Exhibitions Archive
An Exhibition in Honor of Adolph Weil Jr.
Canaletto's Vedute Prints
Although the Italian eighteenth-century artist Antonio Canaletto is best known for his luminous, sweeping views of the Grand Canal and Piazza San Marco, the Vedute, a portfolio of prints made in the early 1740s, reveal another side of Venice. These scenes are intimate in scale and contain an extraordinary variety of subject matter, encompassing both real and imaginary views, from urban portraits to bucolic landscapes. This exhibition presents the full range of Canaletto’s Vedute project and celebrates the legacy of Adolph J. “Bucks” Weil, Class of 1935, an astute and generous collector who over his lifetime amassed one of the most impressive collections of Old Master prints in the country.
(Re)Imagining Home
Home is a complex idea imbued with a variety of meanings and associations. This exhibition explores home as a mutable emotional and conceptual phenomenon inextricably linked to physical spaces. Home is constantly (re)imagined, subject to continual construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction both materially and in the mind. Homes are highly personalized spaces that represent personal narratives and inner lives and continually evolve as their inhabitants age or move. Whether actual or staged, physical or imagined, idyllic or in ruins, images of homes raise the questions: Where is home? What is home? Does (or can) home travel with you or is it something forever left behind?
The City as Memory Machine
Life in the city is lived in daily patterns of mobility. Each day, most of us stroll past the same shops and cafés, or distractedly gaze across receding rooftops from the vantage of an elevated train. We often think of time spent in transit as lost time, life on the periphery of real living. But as the French anthropologist Marc Augé has shown us, traveling through the city is a practice of history and memory. Instead of life lost, cities unfold at the stop-and-go pace of a crowded bus line. Along the way, monuments to the city’s collective history spark personal, individualized memories. In those fleeting moments, as the bus rolls along, we may be struck by the memory of a childhood trip to Central Park or suddenly recall a moment of heartbreaking loss. On the commute, the past and the present intermingle in barely recognized flashes of illumination, all in the time it takes to glance up from the morning newspaper.
Journeys along the Tokaido Highway
A Feast for the Eyes and a Sacred Trek for the Feet
This exhibition, at its essence, is about the power of place. A single locale can carry myriad meanings and experiences for different people, as can be seen through depictions of the Tokaido highway. As the main arterial road in Japan during the Edo period (1603–1868), the Tokaido held great significance for citizens and artists alike. Examining different artists’ representations of the Tokaido illustrates the diverse range of experiences people had along the road, as well as the distinctive meanings each artist attached to the highway.
An Exploration of the Reclining Female Nude
Goddesses, Models, & Prostitutes
The reclining female nude has been a recurring theme in Western art since the 1500s. It began with erotic images portraying an idealized woman (often in the guise of a goddess) for the pleasure of the male viewer. Through her passive, reclined pose, she offers her body for our gaze; her recumbent nudity implies that she is sexually available. She represents sensuality, beauty, and desire. As the subject of the female nude became canonized, artists began to expand the ways in which it was represented. She can be depicted alone or with guests and companions. With each incarnation of the reclining female nude, the tradition continues to grow and change.
Tension and Flow
Water Ways
Water is essential to human life, shaping the geography of human settlement, modes of travel, and ease of trade. Too much water (flooding) or too little (drought) has wrought havoc in communities for millennia. This exhibition considers humans' relationship to water, from the architecture of socialization pictured in Edward Burtynsky's photograph of a stepwell in India to the dramatic effects of flooding shown in images of people in front of their homes from Gideon Mendel's series Drowning World. From quiet still lifes (David Goldes) to panoramic landscapes (Ian Teh), these photographs showcase the beauty and power of this miraculous, yet quotidian, substance.