Month: September 2010

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.