Category: art galleries

This exhibition is the second in a series of exhibitions to take place at the University Gallery in which artists are invited to integrate their own works with pieces they select from the University Gallery’s works-on-paper collection, which includes over 2600 contemporary prints, drawings, and photographs.

This exhibition features the work of Northampton photographer and UMass grad Sheron Rupp alongside works she will select and place in direct dialogue with her own recent photographs. Rupp’s photographs have been exhibited at museums such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Cleveland Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, DeCordova Museum, among many others.

Wednesday, February 4 – Sunday, March 29
University Gallery
Free and open to the Public

The exhibition “Miroslaw Balka: Lightworks”shows a selection of video works by the internationally acclaimed Polish sculptor. This is the artist’s first solo American museum exhibition to focus on his new video installations.

Born in 1958 in Warsaw, Poland, notions of history and the residue of memory weigh heavily in Miroslaw Balka’s approach to his art. His poetic works, recalling the tragedies of Western European history such as the Holocaust, memorialize events through symbolic abstraction rather than discrete monument. His video works of memory and forgetfulness, presence and absence, meditate on what history leaves behind — the psychic repercussions alluded to in abstracted object — and ties it to the body and the memory of those living in the present.

Miroslaw Balka’s work has been the subject of many one-person exhibitions internationally, including the Kroller-Muller Museum, Otterlo; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Museet for Samtidskunst, Oslo; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Tate Gallery, London; Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld; and Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. The artist was the representative of Poland at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Thursday, February 5 – Sunday, March 29, 2009
University Gallery
Free and open to the public

Saturday, December 6th, 2008

8:30 am – Bus departure Amherst,
9:00 am – departure Northampton

10:15 am – Tadao Ando: Clark’s Stone Hill Center
Built on a grassy hillside a short hike through the woods from the Clark’s main buildings, it is a two-story, 32,000-square-foot gray box of steel, cedar and glass. Outside, angled concrete walls imprinted with wood-grain textures visually break up the monolithic boxcar form of the main structure and support a triangular porch that juts out over the hill. Because the building is set into the hill — its lower half buried on one side and fully exposed to northern light on the other — and because of its low profile, it seems gently integrated into the landscape. It is a blessed departure from the kind of showy architectural statements many art museums have been prone to in recent years.
12:00 noon – leave for North Adams

sign up for a box lunch for additional $$$ at Lickety Splits or bring your own.

1:30 pm – MASS MoCA tour of Sol LeWitt exhibition with expert Kim Carlino, University Gallery’s Education assistant/coordinator

Sol LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1928, and attended Syracuse University. After serving in the Korean War as a graphic artist, he moved, in 1953, to New York, where he worked as a draftsman for the architect I. M. Pei came into prominence in the 1960s, termed his work conceptual art, emphasizing that the idea or concept that animates each work is its most important aspect. He is probably the artist most often linked with the conceptual art movement. Reflecting his study of mathematics, LeWitt reduced the contents of his art to the most basic shapes, colors, and lines, creating modular cubes and grid structures, geometric “wall drawings,” and serial graphics. Sol LeWitt, one of the most prominent American artists of the later 20th century, died on April 8, 2007 in New York City.

Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective consists of one hundred works—covering nearly an acre of wall surface—that LeWitt created from 1968 to 2007. The works in the retrospective are on loan from numerous private and public collections worldwide, including the Yale University Art Gallery, to which LeWitt donated a number of wall drawings.

Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, in collaboration with the artist before his death in April 2007, the project has been undertaken by the Gallery, MASS MoCA, and the Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts. The installation remains on view for twenty-five years, occupying a 27,000-square-foot historic mill building in the heart of MASS MoCA’s campus. The three-story building has been extensively reworked for this exhibition by architects Bruner/Cott and Associates including a complex sequence of new interior walls designed in close collaboration with LeWitt himself.
3:30 pm – docent guided tour of MASS MoCA’s exhibitions

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape
Anselm Kiefer: Sculpture and Paintings
Eastern Standard: Western Artists in China

5:00 pm – departure from North Adams
Approx arrival time in Northampton 6:00 pm; in Amherst 6:30 pm

“The Future of the Image” is an attempt to understand the various temporalities of the image–historical, prophetic, diagnostic–by surveying the way the entire history of the image has been punctuated at various points by the figure of the animal.

Departing from Jacques Ranciere’s recent book by this title, the lecture examines not only some possible and probable futures for image technologies, but also the way futures
as such are constituted by image-making.

WJT Mitchell is professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. He is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. A scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature, Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology. He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues.

This event has been made possible by the University Gallery and the UMass English Department in collaboration with the following entities:

Art History and English at Amherst College, Five Colleges, Inc., Humanities Program at Hampshire College, English at Mount Holyoke College, Art at Smith College, and Art History, English, German and Scandinavian Studies, and the Dean of the Graduate School at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Thursday, November 13, 2008: 5:30-6:30 PM
University Gallery
Free and open to the public