BENCHMARKS
The
Arthur Ross Gallery 1983--2003
Twenty
Years of Gallery Graphics
by
Dilys Winegrad, Director and Curator
of the Arthur Ross Gallery
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Four
family members were represented
in Peales
at Penn, 1996, from the
University's Collection, mounted
in conjunction with The Peale
Family: Creation of a Legacy at
the Philadelphia Museum of Art. |
The
Arthur Ross Gallery shares a grand
entry with the Fisher Fine Arts
Library, designed by Frank Furness.
Lamps created by sculptor Robert
Engman after an unexecuted design
by Furness provide the Gallery
with its nautilus logo. |
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The
first exhibition devoted
to Navajo "eye-dazzlers," November
1994-February 1995, included
this late classic serape
from the University of Colorado
Museum at Boulder.
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Art
and Ephemera
In
times of peace, people with the means
to travel have always gone afield in
search of rare sights and famous works
of art. Such tourists inevitably return
with souvenirs, proof that they have
seen the eternal wonders of Nature,
have
visited the temples, churches, museums,
or private collections, quasi permanent
institutions housing famed objects
of art. In antiquity, travelers might
purchase figurines of famous statues;
later on, Grand Tourists could collect
prints depicting sites or reproducing
celebrated works. (With time, the prints
themselves have often come to be prized
objects in their own right.) Nowadays,
traveling exhibitions tend to reverse
the process. Not incidentally, shows
that bring together objects from across
the world in a single great museum
also contribute to local tourism. Still,
the urge to record what we have seen
with our own eyes remains strong; it
is easy enough for a traveler with
a camera to substitute digitally enhanced
images for those furnished in earlier
times by the sketchbook or purchases
from enterprising local artists.
Exhibitions
are ephemeral unlike the exhibits--the
actual objects temporarily placed on
display. (Or at least, this is the
fervent prayer of any curator!) After
a certain time, loaned works must be
returned to studios or to their place
in public or private collections. Organizers
usually extend the life of an exhibition
beyond its limited span by producing
printed materials to accompany the
show. Whether fine illustrated catalogues
or humble cards and flyers, these provide
visitors with something to take home
for reference or as an aide-mémoire.
Once again, it falls to the graphic
arts to capture the moment--to give
a semblance of permanence to what is
transitory.
After
twenty years and a hundred or so exhibitions,
the Arthur Ross Gallery finds itself
in possession of a host of memories
and numerous posters recording the
variety of visual art the Gallery has
brought to Penn, the City of Philadelphia,
and the region. These incidental artifacts,
modest but often quite striking, also
provide a paper trail from 1983 to
2003 and beyond. In addition, they
further offer a way into the process
of reviewing two decades of a gallery's
activity.
20
Years of Gallery Graphics
Photograph
by Brian Edwards,
Shoot Digital |
20
Years of Openings at the
Arthur Ross Gallery, detail,
collage of invitations by
Naomi Usher. |
The
eighties were a popular decade for
establishing new university galleries,
many of them concerned with contemporary
art. At Penn, the Arthur Ross Gallery
opened its doors on February 8, 1983.
Apart from adding to the cultural attractions
in the area, including the Institute
of Contemporary Art, already established
on campus, the Gallery had a broad
yet distinctive mission: to present
art and artifacts from ancient civilizations
up to current cultural developments;
and to respond to proposals from academic
departments as well as artists and
the community.
By
providing a forum for visual learning
and instruction and for the presentation
of creative research as well as the
work of creative artists the Gallery
contributes a visual dimension to scholarship
and teaching at the University. With
modest resources, as a self-standing
institution within the University,
the Gallery serves a range of intellectual
and aesthetic interests on campus and
in the community. It has proved adept
in devising a visual component in non-traditional
areas--history along with art history,
ecology as well as archaeology, the
School of Medicine no less than the
School of Fine Arts.
Exhibitions
have been organized in connection with
milestones in the history of the University
and its individual Schools or to welcome
visiting scholars to conferences on
Chaucer, Psychiatry--or the Fall of
the Berlin Wall (upcoming in 2004).
Recent meetings in Philadelphia of
the Archaeological Institute of America,
the American Philological Association,
and the American Schools of Oriental
Research were the occasion of North
Americans in the Aegean Bronze Age:
the Discovery of Minoan and Mycenaean
Civilizations (January 2002) curated
by Professor Philip Betancourt, Karen
Vellucci, and Elizabeth Shank of the
Institute for Aegean Prehistory in
West Philadelphia. The exhibition brought
together drawings, archival photographs,
and archaeological objects excavated
by Penn archaeologists, many working
at the University of Pennsylvania Museum
in the early years of the twentieth
century. Such exhibitions serve to
showcase existing University collections
by highlighting seldom-seen treasures
along with several centuries of institutional
history.
Posters
serve to memorialize an event as well
as to broadcast information at the
time of a show. They have wound up
on the walls of student dorms and framed
in living rooms and offices. Quality,
and originality, have been key along
with the guiding principle that good
design should record and reflect the
great variety and high caliber of the
art that has appeared in the Gallery
since it opened its doors.
At
the beginning of the Gallery's 20th
year, posters were assembled for the
exhibition POSTERS/POSTERS/POSTERS:
20 Years of Gallery Graphics, which
greeted the Class of '06 when they
arrived on campus in September 2002.
The posters recorded exhibitions on
all manner of subjects in a variety
of media while making an aesthetic
statement of their own. In addition,
they provided a visual accounting of
the Gallery's 20-year history. No poster
was produced for the occasion, but
the introductory panel, a large photocollage
of invitations provided the graphic
for the invitation and other publications.
Chronologically
a patchwork, the exhibitions represented
by the posters nonetheless fall into
natural groupings according to medium,
subject matter, provenance, or interest.
The Gallery was built as a library
in the 1920s, so prints and drawings
look particularly good on the wainscoted
walls of the main space. Textiles,
another favored subject matter, particularly
the extremely long Moroccan rugs loaned
for Mysteries of the Maghreb: Rugs
and Textiles of North Africa (1997),
take advantage of the Gallery's exceptional
height as do paintings displayed "salon
style." This was necessary--and
successful--for the huge pieces loaned
by the Crawford Municipal Art Gallery
in Cork for Irish Art 1770-1990:
History and Society (1995) and Travels
in the Labyrinth--Mexican Art in the
Pollak Collection (2001). Faculty
artists and student groups have been
invited to show their work; photographers
and architects are regularly featured
as are groups of vintage photographs
and architectural drawings. Books from
Penn collections and others have not
only been featured but have provided
a fascinating component in shows from The
Intellectual World of Benjamin Franklin to Edward
Lear's Greece 1848-1864 featuring
an artist better known for his limericks.
Travelling exhibitions have been mounted
in various contexts; but by far the
majority of exhibitions have been organized
from public and private collections
by Gallery staff and guest curators,
among them Penn faculty and their students.
In 1999-2000, Professor Fredrik Hiebert
ransacked major Uzbek museums of art
and archaeology--with the permission of
President Karimov himself--to bring Treasures
of Uzbekistan in many media and
dating from 4 millennia. Most recently,
for Antiquity Recovered: Pompeii
and Herculaneum in Philadelphia Collections Professor
Coates and Getty curator Jon Seidl
drew from a dozen Philadelphia collections
to highlight the influence of these
archaeological excavations on Philadelphia
collectors--not to mention Philadelphia
tourists of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries!
-- Excerpted
from the 20th-Year Report of the Arthur
Ross Gallery, in press
Review
of Posters/Posters Show
We
live in a world where a plethora of
tacky graphic forms surround us daily.
An abundance of promotional suggestions,
in print and on television, urges us
to acquire or select all sorts of frequently
needless products and services, from
suntan lotion to public servants. More
often than not, these messages produced
for massive audiences are tiresome,
banal, annoying, and boring to our
eyes and mind. One has to wonder where
so much offensive ugliness and sheer
vulgarity come from.
By
contrast, we occasionally confront
examples of refreshing typography and
layout design that have been conceived
and executed by the exercise of good
taste and original creative effort.
These are informative and visually
attractive. A perfect case in point
was the collection of posters produced
over the past years calling attention
to exhibitions presented in the Arthur
Ross Gallery. It is a pleasure to single
out such superb examples because they
showed how the practice of imaginative
graphic design may be pursued with
dignity, integrity, legibility--and
admirable esthetic appeal.
--
Burton Wasserman, professor of
art,
College
of Fine Art and Performing Arts, Rowan University; critic
for Art Matters
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Leslie
Bowen's oil with mixed media The
Sun and the Moon was seen
in the juried exhibition Confronting
Cancer Through Art, 1999,
the Gallery's second collaboration
with the University of Pennsylvania
Cancer Center featuring artists
whose lives had been touched by
cancer. For more works in this
exhibit see Almanac September
7, 1999. |
Louis
I. Kahn's structural model
for the Richards Medical
Research Laboratory at Penn
was featured in both The
Architect's Design: Drawings,
Models, and Manuscripts from
the Architectural Archives,
1984, and Constructing
Penn: Heritage, Imagination,
Innovation organized
for President Rodin's inauguration
in 1994. Courtesy of the
Louis I. Kahn Collection,
University of Pennsylvania
Architectural Archives.
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