Jessica D. Brier

September 21, 2022.

Jessica D. Brier, Deknatel Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, talks about her exhibition and takes us on a tour through the galleries of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print, on view at the Center from August 20 through December 22, 2022.

The grid often hides in plain sight, from notepads and spreadsheets to halftone photographic reproductions. It dominates the organization, perception, and representation of the modern world, especially in print. Deeply embedded in a Western worldview, the grid visualizes control, mastery, and order. As an invisible framing device, it has become so pervasive that we habitually ignore it. Yet when artists call our attention to the grid, its layered meanings come fully into view. On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print surveys photographs, prints, artist’s books, and printed sculptures from the dynamic permanent collection of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. From 19th-century scientific and portrait photography to avant-garde and conceptual photography; from mid- 20th-century Minimalist, Pop Art, and Op Art printmaking to experimental bookmaking and photography in the 21st century, this richly illustrated volume explores how artists have embraced, rejected, and reclaimed the grid. By altering and challenging perception, they offer new ways of seeing the world. 

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Aaron Sinift, Kahkashan Khan, Jitendra Kumar

 

December 8, 2021.

The Artist Aaron Sinift and project co-curators Kahkashan Khan and Jitendra Kumar discuss the artist book featured in the exhibition "OTHER IMAGININGS: Artist Collaborations with Gandhi Ashrams" on view in the Vassar College Art Library through March 4, 2022.

As western modes of advertising and television began to be adopted in India on a mass level in the early ’90s, there was a shift towards a generic global style in popular culture. The uniquely S. Asian styles of portrayal which flourished in the pre-digital era began to disappear as the imagination began to be more aggressively colonized. As vestiges of Gandhi ashram visual culture become rarer in public it is evident that we are nearing the end of a particular visual era that helped define a unique sense of Gandhian social purpose and national identity as popularly understood after Indian Independence.
 
The images in this book are traces of a world that exists even today and continues to provide a baseline means of self-sufficiency for tens of millions of people. Yet how we express ourselves is being transformed by our present circumstances and at this very moment is searching for its compelling voice. Perhaps this book is an opportunity to catch a glimpse before it’s gone of a more local sensibility that is unimpressed by glamour and worldliness, more focused on the ideals of communal harmony and love of country, particularly its rural pastoralist culture, what Gandhiji called “India’s heart and soul.”
 
As we reflect on these unique qualities (rasa), it is important as well to consider the present, the point from which we encounter the future, and from which we must find our voice. OTHER IMAGININGS is intended to create community (you included) and assert absolute equivalence among all participants so that no labor, no effort, no artist known or unknown is prized above any other. This artwork is an attempt to weave together stories rooted in community in order to create a primal resource for understanding and collaboration.

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Dora Apel

Vienna: Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial, Rachel Whiteread, 2000

October 13, 2021.

The acclaimed art historian and cultural critic, Dora Apel, W. Hawkins Ferry Professor Emerita of Modern and Contemporary Art History at Wayne State University, talks about her recent monograph, Calling Memory Into Place (Rutgers UP, 2020). Her many books include Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob;  Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing; and Beautiful, Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline.

"In this deeply personal work, acclaimed art historian Dora Apel examines how memorials, photographs, artworks, and autobiographical stories can be used to fuel a process of “unforgetting”—reinterpreting the past by recalling the events, people, perspectives, and feelings that get excluded from conventional histories. The ten essays in Calling Memory into Place feature explorations of the controversy over a painting of Emmett Till in the Whitney Biennial and the debates about a national lynching memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. They also include personal accounts of Apel’s return to the Polish town where her Holocaust survivor parents grew up, as well as the ways she found strength in her inherited trauma while enduring treatment for breast cancer.  
 

"These essays shift between the scholarly, the personal, and the visual as different modes of knowing, and explore the intersections between racism, antisemitism, and sexism, while suggesting how awareness of historical trauma is deeply inscribed on the body. By investigating the relations among place, memory, and identity, this study shines a light on the dynamic nature of memory as it crosses geography and generations."  

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Buzz Spector

March 31, 2021.

The artist Buzz Spector talks about his retrospective exhibition at the St. Louis Art Museum on view through May 31, 2021: Buzz Spector: Alterations. Spector is a contemporary Conceptual artist who explores the aesthetic possibilities of language, paper, and books. The exhibition spans the artist’s career from the 1970s to the present and includes drawings, altered books, postcard assemblages, collages, and more. The artist also discusses the catalogue raisonée of his work just published by the Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and available through the SLAM bookstore. Spector has recently moved his  home and studio to the Hudson Valley.

"Taking cues from Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers—two influential 20th-century artists whose careers shaped the course of contemporary art—Spector draws from art historical precedents and adapts borrowed materials, injecting poetic humor and philosophical musings along the way. . . .

"Spector is internationally recognized for his contributions to the field of contemporary art. He taught painting, sculpture, and two-dimensional design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis for a decade before retiring in 2019. This is the first presentation of the artist’s work at a St. Louis museum."

The Rowland Atkinson skit we mention.

Art Speaks:  a 53 minute video on Buzz Spector: Alterations by SLAM

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Patricia Phagan

February 12, 2020.
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center curator Patricia Phagan talks about the exhibition Louise Bourgeois: Ode to Forgetting, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, on view January 24 - April 5, 2020.

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) is one of the most renowned artists of the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. She is perhaps best known for powerful sculptures, including monumental spiders, human figures, and anthropomorphic shapes. An enigmatic chronicler of her emotions, she confided in her diaries, made drawings daily, and returned regularly to printmaking. The exhibition focuses on prints she made in her eighties and nineties, with a few earlier examples and a massive spiral sculpture to give additional context. She made art because she had to, and described her practice as a means of survival, a lifelong managing of emotional vulnerabilities, traumas, and nightmares. As she put it, “Art is a guarantee of sanity.”

Raquel Rabinovich

December 12, 2018

The  artist Raquel Rabinovich (b. Argentina 1929) will discuss her exhibition Raquel Rabinovich: The Reading Room, on view in the Frederick Thompson Memorial Library at Vassar College October 25 - December 20, 2018.  The exhibition is being held concurrently with the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center exhibition Past Time: Geology in European and American Art and another related exhibition in the Vassar College Art Library: Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Geological Illustration from Catastrophism to the Anthropocene.

"The exhibition title The Reading Room refers to the location where the works are installed (an intervention of sorts in the south transept of Vassar's main library) but also serves as a metaphor for a possible approach to the work.  The selections on view each represent an attempt to transcend the routine of every day, inviting viewers to enter into a place of contemplation in which many layers of meaning can be read in, or into, the individual artworks.  Rabinovich describes this approach as a language of metaphors.  In a recent interview she said, 'Beyond the language of the novel or the poem or the story, there is always an element that is beyond the words, in between the lines, which is not literal.  And that world is, for me, a wonderful world.  I love that world.  I resonate with that world.'"

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Thomas Edward Hill

Tina Barney (American, (b.1945) The Librarian, 2010, Chromogenic color print © Tina Barney Courtesy of the artist and Janet Borden, Inc.

October 10, 2018.

In this installment of our series on the value of the liberal arts in contemporary society, Milly Budny (VC'71), Founding Director of the Research Group on Manuscript Evidence, turns the table to interview Library Cafe host and Vassar College Art Librarian Thomas Hill about the Library Cafe, his career as a librarian at Yale University and Vassar College, and his background and views on subjects that include the connection between education and friendship, and how library education and practice might be better integrated into academic research and culture.

Part 1:
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Katherine Mangiardi (b. 1982). Kerchief, 2018. Acrylic on board, 12.7 x 12.7 cm.

October 17, 2018.

Part 2:     
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Barbara Beisinghoff

October 5, 2016.

Internationally acclaimed graphic artist Barbara Beisinghoff will talk about her artist's books and etchings, installations and public commissions, her residency at Vassar College during September and October of this year, and her exhibition, "When Light Touches Paper," on view in the Vassar College Art Library and the  Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center September 19 - October 14, 2016.

46:15 minutes.

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Mary-Kay Lombino

May 4, 2016.

Mary-Kay Lombino, Emily Hargroves Fisher 1957 and Richard B. Fisher Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, discusses the exhibition on view April 29 - August 21, 2016: "Touch the Sky: Art and Astronomy."

Astronomy can be traced back to antiquity with its origins in religious and mythological beliefs; its study has been closely linked to artistic endeavors since the Renaissance. Touch the Sky is a multi-media exhibition of images of the moon, sun, planets, and stars made by artists since the nineteenth century. Artistic observation of the skies was advanced by the dawn of photography in 1839, when Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre attempted to capture an image of the moon, and in 1865 when Lewis Rutherfurd, inventor of the first telescope designed for astrophotography, made top-quality spectroscopic images of the moon. Since then, artists’ enthusiasm for recording and interpreting the grandeur and mystery of the cosmos has not waned. The exhibition includes work by nineteen artists, including Vija Celmins, Chris McCaw, Sharon Harper, David Malin, Mungo Thomson, Lisa Oppenheim, and Nancy Graves.

44:12 minutes.

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Radha Pandey

April 20, 2016.

Book artist and papermaker Radha Pandey discusses her artist's books, traditional artisinal papermaking, and the history of papermaking on the Indian subcontinent.

32:52 minutes.

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Werner Pfeiffer

SEASON OPENER
October 3, 2012.

Artist Werner Pfeiffer talks about the exhibition of his work on view in the Thompson Library, Van Ingen Art Library, and Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College through December 14 entitled: “Reexamining Books: Book Objects and Artist Books by Werner Pfeiffer."

59:35 min.

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Joel Smith

February 12, 2008.

Joel Smith, Curator of Photography at the Princeton University Art Museum, discusses his exhibition Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, on View at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar, November 2, 2007 through February 24, 2008.

38:44 min.

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Mary-Kay Lombino

November 7, 2006

Mary-Kay Lombino, Curator of Collections at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, talks about the exhibition: Off the Shelf: New Forms in Contemporary Artists' Books (October 6-December 17, 2006)
28:37 min.

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