Chris Drury
British, b. 1948
Poison Pie, 2000
An Amanita Muscaria spore print on black card with radiating lines of handwritten text in white ink listing all the poisonous fungi and their effect on the body.
Photo engraving
Dr. and Mrs. E. William Ewers Gift for Fine Arts Fund Purchase
2002.025
Courtesy the artist

Reading Pictures: Text and Image in Contemporary Art

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
August 25, 2011–September 30, 2011

Reading Pictures examines the intersection of text and image in contemporary art through more than fifty examples drawn from the Fine Arts Gallery’s collections. While some works are associated with the modern tradition of concrete poetry, many use text as a means to linguistically “illustrate” accompanying images, or vice versa. Still others employ text either alone or in conjunction with images in order to trigger associations, thoughts, and memories within the viewer. Featured artists, some in collaboration with writers or in response to existing text, include Robert Barry, Harmen Brethouwer, John Cage with Calvin Sumsion, Enrique Chagoya, Thomas A. Clark, Thomas Joshua Cooper, Richard Devereux, Lesley Dill with Emily Dickinson, Jim Dine with Frank O'Hara, Chris Drury, Ian Hamilton Finlay with Janet Boulton and Cornelia Wieg, Hamish Fulton, Douglas Gordon, Barbara Kruger, Les Levine, Sol Lewitt with Paul Celan, Thomas Locher, Richard Long, Jill Mathis, Deborah Muirhead, Michael Peel, Alyson Shotz, Jack Werner Stauffacher with Albert Camus, Antoni Tàpies, Kees Verbeek, Hans Waanders, and Lawrence Weiner.

Reading Pictures is organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Joseph S. Mella, director. Student research assistant, Ellington Griffin (B.A., Vanderbilt 2011). Reading Pictures is presented in conjunction with The Book as Art: Beautiful Books, organized by the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries.

Gabriel Warren
American, b. 1955
Piesterion–Column 6 (detail)
Stainless steel
12' (height)
Courtesy the artist

Polar Probings: Sculpture by Gabriel Warren

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
October 13–December 8, 2011

Gabriel Warren creates sculptures using natural ice formations as source material. As noted by the artist, his sculpture is “intended to reflect the beauty of the natural sources from which they emerge… They represent my attempts to triangulate an understanding of a single natural phenomenon: ice.” Warren adds, “although ice is not the only source in the natural world for my sculptural probings, it is the dominant one and has been so for decades. Ice exhibits mind-numbing variability and variety on a visual plane, and, on a scientific one, understanding its behavior is key to understanding many other components of our world.”

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery will present a number of works by Warren, each layered with meanings and references to the condition of the planet and based on his close observation of the way ice behaves, including an outdoor sculpture installation adjacent to Cohen Memorial Hall, the home of the Fine Arts Gallery.

Warren received his bachelor of fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design and has studied at the Tyler School of Art, Rome, Italy; Amherst College, Amherst, Massachusetts; the Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; and the Externat Notre Dame, Grenoble, France. Dividing his time between his studio and residence in Rhode Island and his summer home in a primitive cabin he built on a sea cliff in Nova Scotia, Warren travels frequently to Antarctica, making his 1999 trip as the recipient of a National Science Foundation “Artists and Writers in Antarctica” grant. His art has been shown at the Peabody-Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts; Newport Art Museum, Newport, Rhode Island; Hunter College, New York, New York; and the Quay School of the Arts, Wanganui, New Zealand, among many other museums and galleries.

This exhibition is being presented in conjunction with the campus-wide initiative on sustainability and is supported, in part, by the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the English Department, The American Studies Program at Vanderbilt University, and the Dean’s Office, College of Arts and Science.

María Magdalena Campos-Pons
Cuban, b. 1959
Thinking of It, 2008
Watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper
73" x 51-5/8"
Courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, NY

María Magdalena Campos-Pons
MAMA/RECIPROCAL ENERGY

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
October 13–December 8, 2011

María Magdalena Campos-Pons: MAMA/RECIPROCAL ENERGY will be the first exhibition that examines this internationally recognized artist’s drawings. Five large-scale, mixed-media drawings, works that the artist created as a means to explore themes central to her practice, such as issues of identity, exile and displacement as a Afro-Cuban artist living in America, will be included. In addition to these works, drawings that address specific performances the artist has presented over the course of her career, one of which is a collaborative work she created with her son, will also be featured. This later body of work is the artist’s attempt at “putting the [performances] in a memory box, [in order to create] the essence of the moment.” The drawings will be accompanied by a three-channel video work that examines questions surrounding the nature of energy from an intriguing perspective.

Born in Matanzas in 1959, Campos-Pons was educated in Cuba at the National School of Art (1976–1979) and Instituto Superior de Arte (1980–1985) and graduated from Massachusetts College of Art in 1988. She is one of the most significant artists to emerge from the Cuban post-revolutionary era. She moved to North America in 1991 and now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband, the composer and performing artist Neil Leonard, and their son.

This exhibition is part of a collaboration among the Center for Latin American Studies, the Department of Art, the Department of History of Art, the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, the Program in African American and Diaspora Studies, the Atlantic World Seminar, the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, and the College of Arts and Science.

Tsukioka Yoshitoishi
Japanese (1839–1892)
The Buddhist Monk, Nichiren, in Exile on Sado Island, from the series Yoshitoshi Ryakuga (Sketches by Yoshitoishi), 1882
Color woodblock print
6-15/16" x 9-3/16"
The Herman D. Doochin Collection, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
1992.090

The Arts of Japan

The Arts of Japan
Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
January 12–February 26, 2012

More than 1,300 objects compose this portion of the Fine Arts Gallery's collections, encompassing both fine and applied art. Highlights include two six-panel screen paintings: an early seventeenth-century work illustrating scenes from the Tale of Gengi, and an eighteenth-century work featuring vignettes of daily life in Kyoto, each a masterful example of Japanese painting executed in mineral colors and gold leaf; a wide range of fine ceramics from blue and white porcelain to works by artists associated with the rebirth of the Japanese folk art movement; and textiles, scrolls, paintings, and rare books. The exhibition will also feature outstanding examples of graphic arts by such influential Ukiyo-e artists as Utagawa Kunisada I, Andō Hiroshige, and Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, along with artists associated with the twentieth-century shin hanga movement that revitalized traditional Ukiyo-e techniques with a modern sensibility.

This exhibition is presented in recognition of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Asian American Student Association at Vanderbilt University and will feature the research of Fine Arts Gallery interns and research associates Rebecca Bratt, Meredith Novack, Ashley Pakenham, and Christine Williams.

The Arts of Japan is organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Joseph S. Mella, director.

Adriaen van Ostade
Dutch (1610–1685)
The Cobbler, 1671
Etching
7-1/8" x 5-15/16"
Peabody College Collection, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
1979.0860P

Reflections of the Dutch Golden Age: Etchings by Adriaen van Ostade from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery Collection

Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
March 15–May 11, 2012

After Rembrandt, Adriaen van Ostade was the major Dutch etcher of the seventeenth century. According to Arnold Houbraken's biography from the period, Ostade studied concurrently with Adriaen Brouwer and Frans Hals in Haarlem. Hals influenced Ostade very little, whereas Brouwer, who was described as "known far and wide" as early as 1627, had a decisive influence on the evolution of Ostade's portrayal of peasant life. Many seventeenth-century Dutch artists developed specialties to help them gain an edge in the highly competitive contemporary art market. Some artists, for instance, focused exclusively on the representations of landscapes, still-lifes, or animal subjects. Ostade was one of a number of artists who specialized in genre themes—scenes drawn from daily life, rather than from religious, mythological, or literary sources. Ostade's work deals primarily with peasant life, a topic explored in the previous century by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Of the fifty known etchings by Ostade, Vanderbilt holds thirty-four as part of our collection of Dutch prints that numbers more than 100 works. Several included in this exhibition are early states of individual prints illustrating the artist's working methods. The etchings in the exhibition are representative of Ostade's range of subjects: images of rural tradesmen, parents with their children, village fairs, itinerant peddlers, and quack doctors.

Reflections of the Dutch Golden Age: Etchings by Adriaen van Ostade from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Joseph S. Mella, director.