Spring 2017 exhibitions

April 8–August 6​
Robert Pruitt: Benediction
Robert Pruitt is known for impactful drawings that touch on issues of representation and the body. Referencing the artist’s interests in science fiction, hip hop, science and technology, sci-fi, comic books, Black political struggles and symbols of traditional African cultures, his work strives to convey the diversity present in the range and breadth of collective Black diasporic experience both past and present. Benediction presents a series of ten large-scale drawings produced expressly for the occasion of his first solo exhibition at the Ulrich Museum of Art. The size of the drawings compel viewers to be encompassed by the work, leading them into dialogue with the subjects of the artist’s renderings. 

April 15–August 6
Daryl Vocat: The Secret of the Midnight Shadow
Much of Toronto-based artist Daryl Vocat’s print-based practice showcases a mastery of the silkscreen process. Producing works on a variety of supports, his practice to date has explored the themes of boyhood, play, and the intricacies of social norms and engagement. In his installation, The Secret of the Midnight Shadow, figures arise from found, manipulated and redrawn Boy Scout illustrations. Removed from their original contexts, the figures are enlarged to life-size and placed within a realm of ambiguity. Transforming the hallways of the Ulrich Underground into a veritable pop-up book, Vocat creates a space of inversion that is simultaneously playful and menacing, while alluding to the underlying layer of violence that can exist through social interaction. 

April 22–August 6
Patrick Duegaw: Pierced by Dogma 
In response to the early Christian tenets of conduct, known colloquially as the Seven Heavenly Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins, comes Patrick Duegaw’s Pierced by Dogma—a series of paintings that explore what the artist posits are “countless and mundane trials of the human condition.” Begun in 1997, this body of work, which is a part of Duegaw’s ongoing project The Innumerable Anxieties, portrays humorously nightmarish large-scale figures engaged in a myriad of circus-like spectacles: allegorical images that illustrate seemingly infinite, and uniquely personal musings, that meditate on an individual’s ongoing relationship with anxiety. The circus becomes the backdrop for scenes of self-perpetuated melodrama. The “performers” in these paintings provide a medium through which viewers may vicariously partake of danger, albeit through the benign perils of manufactured stress. 

April 22–August 6
Mary Walling Blackburn: x.y.z.
Mary Walling Blackburn is the first in a series of artists who will be invited to respond to the Ulrich Museum’s vast holdings of works by Charles M. Grafly. Using his work as a starting point, contemporary artists will create new works that expound on the aesthetics and themes contained within Grafly’s immense output.

Noting that Grafly’s public commissions of figures usually reflected people of considerable station who were considered to be influential figures during the apex of the early 20th century, Mary Walling Blackburn turns her attention to the figures that were frequently excluded from Grafly’s renderings. Employing the use of text, Blackburn will constitute works that call forth the bodies of those whose actions helped shape the tenor and fabric of society during turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, but have been lost to the annals of history. Using unorthodox methods of installation, Blackburn will interweave works of her own creation with Grafly’s, commenting on how the placement of works within public space correlates to the ways in which we revere or overlook public figures.