Do you remember that a couple of months ago I wrote about visiting five art galleries on the UMass campus?  I ran out of time that week and was not able to visit the sixth gallery on my list, but by now, we’ve begun another year and another semester.  Although it was bitterly cold today even at mid-day, with a piercing wind, at the start of my lunch hour I headed across campus to the University Museum of Contemporary Art, a small gallery on the ground floor of the Fine Arts Center.  This space was not always known as the UMCA; I remember previous visits when it was simply the Fine Arts Center Gallery. Perhaps the focus has sharpened and the mission has changed. At any rate, the website declares:

The University Museum of Contemporary Art – the teaching museum of the University Massachusetts Amherst – is a multidisciplinary, international laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art.

Through exhibitions, a permanent collection, educational programming, and a visiting artists program, the University Museum of Contemporary Art acts as a forum where renowned and emerging artists can test ideas and where diverse audiences can participate in cultural experiences that enhance understanding of the art of our time.

This year the gallery is celebrating its fortieth year with a special exhibit titled 40 Years/40 Artists.  In recognition of the UMCA’s impact on their careers, local, national, and international artists agreed to donate works to the UMCA’s permanent collection; this diverse group includes such figures as Daniel Buren, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jenny Holzer, Robert Irwin, Ellen Phelan, Avery Preesman, Scott Prior, Joel Shapiro, Beat Streuli, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems, and William Wegman.  Insofar as the Museum collects primarily works on paper, most of these donated works are photographs, drawings, or prints.

As I mentioned before, I have conventional tastes, so I must confess that my favorite works from this exhibit were the six silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol; I especially liked Sitting Bull, 1986, and Hammer and Sickle, 1977.

I brought my camera with me, and when I saw some other students taking photos with those ubiquitous smart phones, I snapped a few shots, without using flash, of course.  I’m not sure of the legality of all this, but these materials are copyrighted; please don’t re-publish them without attribution.

I also admired William Wegman‘s silver gelatin print Double Header, 1992, and Scott Prior‘s Pumpkins and Snowman, both polymer intaglio and digital pigment ink prints from 2005.

Also on exhibit at the UMCA until March 8th is Yu-Fei Ji‘s Migrants, Ghosts, and the Dam.  This contemporary Chinese artist is known for his use of traditional ink painting on handmade rice paper: he uses centuries-old painting techniques, including calligraphy, in the style of traditional Chinese landscape painting.  On display are a number of his works from the past ten years, including a scroll painting, which when unrolled is over ten meters long, as well as a three-meter-long watercolor woodcut print.  The contrast between his style and his subjects, such as the Three Gorges Dam and its negative consequences for millions of village people, is striking.  The artist has been in residency as UMass this past week and participated in a number of public talks and workshops.  Last night the film Still Life, directed by Jia Zhangke, was screened at the School of Management Auditorium, with the artist on hand for commentary.

This photo is a close-up of one section of Four People Leaving Badong, 2009, ink and watercolor on Xuan paper:

Recently, I read an article on the UMass website about the art galleries on campus and was immediately inspired to do my own Art Crawl — I guess it’s like a pub crawl but without the beer. I’m only on campus during the day during the work week, so in the past week, I used my lunch hours and an hour after work to visit five of the galleries mentioned in the article.

My first stop was Herter Art Gallery, on lunch hour on Tuesday, which I had never visited before, even though the building is next door to Whitmore, where I worked for over five years.  The gallery consists of two rooms, with an exhibit in each. I didn’t care for new media artist Jenny Vogel’s Methought I Saw a Thousand Fearful Wrecks, as it left me unmoved. I was more appreciative of the print show titled Intercourse. Apparently, I am more of a traditionalist, because my two favorite works were Matthew Van Asselt’s Arboretum #2/35, 2013 (16-color screenprint) and Alex Dodge’s Eternity is without limits, and so it has no flaws #16/30, 2012 (6 color screenprint with braille texture on 2-ply museum board).

Yesterday, I visited three galleries.  On lunch hour, I went to New Africa House near the Central Residential Area to the Augusta Savage Gallery — again, I don’t think I had ever been there. There were two women artists showing in an exhibit titled Power/Play.  I did not care for filmmaker Holly Fisher’s work, though it was probably not the right context in which to view it (in other words, I don’t think a gallery is the setting in which to view a 2-hour film on human rights violations in Burma). I did warm to photographer Liane Brandon’s work, the collection of photographs of women powerlifters called Lift. She says of her subjects, “The four women . . . range in age from 27 to 60. They are smart, interesting, and strong.”  Yes! You go, Jessica, Lodrina, Candace, and Jane!

I noticed that two of the galleries are open after 5, so these I visited after work. After parking in the lot near Boyden Gym, I walked quickly (it was quite cold) through the tunnel under Massachusetts Avenue to the Southwest Residential Area. I wasn’t sure exactly where the gallery was, so I wandered around until I found it. The Hampden Gallery featured three exhibits, all focused on animals. As you know, I’m an animal lover, so I was quite taken with these.  Elizabeth Keithline’s Only the Strong Survive features wire sculptures of animals, life-sized, staring down a ’69 Dodge Charger. What? you ask, What’s that about? The artist says you’re supposed to think about whether animals are actually stronger than cars (I say, I hope so). Animalia: The Endangered is a collection of dawn howkinson siebel’s oil paintings of endangered animals (only charismatic megafauna, sorry). These are portraits of individual animals, painted against a darkened background, and they are truly beautiful and haunting. My favorites were Simon the black-footed ferret and Margaret the tiger. The third exhibit, titled The Meek Shall Inherit, was co-curated by Elizabeth Keithline and Bernard Leibov. The curators’ statement says that the exhibit focuses on “the effects of human self-extension on the lives of animals in the modern built environment.” My favorites in this exhibit were two prints, Roger Peet’s Moon, Ghosts, and Mora, 2010 (block print and stencils on mulberry paper) and Meredith Stern’s Owl, 2012 (reduction linoleum block print).

My last stop yesterday evening was the small Louis and Hilda Greenbaum Gallery in the Commonwealth Honors College Elm Building, in the Melvin Howard East Wing. This photographic exhibit was curated by Art History majors, with special thanks to the UMass University Archives and Special Collections, as well as to the staff of the Image Collection Library. The exhibit is titled Vanishing UMass and I found it fascinating. There were photographs from the turn of the century, which of course everyone finds quaint, but my gaze lingered on the more unusual and even the more recent images. There was a group photo of the women’s rifle team from 1928; there were photographs of events on Mount Toby; Winter Carnival was much enjoyed but is no longer held. In 1979, there was a student-run Photo Co-op, sure to induce nostalgia now that almost no one processes film. I was struck by a 1987 photo of a computer lab — the equipment looked so dated, and yet I myself was using it at UMass in 1987! The most beautiful image was an undated, untitled time-lapse photo of a woman performing on the balance beam; “vanishing” is the appropriate term, as there is no varsity or intramural gymnastics today at UMass.

Today during lunch hour I toured the exhibit in the Student Union Art Gallery, which, because it’s centrally located, I have visited a number of times in the past.  For the record, it was established in 1957 and thus is the oldest exhibition space on campus.  I think this exhibit, titled Representations of Oppression and Liberation, closes tomorrow, so I got there just in time. This was a multi-dimensional exhibit, I guess you could call it, as there was a variety of stuff displayed: a large participatory mural, huge photographs, including one of Martin Luther King on the National Mall, books on bookshelves, a bulletin board with inspirational quotes, information about the Ebola epidemic, student-made “masks of liberation,” Romare Bearden collages, reflections from “Stand Against Racism, 2010.”  I also flipped through a compilation of “Extracts from the FBI file on W E B DuBois #100-99729” (our library is named after him), which was both sobering and chilling.  On my way out, I picked up three handouts, a news article on waning support for diversity, a list of opportunities to engage, and a schematic of Bobbie Harro’s “Cycle of Liberation” from Readings for Diversity and Social Justice.

As the blog post title indicates, this is Part One; coming soon is Part Two of the Fall 2014 Art Crawl.  Keep reading.