he trained as an educator at Columbia University and worked to transform the limits of his time and world with his art and teaching.

Center Columns, Blue Red was painted on Masonite, a wood composite valued by artists and builders alike for its smooth, durable surface. Over time, however, the paint of this artwork has begun to separate from its support, the surface has started to tent across the pristine field, and cracks are beginning to form. Without immediate intervention, the painting will continue to deteriorate. To our good fortune, the Rosazza family has made it possible to conserve and study Center Columns, Blue Red by funding treatment by the Midwest Art Conservation Center of Minneapolis, a leader in the field. Their gift was made in memory of Paul Rosazza, a BFA graduate of the University of Iowa painting program, who worked as an artist and designer throughout his life. By supporting conservation, the Rosazza family honors Paul’s passion for art—and preserves a masterpiece in the UIMA collection for future generations.

UIMA is deeply grateful to the entire Rosazza family for this generous and heartfelt gift. John and Trudi Rosazza • Mark, Stephanie, Anthony and Talia Rosazza • David and Becky Rosazza

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EDUCATION

ducational presentations are among the wide array of programs—many of them using object-based learning strategies, with hands-on artworks from the UIMA’s

School Programs Collections—that professionals and volunteers from UIMA bring to classrooms across Iowa. Lively discussions, thoughtful comments, and engaging questions encourage students to take art and make it their own. The presentation titled “Comics and Graphic Novels” elicited these creative (and thankful) student responses to an obviously exciting encounter with art.

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DIGITAL OUTREACH

The new digital initiatives of the Legacies for Iowa Collections-Sharing Project center on a deceptively simple question: Where does art live? Perhaps art lives in paint-splattered studios. Or maybe art is right at home in sleek galleries. Then again, maybe art is most alive in museums, where it can be cared for by loving experts and enjoyed by all who visit. A better question might be: Where do we live? In screens, according to a 2016 Nielsen Company audience report. Now, the average American adult devotes roughly ten hours and thirty-nine minutes each day to scrolling through endless social media updates, clicking through email, and chuckling through sitcoms, often on the same handheld device. If the goal of the Legacies for Iowa CollectionsSharing Project is to share the encyclopedic art collections of the University of Iowa Museum of Art, then that goal can be reached only by expanding 26

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the definition of â&#x20AC;&#x153;exhibitionâ&#x20AC;? to the digital realm. The new online Art of the Day Calendar allows viewers to encounter art by making personal connections to the collections. Each date has been paired to an object that relates to a corresponding historical event or a tidbit of trivia, expanding the context of the featured artwork to make it more approachable. This project has prompted creative thinking about the continued relevance of our collections, and has also provided hands-on research opportunities for many undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Iowa. The series of daily posts, first launched as a social media initiative, has garnered over 210,000 views since its inception. In the end, art lives in the eyes, minds, and hearts of viewers. Art lives in all of us.

NEW STAFF

What were you doing before you came to the UIMA? Why did you go into museum work?

DOMINIQUE ALHAMBRA A S S I S TA NT R E G I S TR A R

I have been working in registration and collections management for the past ten years —at the Field Museum, the National Park Service, and, most recently, the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History (I received my MA in anthropology from UI in 2015). Whenever I went to a museum with my parents, I always asked about the objects that weren’t on display. The pieces we see in exhibitions are only a fraction of a museum’s collection, and every single one of those objects must be cared for, in the present and for the future. So I’ve always been an objects person, whether it’s archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, history, or art. The field of collections care and management is a great fit for my interests and skills.

What is your average workday like? What makes you excited about the work you do here? My time is divided between the UIMA/IMU and the Figge in Davenport, where the majority of our collections are temporarily stored. Most of my job is collections inventory, tracking objects as they go between storage and exhibitions. I am also responsible for transporting and processing new acquisitions, making sure that every object’s location is accurate in the database, and providing for appropriate storage space. I spend at least half of my day at a computer, but working hands-on with the collections is definitely the best part!

What have you accomplished since you began at the UIMA? What are your goals for the museum? One of my first projects was to prepare collections images and data for our online website. Someday I’d love to have the full collection available online so that anyone in Iowa or the world can connect to our art. I am also making progress on our print collection inventory; when I arrived, there was a backlog of prints needing permanent homes. It’s very satisfying to see organized boxes and shelves. My newest project involves preventative care in storage through integrated pest management. Our collections include materials that bugs like to eat, so I’ll be setting up a pest-monitoring procedure. My overall goal is to develop a shared approach so that all of our staff helps to mitigate threats and prevent damage.

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OUT of the BOX This year’s Museum Party, held April 1 at Hancher Auditorium, celebrated our success at thriving “out of the box.” Guests enjoyed visiting a display of artworks from the museum’s K–12 outreach program, watching a compelling video about museum membership, and mingling in the beauty and grandeur of the new Hancher. The Wall-of-Boxes fundraising game was a huge hit! UIMA is thankful for the generosity of all the local artists, businesses, and individuals who donated items for this activity. Thanks to the UIMA Members Council and party chair Jessica fab, festive, fundraising success.

Glick, the evening was a fun,

We thank all of our generous Museum Party supporters: Museum Party Signature Sponsors BNIM Architects

University of Iowa Community Credit Union

Museum Party Hosts James & Anna Barker Bradley & Riley PC Tim & Anna Conroy Evan & Kressa Evans–Whitedog Import Auto Services Shaun & Jessica Glick Hayes Lorenzen Lawyers, PLC Nick Hotek–Hudson River Gallery Kevin O’Brien–McDonald’s Restaurants Phelan, Tucker, Mullen, Walker, Tucker & Gelman LLP

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Rohrbach Associates PC Architects Shive-Hattery, Architecture + Engineering Shuttleworth & Ingersoll, PLC Kristin Summerwill Alan & Liz Swanson Toyota of Iowa City Douglas & Vance Van Daele Mary Westbrook Mark & Laurie Zaiger

Impact Photography / Joe Photo

MUSEUM PARTY

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