Story Archive

Story Archive

  • Blackness and Media

    Blackness and Media

    As early as the nineteenth century, African American cultural producers, critics, writers, consumers, and visual practitioners creatively confronted the vexed, and often exciting, relationship between race and media. This interplay was at the heart of my fall 2018 course “Blackness...
  • Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    Nature's Nation: American Art and Environment

    How can paintings from the nineteenth century reflect views about westward expansion? What can a high chest of drawers from Philadelphia reveal about the trade of mahogany? How have works by contemporary artists contributed to modern ecological consciousness? These are...
  • A Double Take on Picturing Place in Japan

    A Double Take on Picturing Place in Japan

    Three galleries in the Art Museum are currently filled with this prodigious output in the exhibition Picturing Place in Japan . Each gallery treats a different theme: Imagined Places, Famous Places, and Sacred Places, with a final coda of photographs...
  • Teaching Nature's Nation

    Teaching Nature's Nation

    Among the most enjoyable aspects of producing the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment is the opportunity it has afforded to teach related courses at different stages in the project’s gestation.
  • Symposium | Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

    Symposium | Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

    Convened in conjunction with the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment , this two-day symposium extends the exhibition’s focus and approach to the visual cultures of diverse times and places. Seventeen international speakers offer compelling ecocritical analysis of a...
  • Art Matters

    Art Matters

    As I anticipate the opening of Nature’s Nation , I am reminded of the great potential of art to create a shared experience in which our eyes are directed to what is lost to sight or routinely overlooked, challenging our...
  • Recent Acquisition | Post Commodity's Repellent Fence/Valla Repelente

    Recent Acquisition | Post Commodity's Repellent Fence/Valla Repelente

    Postcommodity’s time at the Museum as the 2017 Sarah Lee Elson, Class of 1984, International Artists-in-Residence resulted in a sound art performance and the acquisition of N13: 31°20'50.88"N; 109°29'47.62"W , one of twenty-six large-scale balloons from their 2015 land art...
  • Printing without Limits: Frank Stella, Ken Tyler, and the Making of Juam

    Printing without Limits: Frank Stella, Ken Tyler, and the Making of Juam

    Collaborating as artist and craftsman, Stella and Tyler embraced the challenge of expanding the technical capabilities of modern printmaking with each series they made. The result was the development of multimedia prints of unprecedented scale and breathtaking complexity.
  • Exhibition | Picturing Place in Japan

    Exhibition | Picturing Place in Japan

    Picturing Place in Japan focuses on Japanese representations of place from the sixteenth to the early twentieth century. Three long-standing traditions of place in the visual arts form the core of the exhibition: “imagined places,” “famous places,” and “sacred places,”...