Vanderbilt University History of Art Blog

Morris Davidson Exhibit in Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery Featured in “Magazine Antiques” Article

When modernism dominated art in the United States, from the interwar period onward, Morris Davidson was a prominent and widely exhibited painter—as well as a teacher, a critic, and a leader of arts organizations. And yet, since his death in 1979, his work has fallen into obscurity. A new exhibition, American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson, at the Fine Arts Gallery at Vanderbilt University in Nashville gives the artist his due, shining a spotlight on his lengthy career, with special attention paid to his postwar works.  Read more….

*Morris Davidson. Untitled [Still Life with Red Pitcher], n.d. Rosenfeld/Davidson Family Collection

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on August 1, 2017 in Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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VU’s Employee Appreciation presents “Art in the Afternoon” July 18 at the Fine Arts Gallery

Vanderbilt’s Employee Appreciation invites the University community to visit the Fine Arts Gallery in Cohen Memorial Hall on Peabody campus for “Art in the Afternoon” on Tuesday, July 18, from 12-2 pm. The event is a chance to enjoy the afternoon while viewing two exhibits currently on display:  American Modernism at Mid-Century:  The Work of Morris Davidson and American Artists and the Legacy of the Grand Tour, 1880-1960.

As part of the “Art in the Afternoon” event, employees also should visit the artist Ben Shahn’s last major work, Peabody–1968, a mosaic mural that fills the foyer of the Hobbs Human Development Laboratory on Peabody campus.

Refreshments will be served in the atrium of Cohen Memorial Hall.

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 11, 2017 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Vivien Fryd’s Book on Sexual Trauma in American Art Set for 2018 Publication

In her book, “Against our Will”: Sexual Trauma in American Art Since 1970, to be published by The Pennsylvania State University Press in 2018, Vivien Green Fryd, professor of history of art, examines how and why feminist artists, working from the 1970s to the second decade of the twenty-first century, represented and challenged the dominant narrative about sexual violence against women.  Fryd demonstrates that for more than forty years a key group of American artists have insisted upon ending the silence and have contributed to an anti-rape, anti-incest counternarrative, which she discusses as an anti-rape and anti-incest cycle. They live on the East and West coasts, and also in the South and Midwest; geographically dispersed, they address similar concerns with differences, in terms of perspectives, depending on their time period, racial identity, and sexuality.

Particular themes emerge—rape and incest against the white female body, rape and incest against the black female body, rape against the white and black male body, rape and pornography, and incest and lesbianism—intersecting with and contributing to the anti-rape and anti-incest crisis discourses that challenged and critiqued patriarchy in the wider social and political spheres during these years.  Fryd charts the radical interventions taken by women artists and activists (one and the same) in visual culture to demonstrate that many of these projects helped change legal definitions and social conceptions of rape and incest.  In this way, she elucidates many artists’ activist approaches to making art about sexual violence that also address issues of gender inequality, racial and economic differences, and the impact of sexism and pornography in mass media.

The book provides a social history of the larger cultural world  surrounding the two traumatic subjects of rape and incest that had been purposefully ignored within academic art history and within the culture at large.

While working on this book, Fryd served as the director of “New Directions in Trauma Studies,” the  2008-2009 Fellows’ Program at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, which examined the emerging field of trauma studies and worked to define its boundaries and enhance the field through interdisciplinary discussion.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 7, 2017 in HART, VRC

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Cheekwood’s Historic Restoration to Reclaim its Origins Now Unveiled to Visitors

In January 1929 Mabel and Leslie Cheek began the new year by receiving the first of many floor plans from their recently appointed architect, Bryant Fleming of Ithaca, New York. The drawings provided by Fleming outlined a four-story home whose impressive façade was to reflect the premiere design choice of eighteenth-century English aristocrats.  The interior was to replicate and follow the formal stylistic trends of the era.

Furnishings and decoration were carefully selected in keeping with English formality yet introduced contemporary conveniences that modernized the historically inspired home.  Cheekwood has collected the original receipts for the grand furnishings that decorated the mansion years ago—furnishings that are said to have filled four freight cars—traveling from the estates of English royalty to the Cheek family residence in Middle Tennessee.

In early January 2016 Cheekwood made a historically inspired resolution: to revive and restore a group of interior spaces to reflect the original design and environment created by the Cheeks in the 1930s. To facilitate this important initiative, the Cheekwood Museum of Art

was closed from January 3, 2016, through June 16, 2017.  Recently reopened to the public, the mansion’s historic restoration and the sharing of these spaces debuts with the DressingDownton: Changing Fashion for Changing Times exhibit, including 36 award-winning official period costumes worn in the PBS-TV series Downton Abbey, on view through September 10.

Cheekwood functioned as the Cheek family residence until 1960 when it was opened to the public as a 55-acre botanical garden with 90,000 square feet of buildings comprised of an historic residence and art museum.  The historic restoration has unveiled previously shrouded areas of the home and restored rooms in the lower level of the mansion to their original look in the 1930s.  Such a major project allows Cheekwood to realize its full potential as one of the finest remaining examples of an American Country Place Era estate in the United States.

The project includes original paint matching, molding replication, drapery authentication, the original working dumbwaiter system, and more.  Forty percent of the objects are original to the home. Other items are near-duplicates of the original furnishings or commissioned as identical pieces.

First floor and ground floor rooms that were restored include the drawing room, library, dining room, loggia, morning room, recreation room, and bedroom suite. The upper level art galleries will continue to serve as art exhibition space. Each interpretation considered the interior-exterior relationship of Fleming’s design, incorporating the rooms’ intended landscape views as well as furnishings that would have been purchased and placed in each room by the Cheeks.

The restoration of Cheekwood’s historic rooms and gardens and the endowment for their care and maintenance have been made possible with generous support from the Andrea Waitt Carlton Family Foundation, the Bovender Family, Mr. and Mrs. William F. Andrews Jr., and the Founding Members of The 1929 Club.

Photographs provided by Millie Fullmer, director and curator of HART’s Visual Resources Center, who received the Lazenby Library Fellowship, a part-time, six-month fellowship that began in January 2016 as part of a historic initiative to reinstate Cheekwood as an American country era estate

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on July 5, 2017 in Events, HART, VRC

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HART Alumnus John Powers at the Frist: Focus on Nature Subordinated to Humanity

Knoxville sculptor and HART alumnus John Powers comes from a family of tinkerers in rural Tennessee. He grew up working on cars and farm equipment, and his stunning kinetic sculptural installation Ialu (2011), on view through September 10 at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, demonstrates his mechanical prowess.  Steel reeds connect to wooden supports and are powered by an electric motor to sway back and forth like a field of tall grass—a reminder that in ancient Egypt the afterlife was described as a field of reeds.  The rhythmic movement is set against a projection of mirrored clouds, and the piece examines humanity’s sometimes fraught relationship with nature.  With its loud creaking machinery, Ialu suggests this ideal of eternal peace found in nature has fallen under the control of humanity.

Dottie Habel, director of UT’s School of Art, describes Powers’ work as “remarkable for its scale, its ambition, its manufacture, and its haunting content.”

Powers, associate professor of sculpture at the University of Tennessee—Knoxville, is in the current exhibit entitled State of the Art:  Discovering American Art Now, a broad survey of art from across the United States.  The project, organized by Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, provides a vivid snapshot of contemporary work from diverse studios and creative communities, featuring artists from rural communities, small towns, and urban centers.  The Frist’s Ingram Gallery presents a selection of works that were in the original exhibition, grouped thematically to demonstrate connections between artists and ideas across the country.

The Frist is offering a three-day professional development institute that will highlight two of the summer exhibitions currently on view.  Educators will explore American contemporary art with Powers on Thursday, June 29, from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.  Conversations in the galleries and hands-on activities in the Frist studios will complement the insights provided by Powers and other artists.

Powers, who began teaching sculpture at the University of Tennessee in 2013, was a fine arts major at Vanderbilt and recipient of the prestigious Margaret Stonewall Wooldridge Hamblet Award in 2001.  A year and a half after graduation, Powers returned to campus to mount a solo exhibition of the work he completed during the award year. He earned his MFA in sculpture, with distinction, in 2008 from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia.

His work has been featured in the New York Times, World Sculpture News, Sculpture Magazine, Art Forum, The Huffington Post, Art in America, and the Boston Globe, and on CBS News Sunday Morning. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award (2013), and a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant, as well as a Southeastern College Art Conference Individual Artist Fellowship and an Alabama State Council on the Arts Fellowship.

His sculptural work has been exhibited nationally, including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, MIT Museum, Mariana Kistler Beach Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Alexander Brest Museum, Masur Museum, Gadsden Museum of Art, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Brenda Taylor Gallery, Georgia Museum of Art, Vero Beach Museum of Art, and Cue Art Foundation.  He had a solo exhibition at the Knoxville Museum of Art (2016), and his videos and animations have been screened internationally.

*John Douglas Powers (b. 1978).  Ialu, 2011.  Wood, steel, plastic, electric motor, and video projection, 57 x 80 x 108 inches. Courtesy Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Photo: courtesy of the artist

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 28, 2017 in Events, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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Tracy Miller Chairs Session at Society of Architectural Historians Conference in Glasgow

Hundreds of Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) members recently gathered in Glasgow, Scotland, to hear new ideas about the distant past and, in many cases, to learn from that past in order to affect the future. Tracy Miller, associate professor of history of art, chaired a session at the SAH 70th Annual International Conference held June 7-11 in a city with an urban fabric rich in Victorian-era architecture and increasingly studded with more recent projects by such architects as Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid.

The conference program featured paper sessions, keynote talks, round tables, social receptions, and public events, including thirty-three tours of architecture and landscapes in and around Glasgow and a seminar on heritage and sustainability held at Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Queen’s Cross Church.

Miller chaired the June 8 session entitled “Chinese Architecture and Gardens in a Global Context.”  Among the papers presented were “From Monastic Cells to Corridors: Historical Significance of Sixth–Seventh-Century Changes in the Chinese Buddhist Monastery” (Zhu Xu, The University of Hong Kong); “Hindu Features in the Vernacular Architecture of Southeast China” (Lizhi Zhang, Tsinghua University, China); “Hybrid Spaces Reconsidered: Knowledge, Identity and Publicity in Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Gardens in Beijing” (Lianming Wang, Heidelberg University, Germany); “Historical Study on Modern Textile Mills in Yangtze Delta (Yiping Dong, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China); and “Modern Chinese Association Buildings: Exit Nation, Enter Ethnicity” (Mark Hinchman, University of Nebraska).

In keeping with its mission to facilitate the study, understanding and conservation of architecture, landscapes and urbanism on a global scale, the Society of Architectural Historians has expanded its affiliations with a network of international organizations pursuing similar objectives and has increasingly attracted a more international membership. The SAH Annual International Conference has become in turn a hub for teachers and scholars, planners and architects, preservationists and policy specialists from all parts of the world.

*Queen’s Cross Church (courtesy of VisitScotland/Paul Tomkins)

 

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 27, 2017 in Conferences, Events, HART, VRC

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Traveling Europe Through Art with the Fine Arts Gallery’s Summer Exhibition

Siena’s Torre del Mangia in the Piazza del Campo, sunrise at San Remo on the Mediterranean coast, the Roman stone arch bridge of Alcántara spanning the Tagus River at Toledo, and other artfully rendered images of timeless beauty. Featured this summer in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery is American Artists and the Legacy of the Grand Tour, 1880-1960, an exhibit that explores work created and brought home by American artists, and the continuing allure of Europe as a destination for leisure, study, and cultural refinement during these years.

In a historical sense, the Grand Tour was a seventeenth- to eighteenth-century phenomenon in which young, usually male and aristocratic, members of English and Northern European families visited great cities and societies of the European continent. It was an educational trip, meant largely for cultural exposure and refinement. Art was central to this travel in a number of ways, from visiting masterpieces of painting and architecture, to commissioning portraits, buying art to bring home, and engaging an artist for the journey who would paint the sublime beauty of each destination. This exhibition examines a time from approximately 1880 to 1960 when American artists endeavored to follow in the footsteps of this tradition and trek to Europe for a variety of reasons: study and opportunities to exhibit, illustration on commission, war, and leisure. Education was also a goal of their journey, both for themselves through the process of travel and study and for others through the skills, cultural enlightenment, and artwork they would bring home.

Included in this exhibition are such artists as John Taylor Arms, Otto Henry Bacher, and Alonzo C. Webb, who spent extended sojourns abroad and produced large bodies of work to send back to the United States. Some, like famed illustrator Joseph Pennell and the lesser-known painter Willie Betty Newman, visited Europe to establish a reputation for refinement that would boost their careers back home. While the United States was increasingly becoming more diverse toward the end of the period featured in this exhibit, a majority of Americans could trace their roots to European countries. It follows that studying there was often still viewed as an important part of an artist’s education and a means to develop cosmopolitan tastes, looking to the precedent of many artists in generations past.

The exhibition includes etchings, engravings, lithographs, and paintings by John Taylor Arms, Otto Henry Bacher, Lionel Barrymore, George Inness, Joseph Pennell, Abbott Thayer, and others as well as paintings by Alonzo C. Webb and Willie Betty Newman loaned by the Tennessee State Museum. Their work documents the architecture, scenery, and people of Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, England, and France as the artists saw them.

On view now through August 26, the exhibit is organized by the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Margaret Walker, assistant curator, with support provided by the Fine Arts Gallery Gift Fund and the Sullivan Art Collection Fund.

The Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Summer gallery hours are Tuesday through Friday noon–4 pm, Saturday 1–5 pm, closed Sunday and Monday. Please note that the gallery will be closed on July 4 in observance of Independence Day. Admission to the gallery is free and open to the public.

For more information, please visit the gallery’s website at http://www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

*John Taylor Arms (American, 1887-1953), La Mangia, Siena, etching on woven paper, 1927. Gift of Thomas B. Brumbaugh, professor of fine arts, emeritus, Vanderbilt University.
**Abbott H. Thayer (American, 1849–1922), Sunrise, San Remo, oil on canvas, ca. 1908–09. Gift from Dr. A. Everette James in memory of A.E. James Sr.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 20, 2017 in Fine Arts Gallery, HART, VRC

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Crowd-Sourcing with a Human Face

Visual Resources staff recently attended the “Cultural Heritage at Scale” symposium sponsored by Vanderbilt University Libraries. The event was open to scholars of any description and the crowd was a mix of the science-minded and humanities-minded alike. The “big idea” that directed the symposium was “crowd-sourcing with a human face”, and talks revolved around how different organizations are using volunteers to help them complete massive digital projects. Each speaker discussed the technical details of developing and maintaining a large-scale crowd-sourced project, but several broader themes emerged over the course of the day: motivating volunteers; expanding access to hidden collections; and encouraging users to think about the data differently.

Julie Allen, postdoctoral associate at the Florida Museum of Natural History, discussed the museum’s partnership with the citizen science platform Zooniverse to transcribe handwritten and typed notes relating to natural history specimens. She focused particularly on several methods of motivating volunteers: lowering the barrier of entry to the project, acknowledging user milestones on Zooniverse, hosting on-site transcription events at natural history museums, and framing their individual contribution as an important contribution to science at large. The museum is considering ways of revamping the project’s platform so users “feel more like a biologist.” Eric Schmalz, community manager for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, also discussed motivating volunteers for the History Unfolded project by setting specific, achievable target goals and personally addressing the contributions of each volunteer.

Each featured speaker eventually touched on their project’s underlying goal of expanding access to an otherwise hidden collection, whether it be natural history specimens, handwritten clinical charts, World War II-era newspaper articles scattered across repositories nationwide, or art dealer stock books and sales catalogs. For Eric Schmalz, the ultimate goal of the History Unfolded project is simply to encourage people to learn more about contemporary American attitudes toward the experience of Jews during World War II. Matthew Lincoln, data research specialist for the Getty Provenance Index Remodel Project, hopes that converting the 1.5 million records in the index to a linked open data format will encourage art historians to use more data in their own work and to examine art history from new vantage points.

Check out these and other projects discussed during the symposium:
Notes From Nature: Citizen Science Transcription (Zooniverse)
Getty Provenance Index Research Project
History Unfolded
Crowdsourcing Labels from Electronic Medical Records to Enable Biomedical Research (Grant)
Ushahidi (Map-Based Data Collection)
Bioimages

Photographs by Jon Erickson, Science and Engineering Library:  (above) Visual Resources staff Millie Fullmer and Shelby Merritt with Steve Baskauf, Vanderbilt senior lecturer in biological sciences, and Caroline Voisine, Tennessee State Library and Archives;  and symposium speakers Matthew Lincoln and Julie Allen (middle) and Eric Schmalz (below).

— Shelby Merritt

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 7, 2017 in Conferences, Events, HART, Technology, VRC

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History of Art Graduates and Families Honored at Reception in Cohen Hall

Kevin Murphy, chair of the History of Art department, faculty, and staff honored the HART majors and minors and their families at the department’s annual reception for graduating seniors in the atrium of Cohen Memorial Hall.
Earlier in the day, the Class of 2017 had attended the Senior Day address of Ken Burns, historian and award-winning documentary filmmaker, who, quoting from Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural speech, urged the graduates to let “the better angels of our nature” prevail.

Following Murphy’s warm welcome and introduction of the HART faculty and staff, awards were presented and outstanding students recognized for their accomplishments. Vivien Fryd, professor of history of art, introduced the two HART graduates—Monica Peacock and Annabel Learner—who participated in the History of Art Senior Honors Program, which she described as “an intense three semesters of original research.” Peacock outlined her honors thesis, which was entitled “ISIL and its Destruction of Antiquities in the Middle East: Cultural Heritage in Crisis.” Her adviser was Mireille Lee, assistant professor of history of art. Peacock graduated summa cum laude with highest honors in History of Art.

Learner summarized her honors thesis, “Behind the Curtain: An Exploration of Gender and Class in Late Nineteenth-Century Paris through the Examination of Edgar Degas and his Ballerina Works.” Her adviser was Kevin Murphy, professor of history of art, and Learner graduated cum laude with honors in History of Art.

This year the Cooley Prize was shared by Megan Lee and Monica Peacock for the highest grade point average in the history of art department. Haley Brown and Nina Vaswani were recognized as runners-up.

The History of Art department congratulates these graduating seniors: Haley Therese Brown (magna cum laude), Savannah Jean Friedkin, Annabel Tate Learner (cum laude), Megan Linxin Lee (summa cum laude), Ryan Elizabeth Logie, Monica Elizabeth Peacock (summa cum laude), Danielle Christine Petitti, Llewellyn Kittredge Shamamian, Sujin Shin, Elliot James Taillon, and Nina Mary Vaswani.

Held in conjunction with the celebration of our graduates was the opening reception for a student-curated exhibition entitled American Modernism at Mid-Century: The Work of Morris Davidson. On view in the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery through September 17, the exhibition is the fourth in a series of annual partnerships between the Fine Arts Gallery and the History of Art department. The exhibition is curated by Aiden Layer ’19, Nancy Lin ’18, Ryan Logie ’17, Cecilia March ’18, Kittredge Shamamian ’17, Elliot Taillon ’17, and Nina Vaswani ’17, who were students in the “Exhibiting Historical Art” class, taught last fall by Kevin Murphy.

Murphy introduced members of the Rosenfeld/Davidson family who attended the exhibition opening and reception. They loaned paintings to the gallery from their private collection that spans the entirety of Davidson’s career.

The exhibit, the first comprehensive survey of Morris Davidson (1898-1979), a little known yet important twentieth-century American artist, presents new research into the significance of his life’s work, demonstrating that his move from a social-realist idiom in his early work to abstraction by mid-century was informed by his contact with some of the foremost painters of his day.

The Fine Arts Gallery is located in Cohen Memorial Hall, 1220 21st Avenue South, on the western edge of the Peabody College campus. Gallery hours for the summer are Tuesday through Friday 12 noon-4 pm, Saturdays 1-5 pm, and closed Sundays and Mondays. Admission is free and open to the public.

For more information, please visit the gallery’s website at www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery.

*Morris Davidson (American, 1898–1979) Untitled [Still Life with Red Pitcher], oil on canvas, n.d. From the Rosenfeld/Davidson Family Collection.

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on June 2, 2017 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Student/Alumni, VRC

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X-Peri and the Dada Effect: Readings of Contemporary Experimental Writing

Presented in conjunction with Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery’s current exhibition is X-Peri and the Dada Effect: Readings of Contemporary Experimental Writing, an event to be held in the gallery on Thursday, May 18, at 7 pm in Cohen Hall.

Joining Nathan Spoon, X-Peri‘s associate editor, will be X-Peri contributors Samantha Prychodko, Jamie Thurman, and Alex Lundy for readings of the experimental writing of fellow X-Peri contributor Andrei Codrescu, a commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and author of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (2009) and The Poetry Lesson (2010). They will read their own poems as well. This reading event will seek to demonstrate that the spirit of Dada is alive and as responsive as ever to uncertain times.

X-Peri is a vessel featuring deposits of xperimental x-poetry, x-hybrids, x-visual art, x-fiction, x-essays, x-quests, and posthuman x-memes.

Free and open to the public, the event coincides with the Fine Arts Gallery’s exhibition, The Dada Effect: An Anti-Aesthetic and Its Influence, on view through May 27 and open prior to the readings from 12 to 4 pm. Parking is free of charge in Lot 95, accessible from 21st Avenue South. For more information, please visit the gallery’s website at www.vanderbilt.edu/gallery or call 615-322-0605.

Man Ray
American, 1890–1976
The Meeting, plate IV, from Revolving Doors
Conceptualized as collage, 1916-1917. Printed in Paris, 1926.
Pochoir on paper
22 x 15 inches
© Man Ray Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY / ADAGP, Paris 2017
Courtesy the Hampshire College Art Gallery

Posted by vrcvanderbilt on May 18, 2017 in Events, Fine Arts Gallery, HART, Lectures, VRC

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