Memorial Art Gallery Research Articles

Bedside art is good medicine

“Thank you so much for doing this; I needed it,” was a sentiment I heard often on the sixth floor of Wilmot Cancer Institute (Rochester, NY, USA). As the daughter of an artist, I was overjoyed to stumble upon an opportunity to share my passion for art with patients. Started at the University of Rochester Medical Center in 2009, Art at the Bedside is a hospital visitation programme that evolved from the intersection of chaplaincy and museum education. The idea for this programme first occurred to my mentor Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss several years earlier, while she was shuttling between two positions—a chaplain at the University of Rochester Medical Center and an educator at the university's Memorial Art Gallery. She wondered whether the experience of appreciating artwork at a museum could be mirrored in the hospital, and whether a facilitated art-viewing experience could bring patients comfort and joy during a difficult time.

The Crucifix and the Art Gallery: An Odyssey from Religious Material Culture to Fine Art

This article focuses the epistemological processes through which a thirteenth-century Spanish Crucifix in less than pristine condition transformed from an obscure rural Catholic devotional into an art commodity and celebrated work of medieval art now exhibited at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester (MAG) in Rochester, New York. By situating the Spanish Crucifix within the nascent art historical epistemology and museum movement in the late eighteenth to early twentieth century, this article offers a case study in how religious material culture becomes embedded in capitalistic systems as products or commodities, yet suggests the ways that critical religious studies approaches might enhance our understanding of religious material culture in fine arts museums.

Conversation between Artist Stephanie Gervais and Curator Stephanie Snyder, January–May 2019, Portland, Oregon

This text is a conversation between artist Stephanie Gervais and curator Stephanie Snyder, on the subject of Gervais’ exhibition Gulalhi, on view at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Re...

Interview with Isaac Julien and Mark Nash

Interview with Isaac Julien and Mark Nash Melissa Lyde (bio) On the occasion of the New York premiere of Isaac Julien's newly restored 1995 landmark docudrama, Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, programmer Melissa Lyde spoke with Isaac Julien and collaborator Mark Nash about the film's impact, future projects and a comparative reflection on the legacies of two revolutionary Black thinkers, Frantz Fanon and Frederick Douglass. The interview took place on March 10, 2019, at the Metrograph Cinema in New York City, US. Isaac Julien is an installation artist and filmmaker born in 1960 in London. His 1989 documentary-drama, Looking for Langston (UK), about the American writer and activist Langston Hughes, received global acclaim; and his 1991 feature Young Soul Rebels (UK, FR, DE, SP)—about the1970s counter cultural movements in London, West Indian, and Black communities—went on to win the Grand Prize during Cannes Film Festival's Critics' Week. His extensive career as an installation and video artist, which takes the similar thematic preoccupations as film work—class, race, gender, and sexuality within Black communities—garnered him a Turner Prize nomination in 2001. His most recent piece, Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass, a ten-screen video installation, was exhibited at Metro Picture Gallery in New York City and the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester, New York, March 2019. Melissa Lyde: I want this to be a focus on re-imagining the Black image and reflective of your impact on Black cinema. [End Page 189] Mark Nash: Because? ML: As Frantz Fanon is being re-released, it's especially important today to reestablish what the Black image means through a Black artist's gaze. MN: I think one of the things to focus on is the way in which Stuart Hall, in particular, unpacks the notion of, well, the fact of Blackness. ML: Decolonization of thought? MN: In a way. I'm not sure that it's thought that needs decolonizing exactly, but that's a slightly separate conversation because in a way what Fanon did was reveal how complex the relationships of Black and white are when you start unpacking them philosophically. But also in terms of lived experience, and the book that he did as his thesis, Black Skin, White Masks, was about his dialectical relationships, picking up on the master slave dialectic that it wasn't Black folk over here and white folk over here. Black notions of whiteness on Blackness are really entangled. I think, like you say, the Black Lives Matter phenomenon just shows how things have not changed since the '60s, since desegregation, or even going further back. But a lot of white folks in particular are fixated on—and they don't realize that actually their notion of being white and being privileged is tied into their connection to Black people—the image of Black people. Fanon helped to think about those issues in a different way. It's not essentialist, so it's not like there is a Black identity over here. We just have to clear away some of the bad thinking around it, and it can be assumed. It's a bit complicated. ML: I read a piece about identity by Toni Morrison. In this collection of essays she said identity of the Black person in America has been established not by the Black people who exist but white people. Even as we live today identity is still not of our own. Our identity is predicated on what other people have projected onto us. MN: Yeah. One of the things to say about this film, and in a way more broadly about the Black British art and film movement, is that Britain is a small country, the Black community is smaller, and they have a different history. The history, obviously the slavery, they still share with the US in many ways, but you've brought there the Fact of Blackness, the conference that happened at the ICA in London. About the same time as we were making our film, Stuart also did a conference around that time too, around the question of white ethnicity, to try and stop the notion of white being used as...

Schultz, Robert and Binh Danh. War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal (Poetry and Visual Art Exhibition) [review

Robert Schultz and Binh Danh. War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal. Poetry and Visual Art Exhibition, Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Virginia. February 7-May 23, 2015; Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, August 21-October 16, 2016.In Part 6 of Song of Myself, Walt Whitman suddenly perceives the grass to be the uttering tongues of all those whose dying feeds the living. While the phrase uttering tongues alludes to speech, it gestures more broadly to the communicative impulse at the heart of words and images. After all, Whitman does name the grass a uniform hieroglyph. Though Whitman's visual poetics and interest in the visual arts predate, or, more accurately perhaps, foreshadow, widespread Modernist poetic interest in the visual arts and verbal-visual collaboration, one hundred and sixty years after the initial publication of Leaves of Grass, a twenty-first-century poet and a visual artist have collaborated with Whitman to produce War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal, a word and image exhibition that opened in February 2015 at the Taubman Museum of Art in Roanoke, Virginia. By commingling their verbal and visual arts through collaboration and appropriation of materials past and present, photographer Binh Danh and poet Robert Schultz have produced in War Memoranda a variety of texts, ranging from broadsides to artists' books to the gallery installation, that both memorialize and interrogate the process by which we create shared meaning and memory. As memoranda, these texts proclaim themselves to be notes for the future, gathering for us uttering tongues of the past, including Whitman's own Memoranda During the War, into a collective present.From August 21 through October 16, 2016, War Memoranda: Photography, Walt Whitman, and Renewal will show at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester. Gallery exhibitions are not often read as texts, but in this review, I want to consider how the literal space of the gallery, which is filled with original poetry and art as well as appropriations of historical poetry and art, can be read as a cohesive text in order to offer a conceptual understanding of the project as a whole. In order to do so, I will describe broadly the space of the gallery exhibition while delving into several individual pairings of poetry and visual art to offer insight into the collaborative impulse at the center of the exhibition.A verbal-visual collaboration such as War Memoranda resists the neat categories into which word and image, author and artist, past and present, are often divided. By insisting on the continuum, Danh (a California-based artist whose work is exhibited in galleries across the country) and Schultz (author of three books of poetry and John P Fishwick Professor of English at Roanoke College) not only argue for the need to discover Whitman's interior history of war, which he posits in Memoranda During the War is so often obscured by the impulse to record facts, but also for a recursive, interpenetrating approach to enacting that discovery. They extend their collaboration beyond themselves to join with the seemingly long dead-both Whitman and the many named and unnamed men and women who appear in the Library of Congress's Liljenquist collection of Civil War photography, leafprints of which anchor War Memoranda. They use the flesh of leaves, whose living veins connect the gossamer human story, as both medium and message; photographs from the present and past are reproduced on actual leaves using a chlorophyll printing process, while the trope of leaves weaves through Schultz's poetry. Whitman quotations are placed strategically along the gallery walls, and through the combined effect of this gathering, leaves become a metaphor not only for the cycles of human life, but for the recording of that life.War Memoranda is the work of the body rendering the invisible visible. The artifacts in this exhibition remind viewers that the past is always the material of our present. …

Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and DesignCatalogue Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design, Edited by Jeannine Falino, New York: Abrams, in association with MAD / Museum of Arts and Design, 2011. 144 pp. Cloth $65.00, ISBN: 9780810984806

Previous article No AccessExhibition ReviewCrafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design Catalogue Crafting Modernism: Midcentury American Art and Design, Edited by Jeannine Falino, New York: Abrams, in association with MAD / Museum of Arts and Design, 2011. 144 pp. Cloth $65.00, ISBN: 9780810984806Sequoia MillerSequoia MillerMuseum of Arts and Design, New York, October 12, 2011–January 15, 2012. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York, February 26–May 20, 2012. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by West 86th Volume 19, Number 2Fall-Winter 2012 Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/668074 Views: 79Total views on this site For permission to reuse, contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Vectors

Vectors

Seeing America: painting and sculpture from the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

Seeing America: painting and sculpture from the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery

Better things: an annotated visual essay of photographs interpreting the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

Better things: an annotated visual essay of photographs interpreting the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester

Family Learning in Museums

This study of family learning in museums focusses on the assumptions of museums about family learning and the family audience. It calls for a widening of the base of theoretical knowledge brought to bear on the topic, and explores the range of that material. Applying that wider base, those multiple viewpoints to the specifics of family workshops presented at the Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, certain categories of family learning experience are developed. A framework in which to look at, discuss, and evaluate family learning activities is presented.

The Last Supper of the Vic Cathedral Facade Rediscovered

The facade of the Cathedral of Sant Pere at Vic imitated a Roman triumphal arch. The corner columns, the embrasures, and the archivolts can be compared to the façade of Santa Maria at Ripoll. The discovery of an important sculptural fragment, now in the collection of the Memorial Art Gallery at the University of Rochester, confirms the accuracy of the descriptions which mention a lintel of the Last Supper on the Vic façade. According to the documented accounts, the composition of the facade focused on a Christ in Majesty, which was probably placed in the tympanum, above a lintel of the Last Supper. This arrangement can be compared with that of the central portal of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, whose tympanum has a Christ in Majesty, surrounded by Evangelist symbols, above a lintel of the Last Supper. The chronology of the sculptural workshops at Ripoll in the second half of the twelfth century agrees with that which can be suggested for the sculpture of the facade of Sant Pere at Vic on the basis of the documents and the preserved fragments.

Do you read me?

Review| May 01 1986 Do you read me? Beyond Words: The Art of the Book Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, Rochester, NY Jan. 31-March 30 Susan Dodge Peters Susan Dodge Peters Susan Dodge Peters is an art historian and critic living in Rochester, NY. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (1986) 13 (10): 16–17. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1986.13.10.16 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Susan Dodge Peters; Do you read me?. Afterimage 1 May 1986; 13 (10): 16–17. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.1986.13.10.16 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 1986 by The Regents of the University of California1986 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Thomas Hart Benton'sBoomtown:Regionalism Redefined

In february 1927, Thomas Hart Benton visited Borger, Texas. In 1928 Benton paintedBoomtoum(oil on canvas, 45 by 54 inches. Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester; Marion Stratton Gould Fund) from sketches made in Borger.Boomtownwas, by the artist's retrospective admission, a milestone in his career; he called it “one of my best paintings” and “one of my best-known ‘Regionalist’ pictures.”

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester: “An Instrument of Art Education”

This small-city art museum has dedicated itself to education and to the well-being of its community, a commitment it has carried out for more than half a century with a wide array of programs that grow and change in response to new needs—ethnic, social, and economic. How this “community art center” employs its collection and its programs for the educational benefit of its various audiences is the subject of this report. It is a story that may help, inspire, and sometimes—but not always—comfort other art museums in similar circumstances anywhere in the United States.

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester: "An Instrument of Art Education"

Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester: "An Instrument of Art Education"

Authentication of paintings by Ralph A. Blakelock through neutron activation autoradiography

Following his mental collapse at the end of the nineteenth century the paintings of Ralph A. Blakelock suddenly began to bring exceptionally high prices. Not surprisingly, therefore, many forgeries attributed to him were produced in the early twentieth century. In fact, some experts consider him to have been the most widely forged American painter. At Brookhaven National Laboratory a group of paintings attributed to him have been studied by thermal neutron activation autoradiography combined with solid state high resolution gamma-ray spectroscopy. Most of the paintings studied were of unquestioned authenticity coming from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Collection of Fine Art of the Smithsonian Institution, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Nebraska, and two private collectors with well established histories of acquisition. These included paintings produced by Blakelock both before and after his breakdown. In general a number of characteristic consistencies in the types of pigments and media used and how they were employed in these paintings were revealed by the activation study. Of course, major differences exist between his early and later work. However, a lack of these characteristics and hidden overpainted details which are not revealed in conventional X-ray radiographs have provided evidence that two of the paintings attributed to Ralph Blakelock are the work of other artists. Some paintings of Blakelock's contemporaries George Inness and Albert Ryder have also been investigated.

A Roman Head in Rochester

T HE Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester has recently come into the possession of an interesting and unique head about whose origin little is known except that it is said have been found along the Appian Way. The head, which is certainly a portrait, has been broken off a full length statue or herm. In the course of its wanderings it has received harsh treatment -a deep ridge has been dug into the forepart of the bald crown, a chunk is broken away just above the left eye, the hair on the left side of the head has been damaged, and much of the nose is missing-but despite these mutilations it still displays full advantage the finished technique of the artist and preserves the original charm of its expression. The marble of the head, which measures 0.274 m. from the top of the crown the tip of the beard, is probably Pentelic. The hair, running around the bald crown and continuing into the full beard, is treated in the florid style characteristic of the late Antonine period;' the abundance of undercutting and the frequent use of the drill, together with the deeply cut socket of the eye, which indicates, more than any other feature, the age of the man,2 produce an unusual play of chiaroscuro over the surface, and a close examination of the crown reveals painstaking care in working out the transition between the hair and the bald portion of the head. Around the head and ears the hair comes out in curly locks, then moves on in undulating masses around the slightly drooping mouth and chin. The lightly indicated furrows of the forehead, curving in a line parallel the eyebrows, are more suggestive of incipient senility than of concentrated thought. The eyes with their brooding lids covering a good share of the iris, are the focal center of the face, for the eyeball, in spite of the heavy lid and the shadow of the socket which suggest the meditative philosopher, nevertheless shows the alertness of a ready thinker. A circle enclosing a slightly raised surface indicates the iris in which two small holes mark the pupil; some traces of color, especially on the right eye, still accent the iris. A few fine lines below the iris of the left eye show where the tool of the sculptor went astray in describing this feature of the eye. Around the mouth, whose upper lip is almost concealed by the overhanging hair, there hovers an air of expectancy, as if the man were on the point of speaking. The ears are wide and fully exposed view. The style of this head which represents an elderly man between fifty and sixty years of age, points the end of the reign of Marcus Aurelius (ca. A.D. 180). The execution of the hair and beard is similar that of the portrait of the Emperor3 without being as ornate and obvious in detail as that of Commodus.4 The treatment of the eye is also characteristic of the period, especially the two small holes in the pupil to indicate the points of light.5

Loan Exhibition of Historical American Furniture at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester

Loan Exhibition of Historical American Furniture at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester

Loan Exhibition of Historical American Furniture at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester

Loan Exhibition of Historical American Furniture at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester