PAST EXHIBITIONS

March 1 through April 27, 2008

JED is a three-person collaborative who use the first initial of their birth names to form a fictitious contemporary lens-based, conceptual photographic artist in the early 21st century. JED represents their collective alter egos, whose identity is a secret. Borrowing from the Dada and Surrealist’s art movements, which includes stream-of-consciousness to make art and found objects not traditionally used for art making, championed by Marcel Duchamp for example, JED focuses their attention on a selection of photographic images, such as test strips and “bad” prints that were discarded and thrown out by their original picture makers. These found/abandoned images are re-contextualized and elevated to “high” art with a sense of humor that underscores the absurd, the forgotten, and now serves as documents of the human attempt to make art despite constant failure, what is commonly known as the “artist’s struggle”.

At Home and Abroad:
The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch
October 12, 2007 through February 25, 2008

Listen to Helen Harrison's review of the Cranch exhibition on "Art Waves" which aired on December 6, 2007 on 88.3 FM WLIU's "In the Morning with Bonnie Grice." Despite a fifty-year career as a landscape painter, Christopher Cranch’s paintings are little known. Instead, he is best known for his poetry, his ties to the New England Transcendentalists, and, above all, his playful caricature of Ralph Waldo Emerson as an enormous “transparent” eyeball, perched atop a minuscule body in top hat and tails, optic nerve tied in a pony tail. From his first reading of Emerson’s Nature essay (1836), Cranch was inspired to explore Transcendental concepts through visual means; although ultimately it was painting, not caricature, that provided the ideal vehicle for him. Transcribing nature onto canvas became an act of devotion. Like Thoreau writing of the daily trials of life on Walden Pond, Cranch also attempted, in his landscapes, to express the correspondence between nature and spiritual concepts. His brand of Transcendentalism bypasses the quiet, “transparent” aspect to celebrate a nature that is filled with the flux and continual shifting that Emerson and Thoreau also celebrated in their writings. C. P. Cranch was intimate with some of the most innovative thinkers in America and counted among his friends Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George William Curtis, and James Russell Lowell. This study considers Cranch not only as a Hudson River School artist, but also as a participant in the history of ideas, a multi-faceted individual who merged intellectual and artistic life.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 208-page exhibition catalogue; At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch (1813 – 1892). The Foreword is written by Barbara Novak, Professor Emerita at Columbia University, one of the most influential theorists on American art. Nancy Stula, Curator and Deputy Director of the Lyman Allyn Art Museum, and David M. Robinson, Distinguished Professor of American Literature at Oregon State University authored the catalogue essays.

After closing at Lyman Allyn Art Museum, the show will travel to the Newington-Cropsey Foundation in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where it will be on view March 17 through May 31, 2008.

At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch has been made possible by generous grants from the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Henry Luce Foundation.

This exhibition is also supported in part by the Frank Loomis Palmer Fund, Bank of America, Trustee, and with support from the Connecticut Commission on Culture & Tourism. Eli Wilner & Company Period Frames, New York has provided numerous frames.

October 12, 2007 - February 25, 2008

Miles Gallery will present an installation of this environmentally-based artist. Her hermetically- sealed “evidence bags” are actual specimens taken from nature. This unique exhibition is visually intriguing as well as inspirational and is the perfect complement to the Museum’s major fall exhibition At Home and Abroad: The Transcendental Landscapes of Christopher Pearse Cranch, which deals with the glory of Nature as interpreted by the artist.

Guido Garaycochea, a Peruvian painter working in New York, presents a poignant series of three-dimensional painted boxes in this special and personal installation that deals with the political turmoil and personal loss that has plagued his country for many years.  The exhibition includes a video component and encourages audience participation.

Turandot
Silkscreen ¦ Edition of 120 ¦ 2005
42” x 45½"

The relationship between painting and silkscreen prints as seen through the creative eyes of New York artist Larry Dinkin.  He takes the viewer on a visual journey between the two media.  The vividly bold paintings and prints seem familiar and yet distant; perhaps a memory from a dream when one is jarred awake.  Within the brilliant colors and dense brushstrokes, one can almost see a structure, a landform, something recognizable, but not then quite. Dinkin says of his work, “The images depict a personal universe—distilled landscapes bound only by their own reality.  They strive for the flickering ambiguity of paint to dreamy vision, held fast within a structure that is both descriptive and dimensional.”