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PHILLIPS MUSEUM OF ART FALL 2021

Bill Hutson (American, b.1936). Detail of The Opening, AP 10/10, 1978. Ink on paper, 22 x 30". Gift of the Artist, EC821.

The museum is reopening on Tuesday, September 7th.

Admission is FREE and the museum is open to F&M faculty, staff, students, AND the public for now.

All 4 galleries will be open!!

We will also have an exhibition in the Winter Building through October 29th.

Nissley Gallery

The Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College is pleased to present the Nissley Gallery, showcasing works from the collection. The museum’s permanent collection gallery is named in honor of F&M alumnus Thomas W. Nissley ’55 and his wife Emily Baldwin Nissley, who together generously provided funding for its care and programming. Since its charter in 2000, the Phillips Museum of Art at Franklin & Marshall College has been committed to collecting significant examples of material culture and artwork that support the college curriculum. Routinely refreshed, this gallery is a broad sampling from the museum’s various core collections, including many artworks making their exhibition debut. The collection is evolving and we are deeply indebted to the many generous donors who have helped it grow into a robust teaching resource that can be used to engage with our diverse student population and greater Lancaster community.

David Brumbach (American, 1948–1992). Detail of Golden Star, c. 1977. Acrylic on paper, 26 1/2 x 18 1/4". Gift of the Estate of Robert Sharpe Wohlsen, TC2015.73.11.

  • Noon in the Nissley mini tours: September 15, October 20, and November 17
  • Jazz Night at the Phillips with the F&M Jazz Combo: November 11 at 4:30pm
LOCAL ARTIST SPOTLIGHT

The Nissley Gallery will now be featuring a rotation of contemporary local artists. The PMA’s first spotlight is artist Jerome Wright who is known for his figurative and abstract paintings as well as being an accomplished professional cellist. Wright was born in Richmond, Virginia before settling in Washington, D.C. where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and The Workshop for Careers in the Arts. He then moved to Brazil for five years playing as Assistant Principal Cellist with the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo under Maestro Carvallho before joining the U.S. Army. His Lancaster home has become an art and music studio, where he is surrounded by his instruments, paintings, and eclectic collection of artwork.

JEROME WRIGHT. PHOTO BY JENNY SCHULDER BRANT, LANCASTER, PA.

Detail of Goddess of the Sea/Virgin Mary, 2014. Mixed media on wood panel, 30 x 72”.

Kathleen Elliot: Questionable Foods

Examining and working with diverse experiences in corporate business and alternative spirituality, cultural commentary and craft technique, Kathleen Elliot produces unique sequences of forms and images designed to prompt fundamental questioning and discovery. Based in San Jose, in California’s Silicon Valley, Elliot draws on her surroundings as well as on her extensive studies in philosophy and linguistics to explore questions of reality, ethics, and the composition of everyday life. She has recently expanded her practice to incorporate mixed-media and collage works addressing the developed world’s problematic relationship with food and the political and financial forces that surround and manipulate it.

“Questionable Foods,” collages and constructions made partly or entirely from packaging become a tool for piercing the field of hyperbole and manipulation that surrounds the relentless marketing of food as a commercial product. Elliot still makes some use of glass but combines and juxtaposes her own flameworked structures and more manufactured-looking commissioned vessels with contemporary food packaging to explore some of the ways in which we are manipulated into consuming physically unhealthy and environmentally harmful products. Using gaudily designed packaging from cereal, candy, and other products, she questions the promise of independence, flexibility, and fun they hold out. What, she asks, are the physical and societal costs of accepting commercial hype and prioritizing convenience over lasting health?

Exhibition organized through Katharine T. Carter & Associates.

Detail of We Want Your Money, 2019. Recycled food boxes and mixed media, 45 x 36".

  • Opening Reception: September 7 at 5pm in the Dana Gallery
  • Information session & discussion with the Center for Sustainable Environment: October 6 at 11:30am at the Fair Trade Cafe
Magnum Photographers: Capturing Moments

It was in 1947, and the years directly following WWII that Magnum was created. It was through a shared experience of hardship and devastation that four documentary photojournalists joined together to create a collective that focused on moments of humanity captured on film. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David “Chim” Seymour, the founding members of Magnum, were all deeply affected by the horrors of covering WWII assignments, or suffering through imprisonment and loss. They proposed the creation of a photography organization that supported the artist’s choice of projects that fit their interests rather than predetermined assignments and acknowledged that the photographers would retain copyrights to their own images; a revolutionary approach at the time.

During the first years of the collective, the founding artists split up the globe into coverage areas, much of which had not been photographed before. Images were sold to popular publications such as Life Magazine and National Geographic. From the liberation of concentration camps to 9/11, Magnum photographers have been documenting historic events for the past 70 years, covering famine, war, poverty, art, family, and celebrity so that the intangible, fleeting moments of life are captured. - Their work is based in social equality and human rights; exposing the effects of injustice on marginalized communities. This exhibition highlights ten members of the Magnum cooperative and the vast span of the globe and content that these photographers covered, and in some cases, died for.

Curated by Lindsay W. Marino, Phillips Museum Director & Collections Manager and Janie M. Kreines, Curator of Academic Affairs & Community Engagement.

George Rodger (British, 1908-1995). Detail of Men in Robes, Northern Sudan, c. 1948. Gelatin silver print, 7 3/4 x 9 3/4". Gift of Dr. Stephen J. and Eileen Nicholas, P'20, GRM3467.

  • Opening Reception: September 30 at 5pm in the Rothman Gallery
  • Photojournalism Workshop: November 4 at 4:30pm at the Philadelphia Alumni Writers House
Artful Nature: Fashion & Theatricality

Between 1770 and 1830, both fashionable dress and theatrical practice underwent dramatic changes in an attempt to become more “natural.” And yet this desire was widely recognized as paradoxical, since both fashion and the theater were longstanding tropes of artifice. In this exhibition, we examine this paradox of “artful nature” through the changing conception of theatricality during these decades, as mirrored and expressed in fashionable dress. Theater and performance practices in the late eighteenth century, including the vogue for private theatricals, reinforced the blurred lines between the theater and everyday life. Classical sculpture became a reference point for women, as its artistic excellence was acclaimed precisely because it seemed so “natural.” But when actresses, dancers, painters, or fashionable women posed themselves as classical statues come to life, they acted as both Pygmalion and Galatea, both genius artist and living artwork, carving out a space for their own artistic agency. Artful Nature refers simultaneously to the theatricality and deception typically attributed to fashionable women in the late eighteenth century, and to the potential survival strategies employed by women artists, authors, and actresses to craft their own parts.

Curated by Laura Engel, Professor of English at Duquesne University and Amelia Rauser, Associate Dean of the Faculty and Professor of Art History at Franklin & Marshall College.

G.M. Woodward. Detail of Art of Fainting in Company, 1797. Etching with hand coloring. The Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, 797.05.27.08.

  • Opening Reception & Gallery Talk: September 23 at 5pm in the Gibson Gallery
  • Make your own "reticule", the 18th century's first handbag Workshop: October 28 at 4pm in Booth Ferris, Steinman College Center
Vivian Springford

Winter Building: Sept. 7-October 29

Vivian Springford, an American abstract painter, was active in the New York art world during the 1950s through the 1970s. While Springford started her career in portraiture, she soon ventured into abstract expressionism drawing inspiration from Chinese calligraphy, Taoism, and Confucianism. By the 1970s, Springford had developed her own individual color field painting process. Her technique of using thinned paint on a raw or thinly-primed canvas led to the creation of her own style of stain painting. Springford became a master at this difficult and time consuming process to achieve the desired pattern and concentrations of pigmentation. While Springford continued to paint through the mid-1980s, she led a private lifestyle and became more withdrawn as macular degeneration led to blindness. During her lifetime, many of Springford’s paintings were stored in her studio in Chelsea. Today, her works are being rediscovered though exhibitions, with a resurgence in appreciation for her distinct style of artwork.

Springford once said that to her, painting was an attempt to identify with the universal whole...."I want to find my own small plot or pattern of energy that will express the inner me in terms of rhythmic movement and color. The expansive center of the universe, of the stars, and of nature is my constant challenge in abstract terms.”

Paintings lent from the Springford Collection of Barri and Les J. Lieberman, ‘78.

Untitled, Martinique Series, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 89 x 88 ⅛ x 1 ½”.

WE HOPE TO SEE YOU SOON!