Antoni Tàpies, Spanish, 1923 – 2012
Material Glance (Llambrec Material), 1975
Lithograph
17-1/8" x 12-1/2"
Gift of Carl van der Voort
2003.003h

Material Glance: A Portfolio of Lithographs by Antoni Tàpies and Poems by Shūzō Takiguchi

(May 29–September 27, 2012)
Published in 1975 by Ediciones Poligrafa, S.A., Barcelona, Material Glance (Llambrec Material) brings together two important creative figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012), one of the most universally recognized Spanish artists to emerge in the post-World War II era, and Shūzō Takiguchi (1903–1979), the Japanese writer, critic, and proponent of avant-garde art. Writer and artist shared an interest in surrealism. Takiguchi was responsible for introducing surrealism to Japan in the late 1920s through his writings, and Tàpies was one of the founders in 1948 of Dau al set, the avant-garde surrealist and Dada-influenced artistic literary group and magazine of the same name.

Although Tàpies is best remembered for his paintings, he was also an accomplished printmaker, and his collaborations with writers such as Takiguchi are considered to have produced some of his most innovative work in the print medium.  For Material Glance, Takiguchi sent poems written in Japanese characters to Tàpies, who was responsible for creating the book. The artist’s choice of paper, a warm-toned, tan-colored, Catalan estrassa paper used by butchers to wrap meat, with its irregular fiber echoing hand-made Japanese paper, activates Tàpies’s aggressive, calligraphic line when the prints are viewed with Takiguchi’s poems. The physicality of the poetry, which describes interior worlds merging with exterior realities, is particularly sympathetic with Tàpies’s practice and sensibility.

This exhibition will include other works by Tàpies from the gallery’s collection, and, as with this portfolio, many will be on view for the first time.

Material Glance: A Portfolio of Lithographs by Antoni Tàpies and Poems by Shūzō Takiguchi is organized by the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Joseph S. Mella, director. This exhibition is co-sponsored in part by the Consulate-General of Japan in Nashville and the Center for US-Japan Studies and Cooperation at Vanderbilt University.

Photograph © 2009 Tim Hetherington from LONG STORY BIT BY BIT, Umbrage Editions 2009.

Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, Photography by Tim Hetherington

(October 12 - December 6, 2012; Please note that the Gallery will be closed November 17-25 for Thanksgiving)
Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, Photography by Tim Hetherington entwines documentary photography, oral testimony, and personal writing to explore the dynamics of power, international complicity, and the search for justice in recent Liberian history. Liberia, a country in West Africa, was founded by black Americans, many of whom were former slaves. Two of Liberia’s former presidents faced grisly ends: William Tolbert was disemboweled during a coup d’état, and Samuel Doe was filmed being tortured to death. More recently, former president Charles Taylor was sentenced to fifty years’ imprisonment for war crimes, thus becoming the first person to be tried and convicted by the International Criminal Court in The Hague. However, the terrible years of war and corruption have given way to a remarkable present, with 2011 Nobel Laureate Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf taking Liberia’s helm as the first female president of an African country.

This exhibition brings to life an extraordinary range of characters—from warlords
to presidents, environmental activists to traditional hunters, political hustlers to democratic visionaries, all captured by the award-winning photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington over the course of his eight years of living and working in West Africa.

Known for his long-form documentary work, Hetherington was the recipient of a Columbia University Du Pont Award, a UK NESTA National Endowment Fellowship, and four World Press Photo prizes, including the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year. His film Restrepo, which he co-produced and -directed with Sebastian Junger, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010. Tim Hetherington was killed while covering the siege of Misrata, Libya, in April 2011.

Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, Photography by Tim Hetherington is organized by Umbrage Editions and curated by Nan Richardson.  This exhibition has been brought to Vanderbilt by The Ingram Commons, the Office of the Provost, the Dean of the College of Arts and Science, the Dean of Peabody College, the Dean of the School of Engineering, the Dean of the Blair School of Music, and the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery and is part of the campuswide initiative “Human Identities: Global, Local, Personal.”

SPECIAL PROGRAM
A screening of the film Iron Ladies of Liberia will be held at 5 p.m. on Thursday, October 25, 2012 in Cohen Memorial Hall Room 203, across from the Fine Arts Gallery. Held in conjunction with Long Story Bit by Bit, this screening is co-sponsored by Women's and Gender Studies and the Fine Arts Gallery. There will be a discussion following the film led by Caree Banton, Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History. Banton's research focuses on migration from the West Indies (particularly Barbados) to Africa (particularly Liberia) and the implications of this to experiences of freedom, citizenship and black nation-building. For more information on the film please visit Women Make Movies.

Hans Hartung, German, 1904 – 1989
Noise Horizontale, before 1960
Etching
16-1/8" x 21-1/2"
Peabody College Collection, Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery
1979.0351P

Mark di Suvero—Affinities

(January 17 - February 28, 2013)
Presented on the occasion of Vanderbilt University’s acquisition of a major work of outdoor sculpture by Mark di Suvero, this exhibition will highlight a selection of drawings by this seminal American artist, along with a 1985 documentary film that illuminates the artist’s working methods. Mark di Suvero–Affinities will also include a diverse selection of works from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery collection chosen to explore the artist’s equally diverse affinities. Artists whose work will be featured include Josef Albers, Erwin Broner, Georges Braque, Alexander Calder, John Chamberlain, Eduardo Chillida, Bruce Conner, Hans Hartung, Lee Krasner, Eduard Micus, Robert Motherwell, Pablo Picasso, Martin Puryear, Ad Reinhardt, Antonio Saura, Kenneth Snelson, Kumi Sugai, Jacques Villon, Zao Woi-Ki, and Chizuko Yoshido; in addition, a work of calligraphy by Wu Yang-t’ien, several Indian Tantra drawings, and a selection of African masks will be on display.

Mark di Suvero–Affinities is organized by the Vanderbilt Fine Arts Gallery and curated by Joseph Mella in conjuction with the artist, his studio, and Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.  This exhibition has been brought to Vanderbilt by a generous gift from Creighton Michael, MA ’76, with additional support from the Department of Art.

Thomas Rowlandson, British, 1756 – 1827
Glow Worms,1805 – 1812
Ethching with watercolor
7-7/8" x 11-15/16"
Gift of Philip Pinsof
2003.049

Four Hundred Years of British Art: Highlights from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery Collection

(March 13- June 15, 2013)
British art constitutes an important aspect of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery’s collections. This comprehensive survey will be the first of its kind in over two decades to draw on the nearly 300 British objects held by the Gallery. Four Hundred Years of British Art will include examples of eighteenth-century English portraiture and related painting by such noted artists as Benjamin Wilson, George Romney, and John Opie, and a work attributed to the school of Thomas Lawrence; a selection of engravings by the pictorial satirist and social critic William Hogarth; two biting satires of the English upper class by Thomas Rowlandson; early nineteenth-century prints by Joseph Mallord, William Turner, and the master mezzotint printmaker Richard Earlom; paintings from the founder of the Norwich School of landscape painting, John Chrome; numerous examples of works by artists associated with the late-nineteenth-century etching revival such as Sir Francis Seymour Haden and William Strang; selections from the Gallery’s large collection of etchings by one of the premier portraitists of the early twentieth century, Gerald Brockhurst; and modern and contemporary works by noted artists such as David Hockney, Henry Moore, Roland Penrose, Leslie Foxcroft, Michael Craig-Martin, Mona Hatoum, Bernard Cohen, and Patrick Caulfield.

This exhibition is being presented in honor of Professor Robert L. Mode who will retire after forty-six years of teaching art history at Vanderbilt. Much of his research and teaching focused on British art.

Creighton Michael, American, b. 1949
Tapestry Suite, 2012
Archival carbon black pigment inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Paper
18" x 18"
Gift of Creighton Michael, M.A. Art History, Vanderbilt University, 1976 in honor of Milan Mihal, Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus
2012.004

Tapestry Suite: Seven Digital Drawings by Creighton Michael

(May 1- October 6, 2013. Please note that the Gallery will be closed June 16-July 8, 2013 and September 13-26, 2013.)
This summer, the Fine Arts Gallery will host a special exhibition of Tapestry Suite by Creighton Michael, M.A. 1976. These seven digital drawings, selected from Michael’s larger Tapestry series, were created by the artist in honor of Professor of Fine Arts Emeritus Milan Mihal, and donated to the Fine Arts Gallery by the artist. Michael writes that he would like to thank Professor Mihal, “for introducing me to the wondrous beauty and serene sensitivity of the Far East.” He also sites his experiences in Professor Mihal’s class as an influence for much of his artistic practice over the last forty years.

Michael has explained that the Tapestry series is a collection of composite drawings, layered in time and personal marking history, employing unconventional drafting tools, such as photographic negatives, video stills, sculpture, digital scans and intaglio solar plates. The artist selected the seven works featured in Tapestry Suite as a continuous narrative and a meditation on drawing. This is a common theme for Michael who, in much of his work, has expanded traditional notions of drawing by creating works of art that approach this time-honored practice in fresh, innovative ways.

Michael received his B.F.A. in painting from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (1971); his M.A. in Art History from Vanderbilt University (1976); and his M.F.A. in painting and multi-media from Washington University, St. Louis (1978). His work has been featured in numerous one-person exhibitions and can be found within the collections of The Brooklyn Museum; Denver Art Museum; Hafnarborg Institute of Culture and Fine Art, Hafnarfjördur, Iceland; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; Mint Museums of Art, Charlotte, NC; among several others.

Hans Hinterreiter, Swiss, 1902 – 1989
From: Hans Hinterreiter: Lithografias Volumen I, Galeria Carl van der Voort, 1967
Lithograph
20-1/4 " x 14-1/4"
The Carl van der Voort Collection, Vanderbilt University Fnie Arts Gallery
1997.081b

Hans Hinterreiter: A Theory of Form and Color

(July 9- September 12, 2013)
Drawn from the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery’s collection of more than forty works by the Swiss color theorist Hans Hinterreiter (1902–1989), this exhibition will be the first solo exhibition in the United States of the artist’s paintings and prints since his 1988 retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Hinterreiter shared a rigorous approach to art making with the seminal Swiss architect, painter, and writer Max Bill, who stated in 1949 that “it is possible to develop an art to a large extent on the basis of mathematical thinking.” While the majority of the works selected for this exhibition were created by the artist in the 1960s and 1970s, five rare studies in gouache from the 1930s and 1940s, some with the artist’s annotated notes in the margins, will be included, along with monographs the artist has written on the subject of color and form theory.