On Monday, Sept. 13, 2010, the Hillstrom Museum of Art had an opening reception for its three new exhibitions: Voices: Contemporary Ceramic Art from Sweden, ENNESBO (multi-media installation by artist Sandra Binion), and FOCUS IN/ON: Henry Varnum Poor’s Autumn Still Life.
For those of you who don’t know, the Hillstrom Museum can be found in the Jackson Campus Center (down the hall from the Book Mark). These exhibitions will remain there for viewing until Sunday, Nov. 7, 2010. There will be another reception during the Nobel Conference here at Gustavus, on Tuesday, Oct. 5 from 6:00 to 8:00 p.m. The three exhibitions and receptions are available for free to anyone interested.
Voices: Contemporary Ceramic Art from Sweden is an exhibit featuring ten artists who are distinguished in their creative boldness of contemporary ceramic art in Sweden.The work of each artist does not seek to reflect the ideals of the norm and instead entails nonconformity. The artists, chosen for the exhibition by Inger Molin, a leading figure in contemporary Swedish ceramic art who has owned and operated Galleri Inger Molin in Stockholm since 1998, include Frida Fjellman, Renata Francescon, Eva Hild, Pontus Lindvall, Mårten Medbo, AnnaSofia Mååg, Gustaf Nordenskiöld, Kjell Rylander, Per B Sundberg and Kennet Williamsson.
Voices began as a European traveling exhibition, where it appeared at venues in Hamburg, Paris and Ghent. It was then extended for a U.S. tour (previous venues of which include the Swedish Embassy, the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Mont. and the Dubuque, Iowa Museum of Art). It was organized for tour by International Arts and Artists, Washington, D.C., according to Director of the Hillstrom Museum Don Meyers.
Along with Voices, Professor Nicole Roberts Hoiland, who teaches ceramics in the college’s department of art and art history, will also be presenting a public gallery talk in the exhibition space at noon on Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010.The Voices exhibition is accompanied by a cloth-bound catalogue, on sale at the Museum.There is also an illustrated brochure available free of charge to visitors.
ENNESBO, an exhibition presented by artist Sandra Binion, utilizes multiple types of media to visually enrapture the audience (such as surround sound and multi-channel television). She also has a passion for photography, along with multi-colored water paintings that seize emotions through soft, pastel colors and writing. The pages that once filled her journal are also on display in the museum, almost like wallpaper, adorned with her own authentic handwriting. Several of her water paintings also have poetic words juxtaposed in the foreground of her subjects. Also on display is a 300 year old piece of wallpaper from her home in Ennesbo, a small farming settlement in rural southern Sweden where Binion’s family lived.
Her inspiration stems from her great-grandmother’s bedroom. She began ENNESBO by painting the keyhole of her great-grandmother’s room and then branching off from there: a broken window in her house, writing on a wall in her barn and time spent with her family cherry picking. The artwork reflects much of the visuals and emotions she felt while in Ennesbo, but more importantly, it reflects her Swedish heritage, a forgotten history that she wants to give life to again through her artwork.
Binion will discuss her work at the opening reception for ENNESBO. Her exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, available for purchase at the Museum.
The FOCUS IN/ON: Henry Varnum Poor’s Autumn Still Life exhibition focuses on American painter and ceramicist Henry Varnum Poor (1887-1970), in another of the Museum’s FOCUS IN/ON projects. “The FOCUS IN/ON projects are all collaborative,”Meyers said,” and ideally draw in an audience that’s not necessarily an automatic part of the art offerings at Gustavus.”
In this current FOCUS IN/ON project, Meyers worked with a fellow faculty member, in this case from the philosophy department.Last spring, he collaborated with a member of the math and computer science department, and the fall before that, it was with a member of the geology department. Professor of Philosophy Lisa Heldke and Meyers co-wrote the text that accompanies the current FOCUS IN/ON project, with considerable consultation and editing back and forth.
This exhibit is presented in conjunction with the college’s 2010 Nobel Conference. Heldke is the faculty coordimator for this year’s conference, and she is co-editor of Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research.
“A few years ago, one of my colleagues said that food is the quintessential liberal arts subject matter,”Heldke said, “and this exhibition is just more evidence that that is the case. We all learn more about a subject, such as food, when we explore it through the lenses of science, art, literature, music, philosophy and of course eating!”
On Saturday, Sept. 25, these three exhibitions will be featured as part of the Smithsonian Magazine’s sixth annual Museum Day. Further details on this nation-wide event can be found online.
Hillstrom’s regular hours are weekdays 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and weekends 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. Additional information can be found on the museum’s website.