PAST TRIP The Figge Art Museum and the Stanley Museum of Art March 2024
The February 2024 lecture on the new Stanley Museum of Art at the University of Iowa in Iowa City and their recently expanded collection of African art inspired members to have a look in person, with a stop at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport on the way.
Favorite exhibits and displays at the Figge Art Museum included a gallery of works on loan from the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR (which we visited in 2019), architectural elements and furnishings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Tradition Interrupted, a fascinating selection of 23 artworks created by 12 artists from around the world who believe that everyday objects have the power to evoke memories and emotions. But perhaps the biggest thrill was the 43rd Rock Island Art Guild Art Exhibition featuring a selection of works by artists living within 200 miles of the museum, with works by three Peoria-area artists including trip participant and FAS board member David Gregory!
The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art’s permanent collection encompasses over 16,000 artworks. The inaugural exhibition, Homecoming, reintroduces their extraordinary collection to the public through a series of related installations. Generations, curated by Diana Tuite, Visiting Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, foregrounds the University of Iowa’s history of innovative arts education and scholarship. Fragments of the Canon: African Art from the Saunders and Stanley Collections, curated by Dr. Cory Gundlach, Curator of African Art, features African art collected by a Black Iowan, Meredith Saunders. History Is Always Now, also curated by Gundlach, displays the Stanley’s celebrated collection of African art in a way that emphasizes movement and cultural exchange through time and across space. Smaller, more focused installations, curated by Gundlach, include Centering on Cloth: The Art of African Textiles, which highlights the global scope of interactions that surround the creation, use, and circulation of cloth in Africa, and About Face: African Masks in Iowa, which emphasizes the historical and artistic relationships between West and Central African masks from the world-renowned Stanley Collection of African Art.
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banner: trip participants with Deborah Butterfield's Half-Moon, Figge Art Museum and learning about Jackson Pollock's Mural at the Stanley Museum of Art
above left: Faig Ahmed (Azerbaijani), Hal, 2016, wool; Courtesy of the artist
David Gregory next to his watercolor Snowdrifts on display at the Figge Art Museum
Favorite exhibits and displays at the Figge Art Museum included a gallery of works on loan from the Crystal Bridges Museum in Bentonville, AR (which we visited in 2019), architectural elements and furnishings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and Tradition Interrupted, a fascinating selection of 23 artworks created by 12 artists from around the world who believe that everyday objects have the power to evoke memories and emotions. But perhaps the biggest thrill was the 43rd Rock Island Art Guild Art Exhibition featuring a selection of works by artists living within 200 miles of the museum, with works by three Peoria-area artists including trip participant and FAS board member David Gregory!
The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art’s permanent collection encompasses over 16,000 artworks. The inaugural exhibition, Homecoming, reintroduces their extraordinary collection to the public through a series of related installations. Generations, curated by Diana Tuite, Visiting Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, foregrounds the University of Iowa’s history of innovative arts education and scholarship. Fragments of the Canon: African Art from the Saunders and Stanley Collections, curated by Dr. Cory Gundlach, Curator of African Art, features African art collected by a Black Iowan, Meredith Saunders. History Is Always Now, also curated by Gundlach, displays the Stanley’s celebrated collection of African art in a way that emphasizes movement and cultural exchange through time and across space. Smaller, more focused installations, curated by Gundlach, include Centering on Cloth: The Art of African Textiles, which highlights the global scope of interactions that surround the creation, use, and circulation of cloth in Africa, and About Face: African Masks in Iowa, which emphasizes the historical and artistic relationships between West and Central African masks from the world-renowned Stanley Collection of African Art.
images
banner: trip participants with Deborah Butterfield's Half-Moon, Figge Art Museum and learning about Jackson Pollock's Mural at the Stanley Museum of Art
above left: Faig Ahmed (Azerbaijani), Hal, 2016, wool; Courtesy of the artist
David Gregory next to his watercolor Snowdrifts on display at the Figge Art Museum
PAST TRIP Art Institute of Chicago, January 2024
A group of 32 Fine Arts Society members and potential future members enjoyed a curator-led tour of Canova: Sketching in Clay, the first exhibition to focus on Italian sculptor Antonio Canova’s lesser-known but unforgettable work in clay reveals how the artist developed his ideas—from the first brilliant spark of imagination to his laboriously finished statues. The FAS December 2023 lecture was on these works, but even seeing images of the small scale works projected onto the Peoria Riverfront Museum's Giant Screen Theatre did not compare to seeing the real things!! It was just stunning.
Most of the group also thoroughly enjoyed the beautiful finished sculptures by trailblazing French sculptor Camille Claudel who defied the expectations of her time to pursue original and powerful explorations of the human form. Claudel’s passionate and complicated relationship with her teacher, Auguste Rodin, and her forced confinement in a psychiatric institution for the final 30 years of her life is popularly known today, but her forward-thinking artworks have received less attention in the United States. This exhibition is the first comprehensive display of Claudel’s work in the United States in over 20 years and marks the 130th anniversary of the first public presentation of her sculpture in this country—at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Two other exhibits of particular interest were Picasso: Drawing from Life and Radical Clay: Contemporary Artists from Japan. The former brings into focus Picasso’s life and art as it intersected with a network of artists, dealers, printers, family members, and lovers. The many women with whom he had passionate and sometimes volatile relationships inspired him and are frequently represented in his art, as are several friends and family members. The latter celebrates 36 contemporary ceramic artists--all women-- through 40 stunning, virtuosic works. To close out the day, half of the group met under the Hartwell Memorial Window to meet Dr. Elizabeth McGoey, the AIC curator who lectured to FAS on this Tiffany masterpiece via Zoom during COVID. She pointed out several details of the window and explained more about the installation. And she piqued our interest for another trip this coming summer with a recitation of exhibitions opening over the next few months! |