Exhibitions Archive
Sources of Abstraction
Gesture, Emotion, ShapeAbstraction comes from many different sources. It may begin with a concrete object, or something less tangible, such as an emotion or thought. Artists use abstraction to express that which cannot be conveyed through representation and to explore other sources of art-making. The works in the exhibition date from immediately after World War II until the present. Some were strongly influenced by abstract expressionism, and others stem from later movements, such as minimalism and conceptualism. This exhibition highlights three important sources of abstraction: gesture, emotion, and shape.
This exhibition was curated by Philip Dytko, Class of 2017, Pauline Lewis, Class of 2016, and Molly Siegel, Class of 2016, each of whom was enrolled in Professor Mary Coffey’s ARTH 71: The American Century. This course provides a thematic overview of American art in the twentieth century. Students in the class were placed into curatorial teams of three, and each team identified a theme, selected six objects from the permanent collection, drafted labels, and proposed an installation design for the exhibition. The teams presented their proposals to the entire class at the end of the term, and students voted on their favorite. Gesture, Emotion, Shape: Sources of Abstraction was the winning exhibition.
Class of 1965 Photographers
Picturing the WorldA Centennial Exhibition
Allan HouserConstructing Black Identities across the African Diaspora
Made in the MiddleCultural anthropology began as the study of people—primarily in Africa—whom Europeans had defined as exotic, primitive, and uncivilized, but many later ethnographic studies debunked this colonial mindset. Today’s anthropologists aim to reveal the social, historical, and political construction of racial identities. The works of art in this small exhibition further this effort. They represent a host of colonial binaries—culture and civilization, traditional and modern, savage and civilized, rest and west, black and white—that often serve to perpetuate systems of inequality rather than understanding of our shared humanity. Taken together, the artists here reveal the difficult positions in which people of color find themselves when trying to simultaneously conform to standards upheld by white western society and recuperate a relationship to Africa or blackness. Yet the images expose not only the potential hurt but also the excitement of crafting hybrid identities from various cultures.
Chelsey Kivland, Robert A. and Catherine L. McKennan Postdoctoral Fellow of Anthropology, and Amelia Kahl, Hood Museum of Art Coordinator of Academic Programming, selected these works for Professor Kivland’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology class. Students in the class wrote descriptive labels for these works and used them for a visual anthropology assignment.
The world is comprised of objects. These discrete items acquire meaning through relationships and context, yet are defined by their own autonomy. To give order to the things that surround us, we create categories, which, in turn, rely upon cultural connotations that impart meaning, value, and significance. The common language of things can convey a multiplicity of ideas such as concerns, class, or interests. The audience interprets the subjects by and through the objects that surround them.
Works of art present a special category as they occupy several object worlds simultaneously. Artworks epitomize Graham Harman’s definition of a “real object” as one that has not an outer effect, but an inner one. The tactility of the object is, of course, present, but the value lies not purely in its physical qualities, but in what it evokes.
This exhibition was curated by Katie Hornstein, assistant professor of Art History, and Jane Carroll, senior lecturer of Art History, in conjunction with their class Introduction to Art History II. Students used these works of art for a writing assignment. This exhibition has been made possible by the Harrington Gallery Fund.