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from the director
umma news UMMA RECEIVES HIGHEST NATIONAL RECOGNITION Awarded Re-Accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums UMMA is ranked third on the overall list, behind only the museums of Harvard University and the Rhode Island School of Design—two private universities. The criteria used for the ranking were: a permanent collection spanning multiple historical and cultural periods; the size of the collection; unique opportunities for university students; and significant community involvement.
I am delighted to share with you the exciting news that UMMA has been recognized as the top public university art museum in the country by Best College Reviews.
The ranking notes: “Pushing the definition of what it means to be an art museum, the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s massive expansion and remodel made this art museum into the ‘new town square for the 21st century.’” In tandem with this extraordinary honor, I am very proud that UMMA has just been reaccredited by the American Alliance of Museums, who called our institution a “model of excellence” and “a great example of an academic museum fully embedded within the university.” More details can be found on p. 3. This season we continue to offer programming that exposes our community to critical perspectives and new thinking about art as a lens on the world. Our exhibition The Connoisseurs’ Legacy: The Collection of Nesta and Walter Spink showcases the Spinks’ generosity not only as collectors and donors, but as educators and progressive thinkers, influencing generations of students at U-M. Their dedication to art
as a force for change, essential and humanizing, informs our presentation of the work of Catherine Opie, in the exhibition 700 Nimes Road. In her fearlessness as a photographer, and as a female artist, Opie serves as a role model for a new generation. Finally, I am thrilled with the success of the Museum’s role in the U-M Victors for Michigan campaign; as of this writing we have reached $29 million, or more than 70 percent of our $40 million goal. I am especially gratified that we recently achieved a key campaign priority, the endowment of our Manager of Academic Teaching and Outreach position, which you can read about on p. 22. These significant achievements are due in large part to the dedication and support of our donors, docents, U-M alumni, community partners, and, of course, our amazing staff. Thanks to all of you, UMMA can continue its mission to engage and transform the lives of students and inspire our broader community. I hope to see all of you at the Museum this spring and summer. Warmest regards,
UMMA has again achieved accreditation by the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), the highest national recognition for a museum. Accreditation brings national recognition to a museum for its commitment to excellence, accountability, high professional standards, and continued institutional improvement. All museums must undergo a reaccreditation review every ten years to maintain accredited status. UMMA has been accredited since 1973. Of the nation’s nearly 17,500 museums over 1,000 are currently accredited. UMMA is one of only 37 museums accredited in Michigan. “The University of Michigan Museum of Art is a model of excellence in many areas, including collections stewardship, organizational health, education, and planning,” noted Burt Logan, Chair of the AAM Accreditation Committee. “The Museum is to be congratulated on the expansion of its physical facilities, increased fundraising success, and excellent educational offerings. UMMA is also commended for its inclusive strategic planning process and alignment of institutional mission between Museum departments and partners. The University deserves praise for its strong support of the Museum. UMMA is a great example of an academic museum fully embedded within the university.”
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Joseph Rosa director
Fridays After 5 has become much more than just extended
CONTENTS
gallery hours at UMMA. With generous support from Comerica Bank and the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan,
From the Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
Programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
UMMA News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
UMMA Happenings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
Exhibitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
docent tours, scavenger hunts, and collaborations with local
In Focus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16
UMMA Store . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
businesses. Join UMMA for Fridays After 5 on May 13, June 10,
UMMA has enhanced the evening hours events to include fun and interactive programming such as live music, student
and July 22—the Museum will be open until 8:00 p.m.! Check out the UMMA Store while you’re here for special Fridays After 2
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5 sales and promotions.
Théodore Rousseau, Landscape with Figures, 1828–1832, pen and ink, ink wash and graphite on paper. The Paul Leroy Grigaut Memorial Collection, 1969/2.100
UMMA ROUSSEAU HEADED TO LOS ANGELES AND DENMARK The J. Paul Getty Museum and the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek have organized an exhibition on the work of Théodore Rousseau titled Unruly Nature: The Landscapes of Théodore Rousseau, scheduled to open at the J. Paul Getty Museum on June 21, 2016, and at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek on October 13, 2016. UMMA is lending the artist’s Landscape with Figures, shown above. With its agitated lines, energetic wash technique, tempestuous mood, and mountainous scenery, this remarkable drawing represents the height of Rousseau’s romantic ardor in the years around 1830. Without equivalent in any other North American museum collection, this rare drawing is one of the very few works from the outset of Rousseau’s career in the exhibition and stands in dramatic context to the more painstaking pen-and-ink line drawings he made in later years.
UMMA APPOINTMENT Jennifer M. Friess Assistant Curator of Photography In October 2015 Jennifer Friess was appointed UMMA’s first Assistant Curator of Photography. Jennifer is currently a PhD candidate in History of Art at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. She began her graduate studies in 2010 following a Master’s degree from Case Western Reserve University and a BFA degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her dissertation is titled “Energizing Paris: Photography and Electric Light in the Interwar Period.” She worked at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, and most recently the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas. 3
a. alfred taubman gallery | june 11–september 11, 2016
exhibitions
CATHERINE OPIE 700 NIMES ROAD
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atherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road presents new and recent work by Los Angeles-based artist Catherine Opie, one of the essential figures in contemporary photography. Beginning in 2010, Opie spent six months taking photographs at the Bel Air, California, home of Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011). Inspired by William Eggleston’s images of Elvis Presley’s Graceland estate in Memphis, Opie created a portrait of Taylor that captures the Hollywood legend’s essence through her personal objects and mementos. The exhibition includes fifty works drawn from two series, Closets and Jewels and 700 Nimes Road. Opie photographs rooms, closets, shoes, clothing, and jewelry that intimately depict Taylor’s life as a screen star and cultural icon, compiling an indirect portrait of a life defined by wealth and fame. Light and color are vibrant, forming a view of the actress’s home that radiates the aura of a unique personality. With an investigative eye, Opie documents the grandeur and minute details of the home in a range of visual scales. Scrutinizing without revealing the complete picture, objects accumulate, rooms become landscapes, and clothing is transformed into fields of color and texture. Opie’s lens portrays Taylor’s life experience and eccentricity as an illusory subject, one that cannot be specifically designated or precisely described. In the artist’s words, the project is not about the relationship to celebrity but about “the relationship to what is human.”
Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road is organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This exhibition is made possible with lead support provided by J.P. Morgan Private Bank and major support from Jamie McCourt, and Gilena Simons.
Clockwise from top: Balloon Shades from the 700 Nimes Road Portfolio, 2010–2011, pigment print, 16 1/2 x 22 in., courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
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Handbag Reflection from the 700 Nimes Road Portfolio, 2010–2011, pigment print, 22 x 16 1/2 in., courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
Trophy Room from the 700 Nimes Road Portfolio, 2010–2011, pigment print, 16 1/2 x 22 in., courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
Lead support for UMMA’s installation is provided by the University of Michigan Health System, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch, and Alan Hergott and Curt Shepard. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan Department of the History of Art, Department of Screen Arts and Cultures, and Department of American Culture.
Cover: Andy Warhol to Elizabeth (Self-Portrait Artist) from the 700 Nimes Road Portfolio, 2010-2011, pigment print, 16 1/2 x 22 in., courtesy of the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
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RELATED PUBLICATION CATHERINE OPIE: 700 NIMES ROAD Published to coincide with the exhibition Catherine Opie: 700 Nimes Road, the publication features an interview with the artist and essays by writers Hilton Als and Ingrid Sischy. Hardcover, fully illustrated, published by Prestel. Available for $60 from the UMMA Store.
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a. alfred taubman gallery | june 18–september 25, 2016
THE CONNOISSEURS’ LEGACY
exhibitions
THE COLLECTION OF NESTA AND WALTER SPINK
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uring a trip to India in 1952, Nesta and Walter Spink, two highly accomplished scholars, began to assemble a wide-ranging collection of art that reflects their eclectic interests, inquisitive minds, and keen appreciation of form. True connoisseurs, they were undaunted by unattributed works, trusting their eyes and experience to select objects they found beautiful, interesting, or useful for teaching. Over the years they have made more than 280 donations to the Museum, including a large group of terracottas and miniature paintings from South Asia, as well as a rich representation of its folk art traditions; European graphic art ranging from Medieval manuscript leaves, to eighteenth-century French sketches, academic studies and engravings, to mid-twentieth-century masters; and Japanese woodblock prints. A fascinating aspect of the Spink’s gifts is that they include works that reflect the tastes and expertise of peer collectors: Old Master prints and drawings purchased from the estate of Paul L. Grigaut (1905–1969), Associate Director at UMMA; twentieth-century drawings and prints bequeathed to them by UMMA’s first curator, Helen B. Hall (1905–1992); and Chinese bronzes purchased with the assistance of Caroline Plumer (1901–1995), a collector of Asian art with her husband, Professor James Marshall Plumer. The Connoisseurs’ Legacy: The Collection of Nesta and Walter Spink brings these objects together for the first time, providing insights into the tremendous breadth of their interests and the delight they took in collecting beyond their areas of expertise.
collections, including Asian and European art; she was also responsible for bringing significant works by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Käthe Kollwitz into the collection. Walter Spink, Professor Emeritus of Early Buddhist and Hindu Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting in the U-M Department of the History of Art, is best known for his paradigm-shifting research on the fifth-century cave temples at Ajanta, India, and for his lively and engaging teaching. Together they have trained and mentored a nexus of artists, scholars, and museum professionals around the world who will continue to shape their fields.
The exhibition The Connoisseurs’ Legacy: The Collection of Walter and Nesta Spink is co-curated by Carole McNamara, Curator Emerita, and Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian Art.
Paul Klee, Zeichnung zum Drama der Entzweiung (Drawing for a Drama of Disunion), 1921, ink on paper. Gift of Professor Walter M. and Nesta R. Spink, 2008/2.292
Nesta Spink is regarded as the preeminent authority on the lithographic work of James McNeill Whistler and is the author of the catalogue raisonné of his lithographs. As curator at UMMA from 1967 to 1979 she worked on important exhibitions and publications on the entire scope of the Museum’s
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Clockwise from top left Saturn, mounted on a tiger, India, Rajasthan, Jaipur school, circa 1840, ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper. Gift of Professor Walter M. and Nesta R. Spink, 1987/1.248 Hans Sebald Beham, Achilles and Hector, 1518–1530, engraving on laid paper. Gift of Professor Walter M. and Nesta R. Spink, 2012/2.195 Phulkari shawl with stylized floral patterns, India, Eastern Punjab, 1st half of 20th century, silk embroidery on homespun cotton cloth. Gift of Professor Walter M. and Nesta R. Spink, 2005/2.10
Anyone who has had the good fortune to study Whistler prints, as I have, with Nesta, or to accompany Walter on excursions to Ajanta, knows they are consummate teachers who can’t help but convey to others their pleasure in art and life. Indeed, they collected with an eye toward sharing what they knew and loved. This exhibition, drawn from their varied and rich donations to the Museum and supplemented with a handful of loans, demonstrates their appreciation of works that have an intrinsic quality of conception and execution; it also celebrates their many contributions to the Museum of Art and the wider University of Michigan community, which they will continue to enrich through their generous gifts. Carole McNamara curator emerita
Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan Center for South Asian Studies.
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exhibitions
CATIE NEWELL OVERNIGHT
Detroit-based architect Catie Newell’s work is focused on the tactile, sensory qualities of the materials we use to build things: their texture, density, or malleability. As both a designer and a practitioner, she most often turns to making rather than drawing, preferring what she describes as “an on-the-ground, through-the-dirt way of working.” Her investigations combine architectural research, material studies, and art experiments that include photography and even glass blowing—a strategy she began as a student that now defines her career. Her body of work goes beyond conventional practice to explore inventive solutions to architectural problems. Newell’s early projects led her to discover what has become the most important element in her formal vocabulary—light. In her work light is not only a “material” in its own right but a condition. As it varies in strength, form, and duration, light constructs architecture as a situational experience rather than a fixed space. Newell’s fascination with light is also a fascination with darkness. Darkness and its surrogates—ambient light, residual light, shadows, haze, and other “interruptions”—give an environment what she calls
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exhibitions
irving stenn, jr. family gallery | june 11–november 6, 2016
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its double life: in daytime a landscape may be seen and known—familiar, predictable, trustworthy—but at night it succumbs to a darkness that, in her words, removes its walls, alters its spaces, and haunts, becoming risky, even dangerous, and ultimately alien. Through urban interventions, installations, and photographs, Newell investigates these alternate environments, exploring their unseen geographies, untold histories, and secret identities. The camera, with its controllable reaction to light, is her essential tool, and photography serves her work as both practice and metaphor. The photograph can record an ephemeral moment in a space, a condition that is otherwise fleeting and weightless, and fix it within the frame. In her ongoing series Nightly, for example, featuring nighttime images of Detroit streetscapes and interiors, darkness or near darkness is both subject and principal compositional element. The scenes are hard to discern, and the photographs, printed with a metallic sheen that seems to shift coloration as one moves around them, recreate for the viewer the experience of unreliable illumination. Newell, who is an assistant professor of architecture at U-M Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, is also a recent recipient of the Rome Prize s p r i n g / s u m m e r 2016
in architecture. Her work is emblematic of an emerging generation of solo female practitioners who look to other mediums, beyond architecture, to inform their explorations.
Nightly Series, 2015, Courtesy of the artist ©Catie Newell
Overnight features photographs from her Rome project, as well as new images from the Nightly Series, alongside a site-specific sculptural installation commissioned by the Museum. The installation explores the way certain materials react to and manipulate light, through reflections and shadows, transparency and opacity, clarity and obstruction. These conditions generate a constantly shifting experience in the gallery itself creating its own double life that is alternately revealed and disguised as the light, both natural and artificial, comes and goes. Joseph Rosa curator with Jane DeChants, Exhibitions Manager Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
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exhibitions
photography gallery | may 14–october 23, 2016
exhibitions
MANUEL ÁLVAREZ BRAVO
MEXICO’S POET OF LIGHT
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anuel Álvarez Bravo (1902–2002) spent nearly his entire career, from the 1920s to the 1990s, photographing his native Mexico; his style drew upon international influences ranging from the Modernism of Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, whom he met when they spent time in Mexico in the 1920s, to the formally exquisite photojournalism of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Walker Evans, whose work he knew in New York, and the Surrealism of André Breton, who visited Mexico around 1940. In spite of his exchanges with many of the major artists of his lifetime, Álvarez Bravo’s aesthetic was wholly his own.
not share the French photographer’s riotous embrace of life, but rather they seem to see behind a veil to something larger, something perhaps beyond our comprehension. Subjects have multilayered meanings; simple objects are invested with a stillness and a gravity that seem to extend far beyond the edges of the picture frame—whether it is dazzling light on a woman’s cascading hair as she combs it in the sun, or children silhouetted against a white cloth watching a performance past our view. His compositions of ordinary objects—often natural forms juxtaposed against manmade—suggest correspondences outside our daily life available to those who will take the time to find them.
The artist’s images of life in Mexico reveal an environment in which light not only illuminates but also serves as a metaphor. Everyday scenes, from votive images and views of religious artifacts to rural landscapes and languid street scenes with pedestrians, seem charged with meaning, like static in the air during electrical storms. His photographs carved out a distinct visual identity of Mexico that balanced Modernism against mysticism, a Latin sensibility within an otherwise Eurocentric and American artistic background, a synthesis of the indigenous and the international not unlike that of his friends Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
The exhibition features twenty-three photographs, all drawn from UMMA’s collection. Although not strictly Surrealist, many of Álvarez Bravo’s works manifest a similarly fantastical mood. One of the artist’s most arresting characteristics is his ability to imbue scenes of everyday life with an otherworldly metaphysical power. This sense of the marvelous and the secretly significant is not achieved by the drama of harsh contrasts of light against dark, although that can be present in his works. Álvarez Bravo’s photographs, particularly the early prints, have rich middle values that feel like velvet (to paraphrase Langston Hughes). This is not a hard-edged Modernist look at Latin life in Mexico, but rather an aesthetic akin to the finely wrought chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, and as full of nuance, intimacy, and silence.
Álvarez Bravo’s work has been compared with that of European masters, an assessment that arose when his photographs were shown with Cartier-Bresson’s in Mexico City in March 1935. Although they share many of the same concerns with form and composition, their photographs differ in a number of ways. As noted at the time by critic Fernando Léal, “They have taken the camera’s purely emotional function as the point of departure for their artistic expression. . . . Cartier-Bresson interrupts life, Álvarez-Bravo animates still lifes.” Álvarez Bravo’s images do 10
Far left: Lengthened Light (Luz restirada), 1977. Gift of Frederick J. Myerson, 1983/1.101.4 Near left: The Man from Papantla (Señor de Papantla), 1977. Gift of Frederick J. Myerson, 1983/1.101.8
Window on the Agaves (Ventana a los magueyes), 1976, printed ca. 1981. Gift of Lawrence and Carol Zicklin, 1987/1.174.3.
Woman Combing Her Hair (Retrato de lo eterno),1932–33, printed 1977. Gift of Frederick J. Myerson, 1985/1.130.2.
Carole McNamara curator emerita This exhibition is supported by the University of Michigan Office of the Provost, the Richard and Rosann Noel Endowment Fund, and other generous donors.
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exhibitions
media gallery | april 2–july 24, 2016
SIEBREN VERSTEEG LIKE II
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n Siebren Versteeg’s LIKE II (2016), a computer painting program creates a composition using a continuously changing algorithm, and then runs a periodic Google search to find a matching image online. Every sixty seconds, the painting made by the computer is uploaded to Google’s “search by image” feature, and the images that most closely match the composition are then downloaded and displayed next to the painting. The notion of abstraction plays a central role in this work. Throughout modernity, artists have sought inventive ways to free painting from its tradition as a representational medium; LIKE II inverts this ambition. Rather than abstracting from reality, the piece finds the reality hidden within the pure abstraction of its codes, using the indexical lens of our collective Internet presence as the means of extraction.
LIKE 2014, 2014, Internet-connected computer painting program with real-time recursive image search, © Siebren Versteeg, Images courtesy of the artist
Because it is rooted in the dynamic, continuously fluid environment of content available at any given time on the Internet, the work is perpetually evolving. Thus, though the artist is the originator of the conceit and parameters of LIKE II, a certain sense of creative control is relinquished. Versteeg says, “As the nature of the images presented by the work is random, the artist assumes both all and no responsibility for their presence and content.”
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Versteeg’s multimedia installations engage critically with the systems used to disseminate images in our culture, as well as the technology used to create them. Mining the digital realm for content, he manipulates algorithms that guide the flow of information to create artworks that balance choice and chance. This strategy continues a line of inquiry begun in twentiethcentury art—by the Dada artists, for example, with their experiments in randomness and collective creation—while being uniquely of our current era. Siebren Versteeg was born in 1971 in New Haven, Connecticut. He earned an MFA from the University of Illinois, Chicago, in 2004. He has had solo exhibitions at the Ulrich Museum of Art in Wichita, Kansas; the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; the Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence; and the Art Institute of Boston, among others. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kathleen Forde adjunct curator of media arts Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment and the University of Michigan College of Engineering and School of Information.
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exhibitions
the jan and david brandon family bridge | july 9–october 16, 2016
exhibitions
MIRA HENRY THE VIEW INSIDE
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efore joining the faculty of the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles and opening her own architecture practice, Mira Henry worked as a project architect for two New York firms, an experience that immersed her in the everyday, mundane details of how buildings get built. She became an expert in construction drawings, material specs, and building codes—seeing the world the way an architect sees it. As a progressive thinker, however, Henry’s inspiration has been to deconstruct that vision, to “unsee,” as she puts it, the very forms, materials, and representations that constitute an architect’s basic language. Henry is emblematic of an emerging generation of solo female practitioners that are moving the profession into new domains of conceptual research. By architectural definitions her process is not strictly a process at all—no client, no budget, no schedule, and no constraints of engineering. But through her drawings and installations she embarks on a seductive and often unexpectedly fruitful strategy: speculation and experimentation, propelled by a simple
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drifting of the imagination away from the known and the familiar toward the irrational, the fantastical, or the surreal. In the project In these lines there is a place, for example, she notices that a set of architectural standards for the profiles of roof eaves resembles a set of human profiles, and in their details finds not only the potential for figural, animate representation, but by extension a site for staging what she calls “shifting fantasies”—a phrase that not only describes the core focus of her conceptual work, but is also an apt characterization of how humans experience and live in architecture: subjectively and unpredictably. Color and surface patterns, and the role they play in this subjective experience, are especially interesting to Henry. Wallpaper is a prominent element in her projects, with its ability to mask, transform, or animate a space. As a “skin” applied to a surface, wallpaper, especially one with scenic images or figural patterns, can bring a static architectural form into a dynamic state where it will oscillate disconcertedly between figure and ground, or, as Henry observes,
between “the material and its image.” The View Inside—the project that gives this exhibition its title—engages this perceptual exercise, presenting viewers with an immersive visual experience that, though rendered in two-dimensional wallpaper, alters how they are able to read the spatial order of the room itself. This confusion of the real and the imagined is, for Henry, the principal condition of architectural space. Joseph Rosa curator with David Choberka, Andrew W. Mellon Manager of Academic Outreach & Teaching UMMA is showcasing the work of Mira Henry as part of a collaboration with the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. This spring, SCI-Arc presents the work of emerging architect Ellie Abrons, a faculty member at U-M’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Lead support for this exhibition is provided by the Herbert W. and Susan L. Johe Endowment.
Opposite, top and bottom: Section drawing from Come close and warm yourselves on this fine day, 2015; Drawing from In these lines there is a place, 2015, digital drawings. Images courtesy of the artist
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programs
corridor gallery | may 10–august 7, 2016
RECENT ACQUISITION: JEANNE GANG Boathouse Sketches, 2013, pencil on paper. Museum purchase, 2013/2.363.1,2
Shortly after being named a MacArthur Fellow in 2011, Chicago-based architect Jeanne Gang published Reverse Effect: Renewing Chicago’s Waterways, a study of the Chicago River that imagines its current problems—pollution, flooding, invasive species, and public inaccessibility—resolved by architectural intervention. The book, a collaboration with Gang’s students from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Chicago office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, proposes an ambitious transformation of the river through a series of modest projects and a gentle escalation of activism, bringing about what the architect calls the “rebirth” of Chicago’s riverfront. The WMS Boathouse, located in Clark Park seven miles north of downtown, is one of four boathouses that the Chicago Park District developed as part of its strategy to reclaim the river as a center for public recreation and relaxation. Completed in 2013, the WMS Boathouse is the home of the Chicago Rowing Foundation and serves a range of public rowing clubs, many of whose amateur athletes come from the city’s underserved communities. The boathouse is actually three structures: a field house with training facilities, a boat storage building, and a floating dock at the river’s edge. Its most striking feature is its roofline, a sequence of clerestories, or upper-level windows, whose forms alternate between the shape of the letter M and that of an inverted V, shapes lifted directly from a motion study that Gang’s Chicago firm Studio Gang Architects conducted of the movement of oars slicing rhythmically through the water. The motion study, itself an homage to Eadweard Muybridge’s famous photographic investigations of rowers in nineteenth-century Philadelphia, was part of the team’s methodical search for inspiration as they considered the design scheme and contemplated the human activity at the heart of the boathouse program: rowing as a physical act, a discipline, an aesthetic, and a culture. These two sketches bear witness to this process of contemplation and imagination, preserved in the architect’s own hand. The first sketch shows the contours of the roof trusses as they are positioned in sequence, punctuating the roofline in a repeating rhythm. The second sketch depicts the open, angular, and light-filled space on the interior that these forms define. The M and inverted V forms reappear on the second sketch, and seem to function, appropriately, as a signature—of the structure, of the act of rowing, and of the inspiration that brought this project to life.
The day begins with a visit from Dr. Nachiket Chanchani, Assistant Professor of South Asian Art, Architecture, and Visual Culture. Here, Dr. Chanchani, Dr. Pika Ghosh (left), from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Dr. David Haberman (center), from Indiana University, Bloomington, are discussing the formal characteristics of a fragment taken from a Markendeya Purana scroll depicting Vishnu (1980/2.306).
Meanwhile, in the other study room, Dr. Jennifer Nelson, Assistant Professor of the History of Art, starts her lecture on artworks from and about the early Americas. Throughout the Winter 2016 term, UMMA’s study rooms will be hosting HISTART 194: “How Empires Look,” an undergraduate course Dr. Nelson has structured specifically around UMMA’s holdings.
A DAY IN UMMA’S STUDY ROOMS UMMA’s dedication to research and teaching is especially evident in the Ernestine and Herbert Ruben Study Center for Works on Paper and the Object Study Room. These rooms allow students and researchers access to objects in the Museum’s collections for close examination and analysis and are an important way UMMA integrates its collection with teaching, learning, and scholarship. In a typical week during an academic semester, the study rooms will host about twelve university classes and see three visits from independent researchers. These images capture some of the wide-ranging purposes of the study rooms over the course of a single day.
Students in Dr. Nelson’s class also worked together to interpret Enrique Chagoya’s UtopianCannibal.Org (2001/2.81). Chagoya appropriates material and images from a variety of cultures in order to create piercing commentaries on European colonialism. To date, UtopianCannibal.Org has been requested by over thirty instructors, making it one of the most featured works in UMMA’s object study rooms. Right: Jennifer Friess, new Assistant Curator of Photography, is conducting a series of research projects in the study rooms this semester. To her right, Jenee Schneider, an art handler and graduate student in the U-M School of Information, assists Friess with one of the works she is investigating. Outside researchers can also request curatorial files where the Museum may have collected bibliographic information about those works of art. Below: At the close of the day, art handlers begin to prepare the works for the rest of the week’s classes.
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programs Opposite: Screen grab from video “An Interview with Xu Weixin.” Below: Xu Weixin in his studio, 2013, and with miners at the Shanxi Gaoyang coalmine, 2005
ordinary people, so it wasn’t possible to find their images online. I posted a call for their images and their stories on my blog. Many friends reached out to me, providing information. Some people wrote to me in letters. All of these people helped me in completing this group of portraits.
In the fall of 2015, UMMA’s Lisa Borgsdorf, Manager of Public Programs, and Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian Art, along with 7 Cylinders Studio, created a video with artist Xu Weixin to provide additional context for the exhibition Xu Weixin: Monumental Portraits (on view February 20–May 29, 2016). This exhibition features two acclaimed, large-size portrait series: Chinese Historical Figures: 1966–1976 and Miner Portraits. An excerpt of an interview UMMA conducted with the artist for the video project is below. The completed video can be seen in the gallery and on UMMA’s YouTube channel. UMMA: Professor Xu, what was your motivation to paint the Chinese Historical Figures: 1966–1976 series? Xu Weixin: The ten-year period from 1966 to 1976, usually called the Cultural Revolution, was an important historical moment for modern China because this period had great impact on the political, economic, and social circumstances of China. The Cultural Revolution changed 18
the course of my life and that of many Chinese people. Today, however, only a few decades later, many people have forgotten this period. UMMA: How did you decide which people to paint for that series? XW: First of all, I made different categories of the historical figures such as politicians, scholars, artists, soldiers, heroes, positive figures and negative figures. Many figures are famous. However, I also painted a number of ordinary people; they were also part of the history. I painted their portraits the same size as those of the “heroes.” The order that they were arranged in the exhibition and catalogue is according to the first letter of their family names, rather than according to any ranking of importance. UMMA: How did you find images of the portrait subjects? XW: Some of these people were very famous so the Internet had a lot of information already. About one-third of the portraits in this series are those of
UMMA: Let’s talk about your Miner Portraits series. What was your motivation for painting that series? XW: Starting around the year 2000, I began to pay special attention to combining my art projects with social reality. China is still a developing country—so I think that Realist art retains its vigor in China. Chinese art should be concerned with social reality. Before painting the miners, I had been painting Chinese migrant farm workers. Migrant workers are a social phenomenon that emerged in China’s economic boom. Rural farmers came to the city to become workers; they worked hard and helped boost our economy. Though they earned their living, they suffered a lot as well. I created a number of paintings, but most of them were not portraits. So the Miner Portraits was a project that came before the Historical Figures project. I respect and sympathize with Chinese workers. The visual impact of the miners’ images attracted me. I respect and care about the miners and I often visited them at their mines. The format of large-scale portraiture expresses my respect for the miners.
UMMA: How many portraits have you done for each series? XW: The Miner Portraits series has over twenty. Chinese Historical Figures: 1966–1976 series has over one hundred. They are different projects. One is concerned with contemporary society; one is concerned with history. Each portrait in the Miner Portraits series can be considered an independent work, but the over one hundred portraits in the Chinese Historical Figures series should be conceived of as a whole. Making a group of large-scale portraits to present history is an innovation in my artistic career. This project has been an important aspiration of mine because I have longed to present this history with an entirely new method. s p r i n g / s u m m e r 2016
Lead support for the exhibition Xu Weixin: Monumental Portraits is provided by the University of Michigan Health System, University of Michigan Office of the President, and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional generous support is provided by the University of Michigan Confucius Institute, Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, Beijing Fu Zhan Zhou Culture Art Development Co. Ltd, Boylescott Limited, and University of Michigan Ross School of Business China Initiatives.
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umma happenings
Audience members browse Soviet Constructivist Posters: Branding the New Order after a panel discussion with exhibition curator and U-M faculty. Left: Visitors enjoy listening to the sound work I am sitting in a room by Alvin Lucier.
Above: (From left to right) James Fei, Joe Rosa, Kathleen Forde, Peter Oleksik, and Alvin Lucier during the installation of Lucier’s work I am sitting in a room, January 2016. Right: Annual UMMA/UMS welcome-back reception for local K-12 teachers and administrators.
Above: Mellon Curatorial Fellow Emily Talbot leads a discussion of the exhibition Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s with K-12 teachers during UMMA’s fall teacher workshop. Below, right: U-M student Sharae Franklin presents about the work of the Michigan Community Scholars Program Intergroup Relations Council at ArtsX UMMA: Leadership, Diversity, and the Arts. Below, left: Inspired by the work of Julian Schnabel, families create their own plate paintings during UMMA’s Family Art Studio.
Artist Julian Schnabel and collector Peter Brant discuss Schnabel’s work at the Michigan Theater, presented by the Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series and UMMA. Right: Come as You Are: Art of the 1990s exhibition curator Alexandra Schwartz delivers the annual Doris Sloan Memorial Lecture in UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.
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wo couples, who are among UMMA’s most enthusiastic supporters of the Museum’s commitment to teaching and learning, have made generous pledges to help realize a key priority of UMMA’s Victors for Michigan campaign—to build stronger bonds with the academic enterprise. Richard (BA ’53) and Rosann Noel along with Peter (BA ’70) and Barbara Benedek have pledged gifts to match UMMA’s 2014 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation challenge grant. Their gifts, along with the Mellon Foundation grant have, in turn, matched the Museum’s 2013 National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) challenge grant. Combined, these funds will secure UMMA’s commitment to engaged learning in perpetuity by endowing the Manager of Academic Outreach and Teaching position. Established in 2012 through an expendable grant from the Mellon Foundation, this position has greatly expanded UMMA’s capacity to serve University of Michigan faculty, students, and staff. David Choberka, UMMA’s Manager of Academic
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Outreach and Teaching (above), works with faculty across campus to integrate Museum visits into academic coursework while also identifying and managing campus partnerships that result in significant exhibitions and other scholarly projects connecting faculty and students to the Museum’s resources, collections, and exhibitions. Choberka’s efforts over the past three years, along with those of Academic Outreach Collections Assistant Melinda Stang, have dramatically increased the number of classes visiting the Museum’s study rooms and galleries—totaling more than 360 in the 2014–2015 academic year.
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The generosity of the Noels and Benedeks is the most recent manifestation of their deep commitment to both UMMA and the University of Michigan. “Dick and Rosann and Peter and Barbara understand how art can completely transform the academic experience, for all Michigan students,” says UMMA Director Joseph Rosa. “Their vision and support, coupled with grants from the Mellon Foundation and NEH, will ensure that UMMA will forever be a national leader in engaged learning.”
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