Celebrating the Fleming as a Gateway to the Arts

THE ARTS | This fall, the Fleming Museum marks joining UVM’s new School of the Arts with the first-ever group exhibition featuring the work of faculty members from the school’s studio art program. Bridging the artist’s studio and the museum space, PRAXIS: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM provides a unique opportunity for members of the university and local and regional communities to discover and explore the creative work of UVM’s current teaching artists.

The exhibition brings together an array of artworks, in different media, created by 15 established and emerging artists. Each artist’s work has a distinct presence in the exhibition while, at the same time, generating meaningful relationships with other works shown in the galleries.

The works in this exhibition invite exploration of praxis as an approach to art making and more. “Praxis” is a term for a reflective process of thinking and making through which artists can nurture transformative change in their work, in the world and the self, and in their students’ lives. The exhibition opens thinking about how the acts of making art and teaching can shape each other and what it means, right now, to be a teaching artist at UVM.

Across the Marble Court from PRAXIS, a new exhibition explores how art objects can illuminate the many ways in which place matters to the human experience. Art can give visual form and material expression to human connection to place. So too, art can reveal different ways that humans have and continue to imbue places with meaning.

Grounded in these ideas, Art and the Matter of Place presents a small, compelling group of works from the Fleming’s collections. Through contemplation of form and materials, these objects encourage critical thinking about place and why it matters. A photograph of a marble quarry, for example, can evoke reflection on human interactions with material environments and natural resource extraction. A jar can offer insights about traditional cultural, geographical, and ecological knowledge of place. And additional objects can expand thinking about human attachment to place and more.

Fleming staff are increasingly thinking about issues of place. As part of their ongoing Fleming Reimagined effort, they are considering how to make the museum a more welcoming and inclusive place for everyone. They are also reflecting on the museum’s colonialist history of collecting and displaying objects: practices that involved removing objects from places where they were originally made and used and where they formed an integral part of cultural life.

This work of reimagining the ways in which objects are displayed in the museum has its most ambitious installation to date in the museum’s new Collections Gallery. Over the course of this past summer, the small but productive Fleming team—composed of staff and interns—has made significant changes to this gallery which, at one time, housed the museum’s geo-centric European and American Gallery. These changes include improvements to the physical space of the galleries and a complete reinstallation of art objects drawn from across the Fleming’s collections—both of which aim to make the Collections Gallery a more welcoming and inclusive space for everyone to enjoy.