Past Exhibitions
CREATING: QUILTS OF THE LAKOTA
Creating: Quilts of the Lakota presents over twenty eye-dazzling 20th and 21st century quilts from the Pine Ridge Heritage Center and Indian Reservation in South Dakota. This is the first time most of these quilts are exhibited publicly and published. Mary Bordeaux, a member of the Lakota tribe, curated this exhibition with the Arthur Ross Gallery. "Making items for family and the community is a large part of the Lakota's way of life," notes Bordeaux. In addition, 19th-century Lakota artifacts, such as moccasins, a cradleboard, and parfleche boxes, have been lent by the Penn Museum to provide a context for Native sewing traditions prior to the introduction of quilting at Pine Ridge.
RELATED EVENTS
February 9 at 10:15am: Gallery Talk with curator Mary Bordeaux, followed at 11:00am by Artist Talk with Lakota quilter Janyce Trask
February 22 at 7:30pm: World Premier Reading of Miracle Play by Sheldon Wolf
March 13 at 5:00pm: Gallery Talk with Bill Wierzbowski, Associate Keeper, American Section, Penn Museum
9 PERSPECTIVES ON A PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTION
This exhibition mines the extensive photography holdings in the University of Pennsylvania’s Art Collection and Gabriel Martinez, Senior Lecturer in Penn’s School of Design is guest Curator. Since September 2011, Martinez has surveyed and documented every photograph in the University collection, along with Heather Gibson, Collections Manager.
To mix things up, Martinez has invited his eight photography colleagues (who are also working artists) in the Fine Arts Department, School of Design, to curate a few photos from their distinct point of view. 9 Perspectives will bring the University’s photography collection into an entirely new focus.
RELATED EVENTS
November 13 at 5:30pm: Artist Talk with Neal Slavin
November 27 at 5:30pm: Artist Talk with Larry Fink
December 7 at 5:00pm: Screening of the film The Fighting Lady
CALIFORNIA IMPRESSIONISM: MASTERS OF LIGHT FROM THE IRVINE MUSEUM
California Impressionism: Masters of Light presents thirty paintings that reveal the exceptional beauty and rugged California coastline from. While some of these late 19th- and early 20th-century artists are renowned, others remain unknown east of the Mississippi.
When the first Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris in 1874, French critics derided it as radical art. But by 1886 Americans could purchase Impressionist paintings at the
Durand-Ruel Gallery in New York. American artists embraced the French movement’s use of light, color, and optics and personally traveled to Paris to study and work en plein air, taking their easels outside, working directly after nature.
On loan from the Irvine Museum, works by Franz Bischoff, Colin Campbell Cooper, Anna Hills, Granville Redmond, and Guy Rose are included in the exhibition.
RELATED EVENTS
September 22 & 23: Plein Air Painting Competition at the Morris Arboretum and on College Green
October 13 at 5:30pm: Artist Talk with André Dombrowski, Impressionism: Sensation and Translation
October 27 at 11:15am: Classes without Quizzes - Masters of Light: French and California Impressionism with André Dombrowski, Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Art and James Irvine Swinden, Museum President, The Irvine Museum. Moderated by Lynn Marsden-Atlass, Director, Arthur Ross Gallery and University Curator
SAMBA SESSÃO: AFRO-BRAZILIAN ART & FILM
The exhibition Samba Sessão will introduce viewers to the visual culture of African-descended people living in Brazil, the world’s fifth-largest country and a seldom exhibited and little studied area of Latin American art. Formerly home to the largest concentration of African slaves in the Americas and the longest lasting slave system in the Western Hemisphere, it has a rich artistic tradition. Collected in the late-1990s by John P. Axelrod and later acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the fifteen paintings and four sculptures that form the core of the exhibition were all made during the twentieth century and draw on different aspects of Afro-Brazilian life, from working in the fields to religious rituals and syncretic belief systems born from the experience of New World enslavement. An examination of Brazilian film and television from the 1950s to the present will also be incorporated in this exhibition.
This exhibition is being organized in cooperation with students in the Halpern-Rogath Curatorial Seminar supported by the Department of the History of Art and the Arthur Ross Gallery. The seminar is being taught by professors Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw and Tamara J. Walker.
In Material: Fiber 2012
In Material features four artists who bring imagination and innovation to the field of fiber art. Japanese-born artist Lucy Arai apprenticed in the practice of sashiko, a decorative stitching process which she re invigorates and applies to handmade paper and mixed media. Sonya Clark uses thread, plastic combs, human hair, and other found objects to create wall hangings inspired by her African and American ancestry. Philadelphia-based Mi-Kyoung Lee, has had her woven backdrops incorporated in theater productions around the globe. Cynthia Schira digitally connects art and language in her elaborately patterned Jacquard cloths, drawing inspiration from ciphers, musical notes, and geometric patterns.
Click here to read ENGL-111 students' poems inspired by this exhibit.
Double Take: Series, Multiples, and Prints from the University of Pennsylvania Collection
The exhibition features 58 prints, photographs, pastels, and sculptures drawn from the University of Pennsylvania's diverse art collection, the second in a series of collaborative exhibitions by the University's Office of the Curator and the Arthur Ross Gallery. The exhibition explores issues of serialism and artistic process. The earliest works represented are Albrecht Dürer's Engraved Passion Series (1508-13) and two William Hogarth engravings from A Rake's Progress, 1735.
An American Odyssey: The Warner Collection of American Art
This travelling exhibition from Tuscaloosa, Alabama features exceptional paintings from three centuries of American art drawn from the personal collection of Jonathan "Jack" Warner and his wife Susan Austin Warner and the collection of The Warner Foundation. The paintings chronicle the American experience from 1799 to 1971 in portraiture, historical, genre, still life and landscape.
Lauren Greenfield's Girl Culture
Girl Culture is a wide-ranging and profound documentation of the lives of American girls and young women. Greenfield’s installation presents over 50 color photographs of girls and young women from a range of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds across the United States. The images in this show take an unflinching look at contemporary life for girls, addressing such topics as sexuality, body image, and weight loss culture.
Post-Mao Dreaming: Contemporary Chinese Art
Post-Mao Dreaming: Chinese Contemporary Art presents over thirty prints, drawings, photographs and paintings that offer a glimpse of the post-Cultural Revolution era in China following Mao Zedong’s death, when Chinese artists began to throw off the restrictions of Maoist Communism (1949-1979) and to reclaim their individuality.
The Dogon: Photographs by Stuart Franklin
Illustrating issues of water and sustainability in the Dogon region of Mali, these fifteen limited edition photographs were taken by Stuart Franklin on behalf of the Voss Foundation in 2009. Providing a view of the daily impact of the global water crisis, this exhibition was organized in conjunction with The University of Pennsylvania’s theme year of Water.
Naked: The University Collection Unveiled
Naked: the University Collection Unveiled features paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints and photographs drawn from the University of Pennsylvania’s diverse and remarkable art collection. This inaugural collaboration between the University’s Office of the Curator and the Arthur Ross Gallery draws attention to the historic evolution of the nude from the 16th century to the present.
Laughing Matters: Soviet Propaganda In Kruschchev's Thaw, 1956-1964
This exhibition offers a unique and thematically coherent sample of propaganda posters from the "Thaw," a period of post-Stalinist liberalization during Nikita Khrushchev’s ascendancy (1956-1964). The exhibition illuminates the changes in political rhetoric and iconography at a time when the Soviet Union encouraged an unprecedented "warming-up" in all social and cultural spheres and struggled to define a new imagery of Soviet collective purpose.
Silence Dogood: An Installation by Miler Lagos
Silence Dogood on Miler Lagos' website
As part of the citywide celebration, Philagrafika 2010, the Arthur Ross Gallery will present a site-specific installation by Miler Lagos, a renowned Columbian contemporary artist. Lagos is a multi media artist with an interest in relating different socioeconomic environments-urban and popular-and re-appropriating the different visual ad social phenomena that emerge in each context. He uses a variety of modern materials: plastics, steel, cement and recycled paper.
Jacob Lawrence and the Urban Experience: Selected Prints 1963-2000
A renowned 20th-century African-American painter/printmaker, Lawrence's self-defined style of "dynamic cubism" was primarily influenced by his life growing up in Harlem. The New York Times (June 9, 2000) called Lawrence "one of America's leading figurative painters" and "among the most impassioned visual chroniclers of the African American experience."
West Philadelphia: Building a Community
This exhibition documents the neighborhood's 19th-century architectural and urban development while it features highlights of today's dynamic, multicultural community. The earliest works in the exhibition include watercolors by self-taught Scottish immigrant, David J. Kennedy. Kennedy's watercolors, drawn from the collection of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, depict West Philadelphia houses, institutions, and streets between 1836-1898. City land maps, early photographs, and post cards also reveal the neighborhood's rapid expansion and growth then.
Thirteen Miles from Paradise Paintings by John Moore
This exhibition of industrial landscape paintings by John Moore executed over the last 3 decades focuses on sites from Conneaut, Ohio to Waterville, Maine, including Coatesville, PA, a locale that specifically inspired American Modernists such as Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler. Moore has revisited places he painted 20 years ago, and his most recent paintings reveal changes that have occurred. JoMoore’s paintings resemble places where he grew up. While the images appear immediately recognizable, the paintings are in fact partial composites based on site specifics, formal concerns and oral history as told by individuals with ties to the sites.
Download this PDF for a comprehensive list of the Arthur Ross Gallery's past exhibitions.