Permanent Collection

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Yesterday, local new station WWNY aired a story about our current Adirondack-related exhibitions.  Cathy gave a brief interview about the shows.

 

The exhibitions are on display until October 11.  Visit the Gallery’s web site for more information.

 

 

 

Monday is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and also the first day of the spring semester here at St. Lawrence.

Signs Readied for Washington March, August 27, 1963

Martin Luther King, Jr., gave his landmark “I Have a Dream” speech as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.   This photograph was taken on August 27 as protesters prepared for the march.  The gallery recently acquired a group of press photographs related to the civil rights movement in the US.  We  are working on digitizing these photographs, which will be studied this semester in Mary Jane Smith’s History 273 class, “The History of the Civil Rights Movement.”

A sacred song service called “Let Freedom Sing” will be held on Monday, January 21, at 5 p.m. in Gunnison Memorial Chapel for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday.  The service will include a reflection by President William L. Fox and is open to the public.

Baron la Croix Nègre l'Intermédiaire by Constant

 

We’ve begun a new digital collection of artwork.  The Global Studio features non-Western work from the permanent collection, so it encompasses quite a variety.   Included are a selection of Buddhist works such as thangka paintings, some Jain manuscripts, and a group of Haitian vodou flags which were acquired just this summer.  We hope to add more objects soon.

 

On Sunday, May 20, cartoonist Garry Trudeau will speak to SLU’s class of 2012 and also receive an honorary degree.  Trudeau grew up in Saranac Lake and holds a bachelor’s degree and MFA in graphic design from Yale University. He launched the “Doonesbury” comic strip in 1970, and it now appears in nearly 1,500 newspapers in the United States and abroad, distributed by Universal Press Syndicate. In 1975, Trudeau became the first comic-strip artist to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Since then, he’s been a finalist three times, including this year for his strips concerning the war in Iraq.

SLU’s permanent collection includes a drawing from Doonesbury, a gift from Universal Press Syndicate.

Garry Trudeau
Doonesbury, July 22, 1972
Ink on paper
Gift of Universal Press Syndicate
SLU X.300

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YouTube DirektAlex Duane

 

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YouTube DirektEvan Haynes

 

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YouTube DirektOlivia McManus

Special thanks to Tzintzun Aguilar Izzo for videotaping and editing the interviews. Additional information about the re:WORKS exhibition can be found on the Gallery’s Web site.

re:WORKS, our most recent exhibition, opened  on Friday, March 22, with a very well attended reception, complete with live music.  The exhibition includes works from St. Lawrence University’s permanent collection and “reworks” by students in Melissa Schulenberg’s art and art history spring 2012 senior-year experience (SYE) class.  Each student selected from two to six art objects from the collection and then created new works based on those selections.

Each of the students gave a short talk about his or her work and described how art work from the University’s collection provided inspiration for the final project.  The students in the exhibition are Mike Cianca, Alex Duane, Evan Haynes, Alli Howe, Courtney Kuno, Olivia McManus, and Lindsay Tarolli.  I hope to put up some installation shots soon.

Students from The Annex Performing Arts Theme House (just across the street) provided music, and added so much to the reception’s lively atmosphere.

 

We are pleased to introduce North of Sixty, the gallery’s new Drupal-based digital image collection of Canadian Inuit prints and drawings.  Drupal is an open-source content management system that is highly customizable and in this instance able to incorporate resources and contextualize information to enhance viewers’ understanding and appreciation of works of art.  Eric Williams-Bergen, SLU science librarian and expert in all things digital, has been crucial in establishing a workflow for digital image collections and has created this Drupal site with its dynamic display of images, ease of use, and enhanced display capabilities.

Cathy developed the idea for this online collection as a result of her longstanding interest in Inuit art and two trips to Nunavut in 2000 and 2004.  Since the early 1990s, the gallery has been exhibiting and collecting Inuit art, and the creation of an online database for teaching and research can provide the campus community with quick access to this rich resource.  With SLU programs in Canadian Studies and Environmental Studies, the Inuit art collection can be used to discuss nature, town and camp life, spirituality and religion, and other topics.

3 prints and a drawing in the art storage room

The digital collection has been several months in the making, with digital photography and cataloguing taking place during the 2009-2010 academic year.

digital photography in the gallery

As part of the process, Carole set up the gallery as a photography studio.  She and Arline Wolfe, who has assisted with numerous digital projects for the gallery, worked together on the post-processing of images, including renaming and cropping image files, color correcting, and other tasks.  Arline uploaded and catalogued the images, adding metadata in CONTENTdm, a database program used by many academic libraries, galleries, and archives.  In addition, the Brush Gallery was one of the first institutions to contribute a significant body of Inuit prints and drawings to ARTstor, an international digital image library that provides resources for the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences.  Cathy and Carole also compiled the new site’s art bibliography with additional links to other online resources.

Kudos to Cathy and Eric for making this amazing collection possible!

– Carole Mathey and Arline Wolfe

Having been exhibited earlier at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., and here at the Brush Gallery last spring, Nipirasait: Many Voices will be shown in its third venue, the College of Wooster Art Museum, from October 25 to December 11, 2011.  Marking the 50th anniversary of the Kinngait Studios in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, the exhibition includes prints by Kenojuak Ashevak, Shuvinai Ashoona, Kavavaow Mannomee, Kananginak Pootoogook, Pitaloosie Saila, and Ningeokuluk Teevee, among others.

The Griffiths lobby has been looking sort of bland for an arts building, and then Cathy had the great idea of hanging one of the banners from the Nipirasait exhibition’s Washington venue.  Fac. ops.  just installed it this morning, and it looks really great!

There’s one more banner, with three images, but it’s a long horizontal piece, so it will be challenging to find a place to display it.

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