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from the director Celebrations for the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial are well under way across campus and will continue throughout 2017. Here at UMMA, we’re joining in the festivities in a big way with our two-part Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors exhibition (see p. 4). Beyond celebrating the University’s rich history and commitment to the arts, this exhibition has allowed us to engage with Michigan alumni in meaningful ways as we feature world-class works of art from their collections. I hope many of you will visit the Museum this year and help us, along with the rest of campus, mark this 200-year milestone. The search for UMMA’s next director continues. The Office of the Provost has hired nationally-recognized search firm Korn Ferry to partner with the search advisory committee in identifying a pool of exceptional candidates. The Museum’s staff helped the search committee come up with a list of qualities we’d like to see in our next director. The work that we do is important, and we want to hire the best candidate. I send many thanks to those that are participating in the process —–your voice is key!
Another big project underway this year: improving the visitor experience at UMMA. From redesigning our maps and directional signage, to using museum attendants during peak hours to answer your questions, we’re taking a fresh look throughout UMMA to make your visit even better. Look for changes this spring and summer! Along with our visitor experience project, we want to hear about your experiences at UMMA. How can we make your visit better? Let us know at our new feedback webpage at umma. umich.edu/feedback. We welcome your suggestions and comments. Enjoy the spring and summer seasons! See you at the Museum soon!
Kathryn Huss Interim Director
CONTENTS From the Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
UMMA News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
UMMA Happenings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Exhibitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
In Focus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
UMMA Store . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
COVER: Hans Hofmann, St. Francis, 1952, oil on canvas. Collection of Paola Luptak (AB ’88) and Markus Jakobson. With permission of the Renate, Hans & Maria Hofmann Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. 2
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umma news
ALUMNI GENEROSITY ON DISPLAY On your next visit to UMMA, be sure to look for the Block-M sticker (pictured below) next to hundreds of works throughout UMMA’s galleries. These stickers recognize works gifted to UMMA by University of Michigan alumni, and are another way that the Museum is celebrating the U-M Bicentennial. Of the 21,000 objects in UMMA’s collections, two-thirds were donated by U-M alumni and friends of the Museum. They range from a 10th-century Southeast Asian Standing Figure of Shiva, gifted by Mark (BA ’70) and Iuliana Phillips, to Kiva, a video installation by Peter Campus, donated by Kammi (BGS ’89) and Brad Reiss. The generosity of alumni and friends is largely responsible for making UMMA’s collections one of the finest in the country, and is another example of how Michigan alumni are victors for art.
India, Central India, Standing figure of Shiva, 10th–11th century, sandstone. Gift of Mark and Iuliana Phillips, 1998/1.181
RECENT GIFT: NEVELSON SCULPTURE Generously donated to UMMA by alumni Bobby Kotick (LSA ’82), Louise Nevelson’s (1899–1988) large-scale monochromatic wall sculpture Dark Presence III (1971) will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Victors for Art Michigan’s Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction on view July 1–October 2017 (see pg. 4). Nevelson is best known for creating abstract sculptures using pieces of found wood, which she stacks and uniformly paints black, white, or gold. The impressive form of Dark Presence III encourages viewers to immerse themselves in the abstract visual patterns that emerge from Nevelson’s arrangement of repurposed pieces of wood. Louise Nevelson, Dark Presence III, 1971, painted wood. Gift of Bobby Kotick (LSA ‘82) © 2017 Estate of Louise Nevelson / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Charlie Edwards.
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“I am delighted to make this gift to the University of Michigan Museum of Art,” said Kotick. “Louise Nevelson has long been a favorite artist of mine, and so it brings me great satisfaction to know that future generations of U-M students and the Museum’s other visitors will be able to enjoy this important work in Ann Arbor.”
UMMA GLOW A Gala Celebration of Michigan's Victors for Art
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 6, 2017 For more information, please contact Astrid Giese at 734.647.3132 or agiese@umich.edu.
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VICTORS FOR ART: MICHIGAN’S ALUMNI COLLECTORS
PART II: ABSTRACTION C
ommemorating the University of Michigan’s 2017 Bicentennial, Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors celebrates the deep impact of Michigan alumni in the global art world. This two-part exhibition presents works collected by a diverse group of alumni that represent the breadth of the University and over seventy years of graduating classes. Part II: Abstraction, on view July 1–October 29 in the A. Alfred Taubman Gallery and August 19–November 26 in the Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery, showcases modern and contemporary art by Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Nevelson, Christo, Lorna Simpson, José Parlá, and Do Ho Suh, among others. It also features a fifth-century Korean roof end tile and an Amish quilt, as well as a work by an Inuit master—–thus inviting visitors to explore the strategies of abstraction across a range of media, eras, and genres. Abstraction in art evokes a wide variety of practices and purposes from the playful to the provocative. Many artists use elements from the world around us as a point of departure, but through diverse strategies of abstraction, they transform and distill these into patterns, gestures, and ideas, creating compelling visual experiences through line, form, and color. A sense of exploration animates the works in the exhibition. As just one example, a number of artists investigate how language itself can be a focus of meaning and making and—–when fragmented and devoid of context—–reveal that seeing does not necessarily mean believing, but rather is set up in opposition to believing. The works presented here foreground marks and materials, inviting us to attend to both the artist’s
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gestures and actions of making as well as to our own perceptions—–immersing us in the temporal and sensual experience of looking. Taken together, these works of art offer an unprecedented opportunity to view art that may have never been publicly displayed otherwise—– and most certainly, not all together. For visitors, and especially for future Michigan alumni, Victors for Art illuminates the shared passion for art fostered by the Michigan experience. This exhibition was organized by Joseph Rosa, Guest Curator, in collaboration with Laura De Becker, Helmut & Candis Stern Associate Curator of African Art, Jennifer Friess, Assistant Curator of Photography, Lehti Mairike Keelmann, Assistant Curator of Western Art, and Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian Art. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, Michigan Medicine, the University of Michigan Office of the President, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the University of Michigan Bicentennial Office.
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a. alfred taubman gallery | july 1–october 29, 2017
Lorna Simpson, Untitled (What Should Fit Here Is An Oblique Story About Absence), 1993, photogravure and handcolored with watercolor. Collection of William Susman (BBA ’86) and Emily Glasser. Courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York
Part of Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction, Random International’s LED-light installation Swarm Study / II, loaned by the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, will be installed along the north and west window walls of the Museum’s Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery from August 19 through November 26, 2017. Learn more in the fall edition of the UMMA Magazine. s pring /s ummer 2017
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irving stenn, jr. family gallery | april 22–july 30, 2017
exhibitions
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Wavefunction, Subsculpture 9, 2007, 50 Eames chairs, motors, computerized surveillance tracking system, edition 3/3 + 1 AP. Courtesy of Antimodular Research
RAFAEL LOZANO-HEMMER:
WAVEFUNCTION, SUBSCULPTURE 9 W
avefunction, Subsculpture 9, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, is a kinetic sculpture and interactive installation that plays on the work of mid-century American designers Charles and Ray Eames. The installation consists of forty-two molded plastic chairs (designed by the Eameses in 1948) arranged in a grid and attached to electromechanical pistons. When visitors approach the chairs, a surveillance system detects their presence and the closest chairs lift gently off the ground. The adjacent chairs follow, and a wave movement spreads across the array. The software controlling the pistons is based on fluid dynamics, so as more visitors approach the grid, the chairs—–whose iconic curving contours were also generated mathematically—–mimic the complex interaction of multiple waves in water. Wavefunction is one of numerous large- and small-scale installations that allow the artist to investigate his interest in performance within architectural space. Lozano-Hemmer’s principal interest is in creating platforms for public participation and, as with other works in the Subsculpture series, the behavior of humans in relation to the installation is its key element. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival spectacles, and animatronics, the artist reconceptualizes the conventional applications of robotics, computerized surveillance, and telecommunications to create artworks that “pervert” their parent technologies. He describes these works as “antimonuments for alien agency,” and Wavefunction is precisely engineered to be both playful and seductively strange.
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Lozano-Hemmer was born in Mexico City in 1967 and earned a BS in physical chemistry from Concordia University in Montreal in 1989. His large-scale interactive installations have been commissioned for such events as the pre-opening exhibition of the Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi in 2015, the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, the 2008 memorial for the Tlatelolco Student Massacre in Mexico City, and the UN World Summit of Cities in Lyon, France, in 2003. Recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the MUAC Museum in Mexico City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, he was the first artist to officially represent Mexico at the Venice Biennale with a solo exhibition in 2007. This installation complements the exhibition Moving Image: Performance on view in the Media Gallery from April 1 through July 23, 2017, and together they constitute the second of three presentations at UMMA drawn from the collection of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul. The works in this suite of exhibitions represent traditional categories such as portraiture, landscape, and performance that find new resonance when explored through the strategies of dynamic technology. Kathleen Forde Adjunct Curator of Media Arts Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment and Michigan Engineering. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan Latina/o Studies.
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ERNESTINE RUBEN AT WILLOW RUN:
MOBILIZING MEMORY
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n 2013, when photographer Ernestine Ruben (born 1931, U-M Stamps School of Art & Design, BSDes ’53) toured Willow Run—–the once-famed industrial complex located in Washtenaw County, Michigan—–she was deeply moved by the immense scale of the space and the decayed state of the machines she found there. Although Willow Run had been lauded as an exemplar of American defense manufacturing during World War II, with its mass production of the B-24 Liberator aircraft, the facility was slated for demolition when Ruben visited. Constructed in the early 1940s for the Ford Motor Company by her grandfather, Detroit architect Albert Kahn, Willow Run loomed large in Ruben’s familial memory. Her grandfather’s role in the history of the site underscored Ruben’s personal connection to Willow Run and emboldened the artist’s reactivation of this significant place through a series of photographs. The sequence of photographs in the exhibition Ernestine Ruben at Willow Run: Mobilizing Memory parallels Ruben’s perceptive exploration of the interior environment of Willow Run. Viewers are encouraged to follow the hopeful light that pierces through the overwhelming darkness at the beginning of the series. Ruben’s camera alternately frames the cavernous space—–which at the time of Willow Run’s opening was deemed the world’s largest room under one roof—–and details of the now-defunct and lifeless machinery. As Ruben explores the industrial ruins of the site, light and color fill the frame and enliven the still machines. These documentary photographs are juxtaposed with photomontages in which Ruben overlays imagined glimpses into her own body’s interior landscape with
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scenes of the barren industrial environment she found at Willow Run. The overtly organic yet mysterious shapes of Ruben’s internal self-portraits contrast with the hard industrial contours of the machines. Viewers become unable to parse the forms of human and machine—–effectively blurring the line between the internal and external environments as light and energy are exchanged. Ruben’s visual strategies suggest a longing for a productive existence, undeterred by mortality, for both Willow Run and the artist herself. In addition to Ruben’s never-before-exhibited photographs, an original film titled Willow Run, cocreated by Ruben and video artist Seth Bernstein, will be screened in UMMA’s Forum throughout the run of the exhibition. The film features an original score by award-winning composer Stephen Hartke, whose musical composition layers fragments of industrial noise onto Ruben’s photographs. The combination of image and sound in this film generate an altogether new narrative—– one that also seeks to awaken Willow Run from its dormant present by alluding to the thrumming machines from the factory’s past. Jennifer M. Friess Assistant Curator of Photography Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost and the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment.
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photography gallery | march 11–august 20, 2017
exhibitions
TOP: Cathedral, 2013, inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist BOTTOM: Blurred Lights, 2013, inkjet print. Courtesy of the artist
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ABOVE: Elena Kovylina, Equality, 2014, single-channel video, running time 7 minutes 59 seconds, edition 1/5. Contemporary City Foundation, Moscow, 31.01.2008, courtesy of Analix Forever and the artist RIGHT: Universal Everything, Presence 4, 2013, two-channel video, stereo sound, running time 2 minutes, edition 1/6. Courtesy of Borusan Contemporary
ABOVE: Kalliopi Lemos, At the Centre of the World, 2015, 16mm B&W film with sound, running time 8 minutes 29 seconds, edition 1/5. Courtesy of the artist and Gazelli Art House LEFT: Roman Signer, 56 Kleine Helikopter, 2008, HD video, color, sound, running time 3 minutes 14 seconds, edition 3/10 + 3 EA. Courtesy of Borusan Contemporary
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media gallery | april 1–july 23, 2017
MOVING IMAGE: PERFORMANCE S
ince the invention of the portable video camera nearly thirty years ago, performance and moving-image media have had a natural affinity, due to their shared time-based nature. Moving Image: Performance presents four artworks that investigate this relationship between the video camera and the action it records. In Kalliope Lemos’s At the Centre of the World the camera is a dynamic witness to the efforts of its subject, a woman seemingly trapped in a spherical cage whose movement is an ambiguous mix of struggle and choreography. Lemos, a sculptor, painter, and installation artist, is known for site-specific works that address humanitarian rights as well as daily personal struggles. By contrast, in Roman Signer’s 56 Kleine Helikopter the camera is a static observer of the humorously chaotic action of toy helicopters. The work of Signer has grown out of land art and performance art and the relationship of both to installation and video. In Elena Kovylina’s Equality the camera is an active collaborator in a staged procession of people and props that references questions of inequality in contemporary Russian culture. Moscow-born Kovylina’s work uses a range of media, from video and film to installation and performance, and emphasizes social critique in harsh or satirical ways. Whereas in Presence 4, by Universal Everything, the camera recedes while the action becomes purely virtual, as a live dance is translated into a digital abstraction. Universal Everything, a digital art and design collective, uses recent technologies, including 3-D printing, touch screens, and
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motion capture, to create large-scale experiential works that reference themes such as synesthesia and anthropomorphism. At their core these works are examining the fundamentals of how the moving image operates, how we as viewers consume it, and how its use affects our perception of the content and meaning it delivers. All four artists are not only presenting an action by way of the camera, but also an argument about how the tools of their art function. The performance, dance, and action captured in these videos are vastly different experiences for viewers than if they were witnessed in real life. Instead, we are offered a uniquely mediated and manipulated relationship to time-based behavior. This exhibition complements the installation of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Wavefunction, Subsculpture 9 on view in the Museum’s Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery April 23 through July 30, 2017 (see p. 6), and together they constitute the second of three presentations at UMMA drawn from the collection of Borusan Contemporary, Istanbul. Kathleen Forde Adjunct Curator of Media Arts Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment, the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities and Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design, and the Robert and Janet Miller Fund.
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PICTURING BUILDINGS:
PHOTOGRAPHERS AND ARCHITECTURE, 1855–1985 A rchitecture was the very first subject depicted in photography, and it has remained a source of fascination for photographers ever since. This exhibition illuminates the enduring appeal of photographing buildings by presenting twenty-three images from the Museum’s collection created between the mid-nineteenth and late-twentieth centuries. From the remains of a Roman amphitheater and a seventh-century Egyptian mosque, to the sleek solemnity of New York City skyscrapers and the urban landscape in Berlin, these visually and spatially complex sites provide photographers with representational
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challenges and endless opportunities to innovate as they develop pictorial strategies in their own medium.
The decisions that photographers make behind the scenes may not always be evident, but they shape what and how viewers see the final image. Timing was key in the production of Berenice Abbott’s celebrated composition New York at Night (1932). Working from a window inside the Empire State Building, Abbott set up her camera at 4:30 p.m. on a late December day, intending to capture the darkened city before workers left their offices and turned off the umm a .umic h.ed u
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jan and david brandon family bridge | may 13–august 13, 2017 LEFT TO RIGHT: André Kertész, Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1929, gelatin silver print. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Museum Purchase, 2011/2.166
Berenice Abbott, New York at Night, 1932, gelatin silver print. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Museum purchase made possible by a gift from Helmut Stern and the Jean Paul Slusser Memorial Fund, 2002/1.156 Harry Callahan, Eleanor, 1948, gelatin silver print. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of Two Friends of the Museum, 1991/2.97
lights. After exposing her film for a full fifteen minutes to soften the definition between forms, Abbott used a special developer to accentuate tonal contrasts in the negative. Her print offers a dazzling view of midtown Manhattan that turns the bustling city into a grid of glowing cubes. Hungarian photojournalist André Kertész also experimented with aerial views. By photographing the Eiffel Tower from a viewing platform inside the structure, Kertész positioned the iconic Paris monument at the margins of the image, instead directing attention to the shadows and patterns on the ground below. This selective framing transforms the appearance and experience of a well-known architectural structure, while questioning what constitutes the “subject” of the picture. s pring /s ummer 2017
Rather than switching to color film once it became available in the early twentieth century, many photographers continued to work in black-and-white for its expressive possibilities. Harry Callahan employed close cropping and the absence of color to heighten the spatial and emotional ambiguities of his scenes. In Eleanor (1948), a depiction of the artist’s wife in their Chicago apartment, the walls of the room seem to dissolve around the blindingly bright window, while the depth of the space—–and the mood of the enigmatic nude figure within it—–remains difficult to discern.
photograph. The resulting images reveal our surrounding built environment in new ways and highlight the intriguing transformation that takes place when the camera converts three dimensions into two. Emily Talbot Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow, 2015–2016 with Jennifer Friess Assistant Curator of Photography Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost and the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment.
Through these approaches and many more, the photographers represented in this exhibition reinterpret their architectural subjects by focusing on the creative act of constructing a 13
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PAGES 14–16: Jim Cogswell, Digital studies for Cosmogonic Tattoos, 2016. Courtesy of the artist
JIM COGSWELL:
COSMOGONIC TATTOOS J
im Cogswell is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the U-M Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, where he teaches primarily painting and drawing. In his creative practice he explores a variety of media languages and has been involved in interdisciplinary projects with a diverse range of colleagues. His collaborations have included performance works, videos, book illustration, sculptures, and installations with poets, dancers, musicians, composers, an anthropologist and historian, cosmologists, astronomers, a biostatistician, and computer science and mechanical engineers. In celebration of the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial, Professor Cogswell was invited to create a sequence of public window installations based on reassembled fragments from a broad selection of artworks in the collections of the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. For this visionary project, the artist created a procession of vivid images on the glass walls of the museums in a rhythmically evocative narrative, as well as a series of related drawings at UMMA. Following is an interview with Professor Cogswell on the occasion of these installations.
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umma commons | april 22–december 3, 2017 Your most recent campus and community collaborations have been vibrant and highly visible vinyl-on-glass installations. How did you come to this medium, and how does it relate to your training as a painter? Large glass windows are such a common architectural feature of contemporary public spaces that we hardly notice how they open out our built environments. Adhesive vinyl technology enables me to transform those spaces while escaping the physical constraints and social expectations of the white cube. Viewers encounter the work unexpectedly in the places where they walk and congregate. They don’t need to be looking for it, or even identify it as art. Through vinyl I’m also exploring the potential of painting beyond the conventions of brush and pigment applied to canvas. By displacing image making to this new context, I’m able to reinvigorate my own assumptions about what it means to make paintings while still playing with elements common to both—even conventional expectations of a painting as simultaneously window and embellished surface. Tell us a bit about the title of this dual-site installation. Cosmogonies are our explanations for how our world came to be, reflecting our assumptions about the fundamental nature of the universe. They inflect our values and help determine how we behave in the world, how we think of who we are as a species, as a society, as individuals. Through collection, curation, and display, our museums narrate the objects they contain to make statements about how we see ourselves. I am tattooing the exteriors of UMMA and the Kelsey in this project—–ornamenting their architectural skins with images of what is found inside and reframing the stories they tell about who we are and how we came to be who we are. What objects did you draw from in creating this piece and why were they selected?
At the Kelsey, I come face to face with enigmatic objects bearing the traces of hands, and, through those hands, minds and circumstances utterly incomprehensible to me. In the process of working with them, again and again I found myself redeploying a particular hand from a painting of Athena found on a small Greek vase. Shifted from one context to another, that one hand seemed to have unlimited expressive and narrative potential. It was a reminder of the human presence at the other end of this process, the laborers who fashioned these objects. It was an expression of my own fascination with the centrality of making and creation in the development of human cognition, and also of how we use our hands as a form of symbolic communication, to shape and express our inner states. I also kept reusing that one hand because so many hands were missing in the objects around me. Within many of the paintings and sculptures at UMMA hands are central to narrating abstract concepts, the dynamics of human relationships, and the identities of depicted players. I began plundering the hands that I found at UMMA because I needed them so badly to bring the objects from the Kelsey to life, to give them contemporary agency. In many cases you employ parts of an object, a particular design feature, rather than the whole. Do you want the viewer to be able to recognize the whole from the parts? It’s not essential that viewers recognize where the fragments I’m using come from. I emphasize their fragmentary character to make it clear that these reconstituted objects don’t belong together, and to trigger associations between otherwise unconnected objects and experiences. At the Kelsey we encounter many objects in a state of fragmentation, wounded by the violence of history, defaced by natural disaster, reshaped through the normal course of physical decay. Their presence in the museum itself is an act of
fragmentation, a separation from the original contexts that gave them meaning. Combining fragments from the Kelsey with fragments from objects at UMMA allows me to capitalize on their original meanings while opening them up to new interpretations. It also turns the tables on time and power relations, ancient cultures looting modern splendor. Having said that, there are rewards for viewers who recognize the specific origins of a hybrid configuration. For example, the hand staunching General Wolfe’s mortal wound is offering the same towel to Aphrodite in her shower; the inverted Yoruba mask has been reconstructed using fragments from the ancient eastern Mediterranean, a kind of reverse colonization; or the arm riding on a long board and cupping an ear belongs to Nydia, the blind girl of Pompeii, headed across State Street toward another volcanic eruption in progress at the Kelsey. You bring together design elements from objects of diverse cultures and periods of time. My installation comments on museum collections to get at a larger issue, which is the mutability of all objects and meanings, how the significance of an object or experience changes depending on its context. Cultures thrive by borrowing from each other; both the borrowed objects and the societies involved are altered in that transaction. The collected objects in museums are only one example of this. Any gathering of objects alters their individual meanings. Museums provide a context in which gathered objects take on added significance by virtue of the values we associate with museums themselves, most often without examining whose and what those values are. The story of the objects gathered in our museums is a story not only of displaced things but also of displaced peoples. My installation is as much about migration continued on page 16
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and exile, loss and longing, as it is about the objects that were plundered, exchanged, and destroyed in the movement of peoples through history. We are witnessing today a mass migration of peoples from places that we as a society have had a hand in making unlivable. Objects from the Kelsey featured in the installation at UMMA are directly relevant to that story, as they are gathered from the very same geographies that are witness to so much heartbreaking turmoil today. How will the visitor experience and make meaning from these installations at UMMA and the Kelsey this spring? The gathering of my images on the windows of these institutions is essential to their meaning. The views and reflections on the glass that the vinyl images are superimposed on, how those relationships morph as a viewer walks by, the light shifting according to weather and time of day, the framing and echoing of objects on display nearby, and the interaction with the architectural context all become part of the content of the work. By calling attention to museum display as a picture plane through which we view the panorama of our histories, I’m proposing the museum as a fictive space built on coincidence and personal narrative, the chance layering of objects and representations subject to the reflections and curiosities of viewers as well as the obsessions of our current predicaments. That could only happen on the windows. To design my installation I’ve taken objects from different societies with 16
fundamentally different assumptions about what it means to be human and put them in dialogue with each other. I suggest identities radically different from what they appear to be while on display in the collections, but those new identities are themselves unstable. Following their metamorphoses is essential to the humor in the piece and part of its content, a reminder that the whole installation is about flexible identities and meanings. And, at a cosmological level, it’s a nod to the fact that everything we know, including ourselves, is constituted by the same cosmic dust that originated at the singular moment that our universe formed, and has been in a continual state of dissolution and reconstitution ever since. At least, that’s the story that makes sense to me. Describe for us how the narrative evolves as the viewer moves around the windows of the UMMA Commons. How are the installations at UMMA and the Kelsey in conversation? The installations at UMMA and the Kelsey are intended as a single continuously unfolding narrative that includes the gap between the two buildings. I think of the narrative beginning in the south UMMA windows facing the courtyard, where patterns establish a vibrating hum—–background radiation emanating from the singular moment of cosmic origin. On the adjacent door, a teeming human presence picks up transmissions that viewers can follow around to the north face of the building and onward to the front entrance of the Kelsey on Maynard Street. Hands sail a
harp on a great voyage across the cosmic ocean in the south windows. Weeping hands hover high in the glass corner of the Commons above a pool of tears. Around that corner calamity awaits. A trail of refugees begins here, fleeing the cataclysm, migrating toward a chromatically more various geography above, mirror image of the doomed place they’ve left behind. A witness tree stands sentinel beside them. Its roots spread upward into the archaeological layers protruding down from the mass of the museum building above. Beyond the tree, a new architectural folly is being assembled around a structural pillar of the Museum. My design for the north facing windows at UMMA describes a procession of figures from the Kelsey, exiles returning home across State Street with souvenirs pillaged from the UMMA collections, items in short supply in the lands of the antique where they come from. Transmission towers broadcast indecipherable dispatches from one side of the divide to the other. I want that gap to speak to us. About distance, movement, migration—–sagas of trade, conquest, appropriation, and plunder. Hands changing hands, shaping histories we tell ourselves in order to somehow comprehend it all. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost. Additional support for the artist’s project is provided by the University of Michigan Bicentennial Office and the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design. Cosmogonic Tattoos is on view at UMMA April 22 through December 3, 2017 and at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology from June 2 through December 17, 2017.
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corridor gallery | april 25–july 23, 2017 Julian Schnabel, Vote, 1992, screenprint. University of Michigan Museum of Art, Gift of Barbara Timmer and Catherine Glynn Benkaim, 2015/2.83
RECENT ACQUISITION:
JULIAN SCHNABEL
S
hortly before the 1992 U.S. general election, Julian Schnabel was commissioned, along with fifteen other artists, to create a work for Artists for Freedom of Expression, a project raising money for Democratic Party groups trying to elect women to the Senate. Schnabel’s contribution to this political effort was a screenprint on paper entitled Vote, an altered version of a work of the artist’s from earlier that same year.
At the time, Schnabel, one of the principal figures of 1980s Neo-Expressionism and known for his iconoclastic approach to artmaking, was working in a genre typical of his inventive style: paintings or drawings created on top of preexisting images. This strategy, in which the artist applied his own eccentric gestures onto an image that was already representational—– with narrative elements or historical references functioning on their own terms—–often resulted in works that were maddeningly dense and mysterious. Vote consists of the word “vote” scrawled across a composition entitled Judy Angel, a 1992 work on paper that featured an array of Schnabel’s marks arranged somewhat randomly over the surface of a reproduction of a Baroque-style painting.
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Schnabel’s innovative technique at this time involved introducing daubs of pigment, which obscured and compromised the illusionistic qualities of the original image and appeared to conjure something new from it that wasn’t there before. In effect, the artist’s interventions deliberately forced the entire composition into the physical space and consciousness of the viewer as an abstract art object. The application of the word “vote” adds yet another layer of complexity to the image. Schnabel often referred to his superimposed markings as “tattoos,” suggesting a transformative quality, especially if they take the form of recognizable figures or words. In the case of Vote, this transformation seems, appropriately, to connect directly back to the original borrowed image. The Baroque work, of a woman being rescued from churning waters, is a scene that speaks, in the artist’s infamously oblique way, to the political and cultural conflicts at the time. Ruth Keffer Guest curator This work was recently gifted to UMMA by Barbara Timmer (JD ‘75) and Catherine Glynn Benkaim.
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programs
LEADING & LEARNING: STUDENTS CREATE & SHAPE THE UMMA EXPERIENCE
A
s we celebrate the University of Michigan Bicentennial, UMMA is focused on engaging U-M students with art and ideas through unique learning and leadership opportunities. UMMA is particularly excited to involve undergraduate and graduate students in mentored learning and substantive project work, training the next generation of scholars, museum professionals and cultural leaders.
UMMA employs many different strategies to offer a rich array of opportunities to Michigan students, who in turn advise and create alongside UMMA’s professional staff, contributing their knowledge and talents to research, programs, scholarship, and exhibitions.
Student Brian Garcia presents at ArtsX UMMA Student Roundtable: Leadership, Diversity, and the Arts.
Each year, the UMMA Student Engagement Council (SEC) partners with student organizations to create a space for student ideas and voices to engage with a larger audience. Collaborations such as last year’s ArtsX UMMA Student Roundtable: Leadership, Diversity, and the Arts provide students the opportunity to connect around shared interests and develop leadership skills. This winter, the UMMA SEC partnered with Arts at Michigan, the Helen Zell Writers' Program, the Michigan Community Scholars Program, Michigan in Color, Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs, and WCBN to present Spectra: Voicing our Experience, an evening of song and spoken word that brought a diverse student audience together to share their experiences through art and music. SEC students also produced the 2017 Student Late Night: Bicentennial Birthday Bash.
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U-M Dance students perform original compositions inspired by sculptor Mark di Suvero.
Since the fall of 2009, UMMA and the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance present the SMTD@UMMA Performance Series. Featuring critically acclaimed U-M composition and performance faculty and their students, these performances are a unique opportunity to see creativity in action and experience original and existing repertoire related to UMMA’s exhibitions and collections.
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programs Student voices and creativity are celebrated at UMMA. Through a series of co-creation projects, UMMA invites students to share their own creative work (photographs, video, music, performance, written work) in response to the themes and ideas of our exhibitions and collections. This year, UMMA is collaborating with other campus colleagues and collections on UpstART 200: A U-M Bicentennial Project of Student and Alumni Reflection and Making. This project, organized by the north-campus-based ArtsEngine program, draws on UMMA and other extraordinary campus collections to invite students to create their own work in relationship to the history of creativity and making at the University by making available objects from U-M collections. Carrie Mae Weems’ After Manet, from May Days Long Forgotten (right) is one of approximately 50 objects in the UMMA collection that will be part of the U-M Bicentennial project.
Carrie Mae Weems, After Manet, from May Days Long Forgotten, 2002, chromogenic color print on paper. Museum purchase made possible by the W. Hawkins Ferry Fund, 2004/2.3
UMMA Student Engagement Council 2016–2017
Working in the Museum’s collections to select, research, and organize exhibitions of art objects is a unique creative experience for U-M undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduate SEC students from diverse departments, some of whom are also gaining Museum Studies credit, work to organize an annual thematic installation. This winter, the student installation explored themes relating to the American experience embodied in works by George Bellows, Edward Hopper, John Sloan, Michigan-born Carlos Lopez, and Harlem Renaissance artists Prentiss Taylor and Elizabeth Olds.
Lehti Marike Keelmann, UMMA Assistant Curator for Western Art and past Mellon Curatorial Fellow, delivers a gallery talk for the exhibition Europe on Paper.
Over the past few years, funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has helped transform UMMA’s teaching and learning enterprise and strengthened the curatorial preparation among Ph.D. students in the History of Art. UMMA has tripled the number of U-M students using galleries and study rooms in their course-work and two of the past Mellon Curatorial Fellows now have curatorial appointments. FY14 Fellow Lehti Marike Keelmann was appointed Assistant Curator for Western Art at UMMA and FY15 Fellow Emily Talbot has been appointed Assistant Curator at the Norton Simon Museum of Art in Pasadena, California. This year UMMA welcomed Alison Martino, our fifth Mellon Curatorial Fellow— and the first Africanist.
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umma happenings
Mark Clague, U-M associate professor of musicology, shares his new research on the national anthem at “The Star-Spangled Banner”: Transformation, Translation, Amnesia & Remembrance,” a lecture/performance exploring the connections with UMMA’s exhibition Traces: Reconstructing the History of a Chokwe Mask. This was one of many events offered during U-M’s annual symposium honoring the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Graduate student Olivia Johnson performs works inspired by Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes at ArtsX UMMA: Spectra: An evening of spoken word and art.
Donald Lopez, Arthur F Thurnau Professor, Arthur E Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, introduced UMMA docents to Protecting Wisdom: Tibetan Book Covers from the MacLean Collection. He brought a modern printed Buddhist text along which he examines with Mary Wakefield, UMMA docent.
Artist Khaled al-Saa’i leads a hands-on 20 demonstration of Arabic calligraphy during UMMA’s November 11 Fridays After 5.
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U-M Dance students perform works created in response to UMMA’s exhibition Europe on Paper: The Ernst Pulgram and Frances McSparran Collection.
UMMA’s Student Engagement Council, along with student organizations EnspiRED, Bronze Elegance, NOiR, and Shei Magazine, presented “The Art of Fashion” at Student Late Night: Bicentennial Birthday Bash on March 30.
Actress and playwright Lisa Kron speaks in UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium during the Zell Visiting Writers Series on December 1.
Photographer Ernestine Ruben (left), with Jennifer Friess, UMMA’s assistant curator of photography (right), gives an artist talk at her exhibition, Ernestine Ruben at Willow Run: Mobilizing Memory, during UMMA After Hours on March 10.
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campaign
GROWING THE UMMA COMMUNITY THROUGH
FREE MUSEUM MEMBERSHIP A
fter more than a year of research and planning, the Museum launched UMMA Free Membership on January 30. With the goal of transforming the way UMMA connects with its nearly 250,000 annual visitors, the program extends the Museum’s inclusive free admission philosophy to free membership.
UMMA FREE MEMBERS ENJOY: • 20% discount in the UMMA Store • Free subscription to the UMMA Magazine and calendar • and much more!
JOIN TODAY at
umma.umich.edu/ membership or on-site at the Museum Store.
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The program’s rollout and development is supported with a grant from the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan, and UMMA aims to promote free membership widely to encourage engagement with both novice and experienced UMMA visitors. UMMA Free Members will receive information on upcoming exhibitions, educational programs, and cultural events through the Museum’s magazine, calendar, and email newsletter. Other benefits include members-only invitations to special events and a 20% discount in the UMMA Store.
Financial support from the Museum’s stakeholders is still crucial for UMMA’s exhibitions as well as community and educational programs that impact more than 35,000 people each year. Donors who give $100 or more annually will receive the same benefits that they enjoyed with the former membership program, including free admission to more than 850 museums across North America and invitations to donor events throughout the year. “One of UMMA’s key goals is to create an open dialogue with our audience,” says UMMA’s Interim Director Kathryn Huss. “We are thrilled to make the Museum even more accessible to our visitors and to build a stronger, broader UMMA community through UMMA Free Membership.” Become an UMMA Free Member today at umma.umich.edu/ membership or on-site at the Museum Store.
As of late March 2017 nearly 7,000 people from around the globe have signed up for UMMA Free Membership. “Response to the program has been extraordinary,” says Carrie Throm, UMMA’s Deputy Director, Development and External Relations. “UMMA Free Membership has energized our community and we are excited to engage with our new free members.” umm a .umic h.ed u
Artisan bean-to-bar chocolate from Dexter, Michigan
New leather and brass jewelry
Japanese and local ceramics
SEASONAL DÉCOR, GIFTS, CARDS, AND ACCESSORIES HANDMADE JEWELRY INSPIRED BY THE MUSEUM’S COLLECTION EXHIBITION RELATED PUBLICATIONS Into the Mysterium by Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors – Part I: Figuration artist, Michele Oka Doner
Color Me Michigan: A University of Michigan Coloring Book A snapshot taken at the U-M Cabinet Shop of our new cherry wood Campus Wood block Ms currently in production there. We are loving the grain on these! The cherry wood used to produce these block Ms was repurposed from trees removed for construction at the U-M Engineering campus in 2016. These and some never before seen campus wood products will soon be available for purchase at the UMMA Store!
FEATURED REGIONAL ARTISTS HANDCRAFTED WOOD GIFTS MADE FROM REPURPOSED CAMPUS TREES
Sweetwaters Coffee, Tea, and Baked Goods Available Daily
SHOP ONLINE! STORE.UMMA.UMICH.EDU STORE HOURS MON–SAT 11 A.M.–5 P.M., SUN 12–5 P.M.
Non-Profit Organization U.S. Postage PA I D Ann Arbor, MI Permit No. 144
525 South State Street Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1354 734.764.0395 umma.umich.edu
For up-to-date details on UMMA exhibitions and programs, visit umma.umich.edu or follow UMMA on Facebook or Twitter! connect online facebook.com/ummamuseum twitter.com/ummamuseum instagram.com/ummamuseum
make a gift
january 28–may 7, 2017 Constructing Gender: The Origins of Michigan’s Union and League february 18–june 11, 2017 Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors— Part I: Figuration march 11–august 20, 2017 Ernestine Ruben at Willow Run: Mobilizing Memory
umma.umich.edu or umma-giving@umich.edu
april 1–july 23, 2017 Moving Image: Performance
gallery hours
april 22–december 3, 2017 Jim Cogswell: Cosmogonic Tattoos
May–September Tuesday through Saturday 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Sunday 12–5 p.m. Closed Mondays
store hours Monday through Saturday 11 a.m.–5 p.m. Sunday 12–5 p.m.
building hours
april 22–july 30, 2017 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer: Wavefunction, Subsculpture 9 april 25–july 23, 2017 In Focus: Julian Schnabel may 13–august 13, 2017 Picturing Buildings: Photographers and Architecture, 1855–1985
May–September The Forum, Commons, and selected public spaces in the Maxine and Stuart Frankel and the Frankel Family Wing are open daily 8 a.m.–6 p.m.
july 1–october 29, 2017 Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors— Part II: Abstraction
The Museum is always free. $10 suggested donation appreciated.
july 29–november 26, 2017 Moving Image: Portraiture
july 25–december 10, 2017 In Focus: Sam Nhlengethwa
university of michigan board of regents: Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc; Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor; Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe; Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms; Andrea Fischer Newman, Ann Arbor; Andrew C. Richner, Grosse Pointe Park; Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor; Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor; Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio contributors: Lisa Borgsdorf, Jim Cogswell, Katie Derosier, Kathleen Forde, Jennifer Friess, Mark Gjukich, Kathryn Huss, Ruth Keffer, Peter Leix, Carole McNamara, Natsu Oyobe, Anna Sampson, Jakob Skogheim, Ruth Slavin, Levi Stroud, Emily Talbot, Leisa Thompson, Carrie Throm, Nettie Tiso editor: David Lawrence designers: Paul Koob + Angie Stranyak