245 Glenbrook Rd
Storrs, CT 06269
USA
You’re invited to the opening reception for four new exhibitions:
Work It: Women Artists, Ellen Emmet Rand, and the Business of Seeing
Objectifying Myself: Works by Women Artists from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Liz Whitney Quisgard: An Installation
Progression: Then and Now (Stanwyck Cromwell)
The exhibitions run March 23 – July 30th, 2017
Objectifying Myself explores works by women artists from 1968-2005 which serve to some degree as self portraits, but which employ surrogate objects rather than depictions of the artists’ faces or bodies.
These works are on loan from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia (PAFA) which was founded in 1805 by painter and scientist Charles Willson Peale, sculptor William Rush, and other artists and business leaders. We thank PAFA for their generosity in collaboration.
Work It highlights how women artists in the first half of the 20th century worked -how they fought for opportunities, paid their bills, and found ways to have their art taken seriously.
Featuring several works by Ellen Emmet Rand, as well as pieces by Dorothea Lange and Lois Mailou Jones, “Work It” features the diversity of styles and subjects that helped women achieve both recognition and security as working artists.
This exhibition is a preview of a larger exhibition opening in October 2018, The Business of Bodies: Ellen Emmet Rand (1875-1941) and the Persuasion of Portraiture. The Henry Luce Foundation’s American Art Program has awarded a grant to the William Benton Museum of Art in support of this exhibition focusing on one of the most important and prolific American portrait painters of the early twentieth century, Ellen Emmet Rand.
The Museum’s collection of Ellen Emmet Rand’s work is viewable online here.
Liz Whitney Quisgard is an award-winning, nationally renowned artist who lives and works in New York City. “My goal is to surprise and engage the mind by seducing the eye. Toward that end I rely on pattern. We all understand a row of triangles, a strip of squares, an arrangement of circles and swirls. No need to ask their meaning. They simply are what they are. They speak to us universally and without apology.”- Liz Whitney Quisgard, Artist
In Progression Stanwyck Cromwell’s work demonstrates how art serves as a medium for capturing and expressing the range of immigrant experiences and voices in the United States. “This exhibition is a visual documentation of my journey as a Guyanese-born artist, living in a multi-cultural America. Despite my lengthy absence from my country of origin, my memories of Guyana are very rich and abundant. A visual kaleidoscope from this exotic place is referenced in my art. These references serve as visual footnotes to my art-making practice, by allowing me a rich palette of diverse sights to draw from. Saturated colors, patterns and textures reveal themselves in my collages, paintings and drawings.” -Stanwyck E. Cromwell, Artist
Exhibition in collaboration with The Caribbean Initiative, El Instituto, and the Africana Studies Institute’s artist-in-residence program.