PAST EXHIBITIONS 2008
Extreme Explorations
Beyond the Edge of the Sea: Diversity of Life in the Deep-Ocean Wilderness
Celestial Images: Antiquarian Astrological Prints from the Mendillo Collection
Diving with a Camera: Photographs by Dennis Liberson
September 5 - November 2, 2008
Beyond the Edge of the Sea is an exhibition of watercolor illustrations by artist Karen Jacobsen, whose métier is deep-ocean landscapes and the exquisite animals that live in this alien environment. Jacobsen's sketchbooks contain more than 400 illustrations and are an important body of original work never before viewed by the public. Beyond the Edge of the Sea is the product of a fifteen-year collaboration between the artist and deep-sea explorer and scientist Dr. Cindy Lee Van Dover, Director of the Duke University Marine Laboratory. Dr. Van Dover has led diving expeditions to deep-sea locations in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans, where she has discovered dozens of new kinds of animals. Her work has helped to change the way we think about life in the abyss. Jacobsen accompanied Dr. Van Dover on many of these expeditions.
Celestial Images celebrates the golden age of astronomical charts. Some of the world’s earliest artistic images, illustrations of cosmologies and heavenly phenomena, entered into a new and lively phase at the time of the Renaissance. The invention of printing in the fifteenth-century improved the means of disseminating scientific knowledge; advances in astronomy in the sixteenth and seventeenth-centuries led to new information to be portrayed. Printed astronomical charts of surprising accuracy and delicate beauty resulted from this fortuitous conjunction. And celestial cartographers combined their scientific quest with a keen aesthetic sense—each chart had to be beautiful to look at, as well as be a repository of information. Indeed, they celebrated knowledge.
Impressions & Expressions: Modern Masters of American Printmaking
April 11 - June 26, 2008
An evolving dialogue between artist and medium characterizes the progression of American art throughout the 20th century. However, the medium of printmaking remained as a constant – a means of impressing an artistic expression that could transcend a constantly shifting aesthetic. In seeking to democratize access to modern art, artists expanded the use of print and created a wave of novel printing developments. Incidentally, just as printmaking had been integral to the evolution of written word, and later, the development of modern prints, so printmaking became an essential component in the creation of artist books. The expansion of printmaking techniques pushed the boundaries of traditional art forms and further challenged the American understanding of representation, expanding upon the fundamental print medium to capture the very essence of art.
The prints and artists books featured in this exhibition on loan from Laura R. Burrows, are gathered from art movements during the second half of the twentieth-century in America. Although a few artists in this collection are in fact European, works in this collection characterize the evolution of American Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptualism exemplified here. In addition, while each artist represented contributed greatly to the development of modern art, none considered themselves to be a part of any single movement. Rather, their collective efforts to steer modern art in new directions through the use of print led to the formation of new perspectives surrounding art, the artist, and their context within twentieth-century American art.
Pursuing Perfection: Selected Loans & Highlights of the Permanent Collection
January 25 - November 2, 2008
In celebration of the Muscarelle Museum of Art’s 25th anniversary in 2008, permanent collection of the Museum, off view since 2006, will be reinstalled in the Sheridan and Spigel galleries. The installation will open in conjunction with Painting the Italian Landscape: Views from the Uffizi and will showcase the highlights of the collection, from colonial portraiture to abstract expressionist canvases. Additionally, the museum’s holdings will be accompanied by major loans from private collections, including great American paintings from the Owens Foundation and to individual works by Old Masters such as Titian, Diego Velázquez and Salvator Rosa.
Painting the Italian Landscape: Views from the Uffizi
January 25 - March 23, 2008
From the great Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy comes the second of a series of three magnificent exhibitions of Old Master paintings from Italy. This exhibition of five centuries of landscape paintings reflects the truly international collections of works at the Uffizi, one of the greatest museums in the world. Beginning with the work of the great master Botticelli in the 1500s, the exhibition showcases the best Old Master artists up to the twentieth-century including the great masters Guercino, Filippo Napoletano, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Canaletto, to the Italian Futurist Giacomo Balla. The exhibition explores the evolution of landscape painting in Italy, though at times by famous artists from all over Europe including France,Germany and the Netherlands, from its early roots as background settings in paintings in the 1500s, to its role as protagonist in paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and finally as an important part of the artist’s life in modernity in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries.
|
