Category: art galleries

Toubeau’s paintings take us in to a world where the future is now. Her compositions depict humans and robots interacting in ways and places which may be simultaneously startlingly odd and yet eerily familiar.

In her undergrad illustration and design work at Massachusetts College of Art and throughout her more recent explorations in the MFA Program at Umass Amherst, Toubeau developed work investigating the global economy’s effect on human labor under exploitive conditions. This path fed her fascination with robots. Toubea’s position is that robotics are highly agreed upon to be the next world scale work force which will most likely replace most of third world human laborers. This led her to visually describe our interaction with machines and cyborgs.

This exhibition is part of Central Gallery’s T.E.A.C.H. Program (Teachers Exhibiting At Central and Hampden).

Balam Soto creates interactive paintings, murals and installations by combining digital technologies with mixed media. The exhibit represents Soto’s transition from traditional to new media. As he states: “Digital technologies are taking a prominent place in the world of art and I take full advantage of this new tool. I use these emerging technologies to create custom hardware and software that add an interactive capacity to my artistic creations. I program my colorful and vibrant works to react to the presence or behaviors of individuals. Soto works so that the individual becomes part of the creative process by affecting changes in light, color or sound in the creative works, providing a seamless interaction between human and technology.”

Prolific and innovative, Balam Soto has exhibited in fine art venues worldwide. Venues include the Queens Museum of Art in New York; Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science & Art in Scranton; Pennsylvania, Colo Colo Gallery in Massachusetts; the Centre Cultural in Brussels, Belgium; the National Library of Cameroon in West Africa; and Museum Miraflores in Guatemala City, Guatemala among numerous others. In November 2009, he was awarded with the “Latino de Oro” [Golden Latino] Award for Arts & Culture in Connecticut; he was also awarded an Official Citation by Hartford, Conn. Mayor Eddie Perez. In April 2008, he was honored with a Diploma of Recognition as a master by the National Congress of Guatemala for “being a valuable and outstanding Guatemalan with international success.”

Balam Soto is currently based in Hartford, Connecticut. An online portfolio of his artwork and a complete list of exhibitions and honors may be viewed at: http://www.balam.us/.

Art Made Of or About Candy, Cakes, and Sugar.

All of the artists in this show use candy, cakes and sugar as an image or a medium to either understand a cultural convention or circumvent its resulting habitual thinking.

Works in the exhibition include a fully functioning gummi bear chandelier, candy button murals, a full size wedding cake balanced on a red hand, licorice mice addressing genocide and a motion graphic charting an entire day’s glycemic index.

Featured Artists: Richard Baker, Tom Bogaert, Ya Ya Chou, Sally Curcio, Lori Ellison , Emily Eveleth, Linda Griggs, Julia Jacquette, T. Charnan Lewis, Christina Marsh, Tracy Miller, Mary Schiliro , Rebecca Siemering, Lynn Talbot

Curator’s Statement:

As we measure our lives from the birthday cake to the wedding cake to the grief buffet., food has many meanings. Through every regional recipe and religious dietary restriction, our food-ways define us as much as our folk-ways and word-ways.

And when artists use food as medium, different meanings emerge. All of the artists in this show use candy, cakes and sugar as an image or a medium to either understand a cultural convention or circumvent its resulting habitual thinking.

In doing so, some use food as a metaphor for such varied issues as genocide in Rowanda, sublimated sex or disappointing relationships or to illuminate the lack of any nutritive quality in supposedly edible objects.
Others use the luscious tactility of sweets as a logical and natural starting point for in indulging in luscious painting.

Curators Statement:

Explosions are an unfortunate part of our visual vernacular. For many, after 2001 every explosion–real or Hollywood–was a raw,fresh, anxious sorrow.

While some of those explosions became as iconic as mushroom clouds. Others were televised so often that they faded from horror to banality. We cease to see them. Art lets us see them again and although they are processed and seen from a distance, we truly look.

Yet while explosions are devastating unto themselves there is a perverse beauty to the visual experience. We watch the flash and the smoke rising and billowing. If separated from tragedy, it is mesmerizing.

As a culture we celebrate that fascination every Fourth of July when fireworks offer us a bloodless, joyful reminder of freedom earned.

It comes as no surprise that politics and religion try to exploit or explain our seemingly inherent fascination. Burnt offerings carry sacrifices to heaven in smoke and the story of the profit Elijah who called for God to send fire and accept his sacrifice is shared by Jews, Muslims and Christians. Censers burn in cathedrals and in Jewish, Buddhist and Taoist temples, where the rising smoke is symbolic of prayers rising to heaven.

Where there’s smoke you’ll find our greatest yearnings and our worst actions.

The University Gallery is pleased to announce Just a Rumor, a new work by nationally acclaimed artist Anna Schuleit. Painted on the concrete facade of the Fine Arts Center, Just a Rumor is Schuleit’s three-story-high, upside-down portrait of a face. When the portrait’s reflection is viewed on the surface of the adjacent campus pond, the image is inverted, producing a double-portrait: the upside-down original and the right side up reflection. The painting will measure approximately 30′ x 40′, nearly 1200 square feet, and will be executed in acrylic paint. The opening reception will be on September 10th, from 5 to 7 p.m., and is open to the public.

A current MacArthur Fellow, Schuleit studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design (BFA 1998) and is the recipient of numerous art awards, including fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Bogliasco, the Blue Mountain Center, and the RISD European Honors Program in Rome. Schuleit’s major works include Bloom (2003), in which she filled the Massachusetts Mental Health Center with 28,000 flowers, and Intertidal (2007), a site-specific outdoor installation on the Boston Harbor Islands in which she addressed their military ruins, a work commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2009 Schuleit had her first solo-show of paintings and works on paper at Coleman Burke Gallery in New York.

Commissioned by the University Gallery, Just a Rumor is a new work that enables Schuleit to connect her ongoing studio practice with her experience in large, site-specific art in an idiosyncratic way. For this project Schuleit selected an outdoor location where the Fine Arts Center meets the campus pond, enabling a low-tech “projection” of the painted face by nature alone, without the use of electronic devices or screens. The effects of the reflected face in the water will be changing constantly throughout the day and into the night, inviting the viewers to re-visit the site over the project’s three-month duration. The pond is also home to numerous ducks that the artist regards as her unwitting collaborators in the piece: as they criss-cross the reflected painting, spontaneous moments of abstraction will be created, making the face disappear from the water’s surface, and then re-appear at random intervals.

Just a Rumor is the artist’s first project in Western Massachusetts since Habeas Corpus, Schuleit’s widely-known sound installation at Northampton State Hospital, in which she turned the enormous psychiatric institution into a sound body for a single day in 2000.

Articles, reviews, and scholarly essays on Schuleit’s work have appeared in the Washington Post, Newsweek, Americans for the Arts, and the European Artistic Research Network in Helsinki. She has appeared in radio and television interviews on NPR, CBS Boston, and on The Charlie Rose Show on PBS. Artforum’s current issue lists one of Schuleit’s works among its Top Ten list. More complete information about the artist can be found at anna-schuleit.com .

This collaborative project between the University Gallery, Nuestras Raices Inc. of Holyoke, Holyoke Food and Fitness Policy Council and Joseph Krupczynski (art activist, architect/designer and Umass professor) transforms a traditional mobile food cart into a visual and culinary feast, circulating to locations throughout our community. It is a vehicle (both literally and metaphorically) that advocates for building a healthier local food system.

Meals and discussions about healthy community-based food practices are transformed into “artworks”
through the framework of this public art project. The truck will be owned by Nuestras Raices, a grass-roots organization that promotes economic, human and community development through projects relating to food, agriculture, and the environment. Movable Feast is inspired by the idea that art can expand conventional notions of people, place and the art-making process. Movable Feast coincides with the University Gallery’s participation in the Museums10 fall festival “Table for Ten”. Throughout the fall Movable Feast will circulate from the Umass campus to rotating locations in Springfield, Holyoke, and other towns in Western MA. All dates and locations, listed on this website and on the project’s website at
movablefeastproject.org, are subject to change.

Feel free to make a comment below. All commenters are entered to win tickets to a Fine Arts Center performance.

Wednesday, October 7 – Wednesday, October 28

Born in Philadelphia and raised in Amherst, Massachusetts, Carol Ross always seeks the beauty beneath the hidden and never leaves a stone unturned. On her tenth birthday, her mother gave her a camera and it was then that her quest for intimacy with the world began to unfold. As both a photographer and former actor, Ross has always maintained a position in front of and behind the camera. While living in Los Angeles, she was featured in several commercial and print ads for Toyota, Lexus, FedEx, Nabisco, Frito Lay, and Chevrolet. Behind the camera Ross produced two documentaries which aired on NBC. In 2007 she released her first book entitled POP: A Celebration of Black Fatherhood. With a forward by Samuel L. Jackson, the book features fifty-one devoted fathers. Since its unveiling POP has been featured in Essence, Heart & Soul, O Magazine, Baby Talk, ABC Chicago, Oprah & Friends Radio, The Washington Post and on the cover of the Chicago Tribune, and has also been the subject of profiles in numerous newspapers and magazines including Chicago Sun Times, Advertising Age and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Ross says: “In my work I seek to challenge angles and break conventional technical rules, always searching for new ways to view and interpret the world–sometimes with humor, always with compassion.”

I want to know, what did you think of this exhibit? 🙂

WHEN? Wednesday, September 23 – Sunday, December 13
WHERE? University Gallery

An exhibition of work by four acclaimed contemporary artists who explore themes and ideas central to Andy Warhol’s artistic practice, demonstrating how Warhol’s legacy continues to influence and shape the content of the work of a new generation of artists. Rather than look strictly at artists who have been stylistically influenced by Warhol, this exhibition focuses on the work of four leading artists where the Warholian impulse is more conceptual and subtle.

Tom Friedman, Mandala Tom Friedman transforms mundane consumer products into playful yet meticulously crafted artworks of almost obsessive intricacy. Friedman’s art is characterized by its attention to process and use of modest, ephemeral materials. Friedman also displays a sly, almost scientific interest in systems of representation. Works in the exhibition will include the serial sculpture 9 Lives and two digital prints, Dollar Bill (2000) and Mandala (2008), commissioned by University Gallery and UMass Art Dept.

Repetition and revision are central to Ellen Gallagher’s treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines such as Ebony, Our World, and Sepia. Her medium of printmaking, immersed in ideas about process and the mechanics of transformation, echoes some of Warhol’s themes. However her aesthetic strategy differs from her predecessor in its autobiographical dimension and focus on the issue of racial identity, while at the same time suggesting a more formal reading with respect to materials, processes, and altered states.

Vik Muniz defies traditional concerns over appropriation and authorship to reveal the power of images in our collective memory. Creating images made of dust, chocolate sauce, sugar, or thread, his work is informed by media and popular culture. This exhibition will include The Best of Life (1989 – 2000), a portfolio of ten Memory Renderings, which are photographs of drawings he drew from his recollection of photographs from Life magazine between 1936 and 1972.

Rob Pruitt’s work is rooted in a pop sensibility and a playful critique of art world structures. His conceptual projects have encompassed sensational staged events as well as simple gestures that promote possibilities for creativity in everyday life. Pruitt’s work is always characterized by an incisive humor and exuberant visual flair. This exhibition will focus on iPruitt (2008), snapshots taken with his mobile camera.

Tell us what you think.. 🙂

Andy Warhol’s Photography (1970-87)
Wednesday, September 23 – Sunday, December 13
The University Gallery

This exhibition of Andy Warhol’s photographs is culled from over 100 Polaroids and black and white silver gelatin prints granted to the University Gallery by the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. Celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Program aims to provide greater access to Warhol’s creative process and to enable a wide range of people to view the important yet relatively unknown body of Warhol’s photography.

The Minox & the Big Shot explores the significance of Warhol’s photography in relation to his larger artistic practice. The works on view in this exhibition provide a counterpoint to the artist’s better known Pop paintings and films from the 1960’s in their diminutive size and non-iconic quality. Numerous Polaroids of unknown sitters and candid black and white shots of friends are mixed with photos of the famous company Warhol kept. Together, they offer the opportunity to see through Warhol’s eyes, the individuals and objects which fascinated him, and they become icons in their own right, of the quest for fame with which Warhol was always preoccupied.

As the University Gallery’s first Curatorial Fellow, Kathleen Banach (M.A. candidate in Art History ’09) will work in consultation with the staff of the University Gallery and art history professor Mario Ontiveros to focus her research on these photographs. She will be the first to study this body of Warhol’s work, culminating in an exhibition and curatorial essay which will provide a wealth of information about the artist’s process and interaction with his subjects.

Related programming will include panel discussions, guest speakers, and film screenings.

THE OPENING RECEPTION is TONIGHT!!! 😀 from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm

See you there and tell us what you think!