~~~CONTINUING EVENTS~~~
Exhibition -- (Future Forward: Projects in
New Media) Banks in Pink and Blue
Until April 16, 2000, Henry Art
Gallery, East Gallery.
A pair of cryogenic sperm banks, complete with gender-separated sperm specimens, stands in the middle of the East Gallery, along with one large stainless-steel liquid nitrogen tank and a video monitor picturing a woman reciting the myriad contracts negotiated between the artist's corporation and the specimen lenders, as well as the museum and the artist. This is a site-specific sculptural installation created by artist IŅigo Manglano-Ovalle to incite a multi-faceted dialogue about the legal and ethical issues surrounding genetics and DNA.
Banks in Pink and Blue utilizes a variety of media - from the utilitarian sperm banks and liquid nitrogen tank to video, framed contracts and abstract DNA portrait photography - to address the apparently disparate concerns of aesthetics, genetics, ethics, and social issues.
While visually simple, the installation presents a number of complex issues and tensions. Perhaps foremost of these is the idea of "ownership." Each sperm sample in the cryotanks (also know as dewars) will continue to be the legal property of the lender and the bank will preserve the viability of the lender sample for a particular period of time. The artist, however, is exploring the possibility of transferring ownership of the samples from the lender to other individuals. Like much of Manglano-Ovalle's work, Banks in Pink and Blue picks apart complex relationships, poses disconcerting questions about the knowledge that DNA holds and to whom that knowledge is accessible, and engages a number of collaborators - geneticists, biotech companies, legal consultants and medical ethicists.
Banks in Pink and Blue, curated by Associate Curator Rhonda Lane Howard, was commissioned by the Henry Art Gallery as part of a series on new technologies, Future Forward: Projects in New Media. Future Forward is sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Allen Foundation for the Arts. The series includes two additional commissions of works by artists Jennifer Steinkamp (presented at the Henry this past year) and an upcoming installation by New York-based Tony Oursler involving digital animation and blown glass (to be presented in May, 2000). Each artist participated in a collaborative residency, working with University of Washington resources and private companies engaged in technologies related to their work. This exhibition is also sponsored by the King County Arts Commission and Visio Corporation.
Henry Art Gallery: Shifting Ground:
Transformed Views of the American Landscape
Until August 20, 2000, Henry Art
Gallery, North Galleries.
Two topics synonymous with the Northwest region are landscape and technology. Shifting Ground provides a look at our evolving relationship with the land we inhabit through the filter of technology as reflected through 150 years of American art. The dramatic physical alterations and changing perceptions, uses and experiences of America's landscapes are made visible through the work of more than seventy-five artists from Winslow Homer to Jessica Bronson. The exhibition brings important landscape works from the Henry's permanent collection together with works from the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. Associate Curator Rhonda Lane Howard has organized the exhibition to present a revisionist look at landscape and to highlight the rapid change and conflicting approaches that characterize America's complex relationship to the land.
The second half of the nineteenth century was a period of remarkable innovation and invention, particularly in the arenas of transportation and communication technologies. New developments in modes of travel and industrialization were catalysts to recasting the landscape. A wilderness previously seen as impenetrable and foreboding, metamorphosed into picture-postcard views. Landscape destroyed and ravaged by the industrial revolution was then refound and rebuilt through the new vision of environmentalism. Photographers such as George Fiske, Frank Haynes, William Henry Jackson and Carleton Watkins were among the most influential in documenting the new West and thus helping to entice bold visitors to these vistas.
As industrialization and urbanization grew, landscape art reflected ambivalence toward, as well as celebration of these dynamic developments. Competing themes of escape from the city also emerged. Painters William Merritt Chase, George Inness and Winslow Homer, among others, presented a landscape of quiet retreat and beauty. Artists including Berenice Abbott, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Edward Hopper, Charles Sheeler and Grant Wood captured the intensity and complexity of the urban, regional, industrial and suburban landscape.
Advances in technologies in the mid-twentieth century offered new ways of seeing the land that had a powerful impact on artists. The landscape was reshaped by the frame of the television screen and the view from the window as travel by automobile and plane became ubiquitous. Painters from Roy Lichenstein to Sylvia Mangold created work that reflected this new sense of the landscape. Other artists including Lewis Baltz, Mary Lucier, Richard Misrach and Edward Ruscha turned their gaze to environmental change in landscape radically and irrevocably transformed in the name of progress.
Today the landscape provides fodder for artists envisioning the future as well as those who see through the lens of our post-industrial culture. From the recasting of landscape logos by Cameron Martin to the paintings of Kevin Appel which suggest a virtual interior/exterior landscape, today's artists continue to explore the landscape in vibrant ways.
Although Shifting Ground closes on August 20, a small spin-off exhibition addressing visitors' experience begins in September in the first gallery of the North Galleries. Organized by Tamara Moats, curator of education, this installation of a selection of works and texts will reflect visitors' answers to a survey given during the run of the exhibition. This novel project is audience-based, allowing visitors to voice what they learned from Shifting Ground.
Shifting Ground: Transformed Views of the American Landscape was organized by Henry Associate Curator and Luce Fellow Rhonda Lane Howard and is the second of two exhibitions supported by the Henry Luce Foundation. The three-year grant awarded to the Henry encourages exploration of the American portions of the Henry's permanent collection, further accessibility to this collection and additional scholarship on American art. A catalogue, featuring essays by the curator, Phillip Thurtle, Leroy Searle, Patricia Failing, Marta Lyall, Raymond William Rast and Julie Johnson will be available in the Gallery Shop in the beginning of 2000. Funding for this exhibition has been provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, Inc.; the Museum Loan Network, a national collection, sharing program funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by MIT's Office of the Arts; The Boeing Company; WRQ, Inc.; Henry Art Gallery Special Exhibitions Initiative donors and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas W. Barwick.
Burke Museum Exhibit -- Mountain Patterns:
Survival of Nuosu Culture in China.
Until September 4, 2000; 10:00am
to 5:00pm daily, except Thursdays to 8:00pm; Burke Museum.
Experience the dramatic traditional arts of the Nuosu people. This stunning display is the first major North American exhibit that spotlights the cultural revival of this fascinating but little-known culture from the remote mountains of southwestern China. See over 200 striking artifacts, including intricately patterned clothing, elaborate silver jewelry, armor, colorfully lacquered wooden bowls and serving dishes, and unique musical instruments and religious images.
The rugged homeland of the Nuosu people lies tucked against the Tibetan highlands in the remote mountains of Liangshan in southwestern China. The physical isolation of their mountainous region allowed the Nuosu culture to develop for almost two thousand years with little influence from other cultures. Nuosu arts and religion were almost crushed during the Communist repression of the 1960s and 70s, but with recent political reforms, there has been a resurgence of Nuosu ethnic identity and culture. Distinctive traditional arts have not only experienced a dramatic revival, but innovations have been incorporated into designs and forms.
Admire the elaborate needlework and handmade cloth typical of Nuosu handiwork. Garments are ablaze with exquisite needlework and flashing silver jewlery; the width of a man's pants indicates the region in which he lives; and elaborately embroidered children's hats fend off ghosts. Learn how to "read an outfit" to deduce what clothing reveals about its wearer's home region, age, gender, coming-of-age and parenthood status, and social caste.
Clans specialize in the creation of lacquered items adorned with elaborate red, yellow and black designs. Red represents bravery, yellow symbolizes brightness and beauty, and black denotes dignity. Some clans specialize in wooden serving dishes, while others craft items made of water-buffalo hide. See dozens of colorful examples of lacquerware, from hand-turned bowls to an ornamental yak skull to a rare suit of armor composed of 352 pieces of water-buffalo hide, lashed together with rawhide laces.
Renowned for their mastery of silversmithing, some Nuosu smiths come from families where their craft has been practiced by as many as nine generations of ancestors. View an entire case of beautiful Nuosu jewlery, made of heavily worked silver. Don't miss the conical priest's hat embellished with ornate silver plates, created by a 72-yer-old silversmith.
Music and song are integral to Nuosu life, and most people sing or play at least one native instrument. The music of flutes, lutes, clarinets, and mouth-harps made of pounded copper from spent shell casings is a part of daily life. Hear recordings of Nuosu music, and see examples of handmade instruments.
The activities of supernatural beings (ghosts and ancestors) permeate the religion of the Nuosu. See images of Nuosu heros and ghosts, ritual texts written in native script, and quivers and spirit fans. Learn about the bimo, highly respected Nuosu priests who perform rituals to expel ghosts and comfort the souls of the dead. Once persecuted as "superstitious practicioners" during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the bimo have been reclassified as "ethnic intellectuals."
The Mountain Patterns exhibit is the result of collaboration between an American anthropologist and two visiting Nuosu scholars from China. In conjunction with the exhibit, the curators have written the book Mountain Patterns, published by the University of Washington Press. The curators will also give lectures for the public on the Nuosu culture.
Support for Mountain Patterns was provided by the Blakemore Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, COSCO North America, Inc., and the University of Washington China Studies Program, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Jackson School East Asia Resource Center, and the Burke Museum Erna Gunther Fund.
~~~NEW EVENTS~~~
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This calendar is provided as a service by the Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities. We publicize a wide range of on-campus events in the disciplines of the humanities and the arts, including lectures, concerts, symposia and conferences.
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by uwch@u.washington.edu. Last updated on Monday, March 6,
2000.