October 6, 2012–April 7, 2013
The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art
at Hamilton College
198 College Hill Road Clinton, NY 13323
The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, which opens to the public on October 6, will inaugurate its Machado and Silvetti-designed building with a special exhibition titled Affinity Atlas. Reflecting the museum’s mission of object-based learning and interdisciplinary visual teaching, the exhibition will bring together new and iconic works of art and diverse media to suggest ways that visual art can connect ideas across disciplines.
“At the Wellin Museum, our goal is to broaden students’ horizons and help them develop a visual literacy that will inform and enrich their lives well past their college experience,” said Director Tracy L. Adler. “Affinity Atlas draws new connections between familiar and unusual works of art to highlight the curiosity and investigation that are at the heart of a Hamilton education.”
Organized by guest curator Ian Berry, Affinity Atlas’s curatorial framework draws inspiration from cabinets of curiosities and the pioneering work of art historian Aby Warburg. Forgoing the customary art historical narrative, Warburg used some 2,000 visuals from the Renaissance to the twentieth century to map out antiquity’s afterlife. He called the project a “picture atlas.” Guided by Warburg’s impulse to generate connections, Affinity Atlas sets up a series of montages and shifting perspectives using artworks from Hamilton’s holdings as well loans by a range of international contemporary artists.
One grouping probes the mysteries of the cosmos, juxtaposing nineteenth-century scientific prints of solar flares by Isaac Hollister Hall with Demetrius Oliver’s contemporary orrery, an abstract, three-dimensional model of the solar system. Another grouping, which includes a trompe l’oeil installation of a crumbling wall and disintegrating painting by Valerie Hegarty and a kaleidoscopic animated video by Chris Doyle, explores the natural world and references the work of nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters. Other works on view include paintings by Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield, prints by Jasper Johns and Kiki Smith, and new works by Terry Winters and Ruby Sky Stiler. Two large-scale photographs from Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s series “Pictures of Junk,” which were featured in the Academy Award–nominated documentary film Waste Land, will be on view alongside London-based artist Hew Locke’s 18-foot-tall tapestry Chariots of the Gods and Sara VanDerBeek’s epic, four-part photographic response to Detroit.
The Wellin Museum commissioned artists Max Galyon, Aaron King, and Johannes VanDerBeek to collaborate on a site-specific installation that plays on the design of the museum’s visible storage. The installation takes its inspiration from the American front lawn as a site where disparate objects are displayed and displaced by the passage of time. The Wellin has also commissioned artist Michael Oatman to create a new work. The twenty-nine-foot-long collage, made up of six panels, depicts a tree branch as it ages across four seasons. Spurred by the artist’s childhood memories, the collage includes thousands of details that reveal a story of technological and social advances across the artist’s lifetime.
Curator Ian Berry notes, “At the heart of the exhibition lies an inquisitive approach to the world and an imaginative view of scholarly research. The exhibition, like the new museum, reveals new connections between a diverse range of objects, offering a wondrous outlook on the world while presenting an invitation to the public to make their own new connections as they discover what’s inside.”
The exhibiting artists are: Anni Albers, George Bellows, F.S. Blanchard, Charles Burchfield, George Catlin, Thurloe Conolly, Dorothy Dehner, Francesca DiMattio, Chris Doyle, Albrecht Dürer, Tony Feher, Spencer Finch, Rob Fischer, Max Galyon, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Morris Graves, Isaac Hollister Hall, Marsden Hartley, Alex Hay, Valerie Hegarty, Jacques Hnizdovsky, Jasper Johns, Aaron King, Edmund Lewandowski, John Williams Lewis, Hew Locke, Reginald Marsh, Henry Moore, Josip Mrvcic, Vik Muniz, Michael Oatman, Demetrius Oliver, Brion Nuda Rosch, Ed Ruscha, Silvia Saunders, Dorothy Shakespear, Kiki Smith, Ruby Sky Stiler, Myron Stout, Albert Swinden, Barbara Takenaga, Paul Thek, Johannes VanDerBeek, Sara VanDerBeek, Charmion von Weigand, Terry Winters, and Jean Xceron.
Affinity Atlas runs through April 7, 2013. A fully illustrated catalogue will be published in late 2012.
For media inquiries, contact:
Alison Buchbinder, [email protected]
