2014

For a unique shopping experience, visit us for artistic treasures and unique gifts inspired by artwork in the Freedman Gallery Collection and the whole season of programs at the CFA.

Under the direction of curator Erin Riley-Lopez, students in the gallery management course will research and curate an exhibition as part of their final project using works that will be drawn from the collection of the Freedman Gallery.

Ammunition for the Virgin is a film about the last surviving member of a Montenegrin tradition in which a girl is brought up as a boy in a household with no male heirs.

Exhibition focuses on the production of artwork by women artists who use the mediums of video, photography and performance to transform themselves into a male persona. Using the 1970s as a starting point, the exhibit charts a history of this work and explore the way gender is conceived of and constructed, concentrating on themes of identity, self-portraiture, passing and drag, among others. Artists include Danielle Abrams, Shannon Plumb, Eleanor Antin, Martha Wilson and Karina Aguilera Skvirsky among others.

Exhibition includes a selection of prints by Romare Bearden from the permanent collection, including several examples of Family (1975).

Freedman Gallery (MG & PS)

Curated by Amy Stevens and Angie Duignan, this international exchange exhibition showcases installation, photography, digital and new media artworks from artists living in the U.S. and Ireland, including: Carol Anne Connolly, Wendy DeSchene and Jeff Schmuki, Angie Duignan, Matthew Garrison, Lori Hepner, Shelagh Honan, Allison Kaufman, Wil Lindsay, Róisin Loughrey and Sinead McDonald. The exhibit considers the position of cultural context as a lens through which artwork is viewed and understood.

Treehouse models will be on display along with drawings and stories representing campers’ explorations of this year’s theme for the summer art camp, which included the construction of a personalized tent.

Multidisciplinary artist and sculptor, Will Pergl, translates and elevates urban structures and objects—cell phone towers, fire hydrants, construction signs—into lyrical and rhythmic forms that investigate the disconnection between the digital and physical realms.

Artist Phyllis Moser in collaboration with Joseph Mench ’09 explore how technology can alter our experience of art, how it changes the way art is delivered and shared, how it enhances interaction with art, and how it redefines art. Viewers will be essential to the success of the show and will be given incentives to take, add, record and share portions of the exhibit, on site and via social media. In addition some images from the exhibition will be incorporated into everyday objects—mugs, stamps, smart phone covers, etc.  These will be part of the exhibit, not separate, as they would be in a museum store.

Inspired by Jules Michelet’s statement, “each epoch dreams the one to follow,” Nous, Le Futur/We, the Future is a speculative fiction concerned with the possibility of transmitting messages to the past and future. Proceeding from the artist’s belief in collectivity as an intergeneration conversation, the video explores the impact such a collective agency could have on influencing past and future temporalities. This work has been created from four years of interviews with Parisian citizens and is intended to be a time capsule of the mental messages of a spectrum of Parisians from 2011-2014.

Working under the direction of Erin Riley-Lopez, curator of the Freedman Gallery, students from Boyertown High School will enter the storage vault and make selections from the Freedman Gallery collection to show in a Project Space exhibition. Students will gain first hand knowledge of curatorial strategies as well as proper handling/installation techniques in this collaborative effort between the curatorial and education departments.

Cellblock Visions is a lively collection of inmate artwork, created behind bars, from county jail to death row – the alternative art world flourishing today in American prisons. Men and women inmates, having no previous training, turn to art for a sense of self-respect, respect for and from others, a way to find peace. They transcend the cramped space, limited light, and narrow vistas. They triumph over security bans with ingenious resourcefulness – extracting color from shampoo, making paint out of M&Ms and sculpture out of toilet paper.

Multi-media artist, filmmaker, musician and theatrical scenic designer, Brent Green, will screen new, short videos, which will serve as an excellent introduction to Green’s larger body of work to be installed in the main gallery in the spring.  Don’t miss this important work from a renowned, international artist.

Historical photographs from Joliet Prison, Joliet, IL, taken between 1890 and 1930, have been reprised from an exhibition that was first shown at the University Museum, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and include landscapes, interiors and intimate portraits of staff and inmates.