Exhibition History

Fall 2007 Exhibition

August 31 - November 5, 2007

Window | Interface

August 31 - November 5, 2007
Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery
and College of Art Gallery

Window | Interface is the second installment in the Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series. The exhibition highlights a variety of artistic projects -- including videos, photographs and digital installations -- that explore the roles of windows, screens, and interfaces as both boundaries and sites of transaction between machine and mind, data and perception, the physical and the virtual.

FEATURED ARTISTS
Doug Aitken; Joseph Beuys; Peter Campus; Albrecht Dürer; Olafur Eliasson; Cerith Wyn Evans; Valie Export; Kirsten Geisler; Gary Hill; David Hilliard; Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle; Marcel Odenbach; Nam June Paik, Jud Yalkut, and Charlotte Moorman; Jeffrey Shaw; Hiroshi Sugimoto; Bill Viola; Jeff Wall

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Summer 2007 Exhibitions

May 11 - July 16, 2007

Andrea Fraser, "What do I, as an artist, provide?"

Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery

This exhibition examines the work of contemporary artist Andrea Fraser, with special emphasis on her recent series of photographs and video installations. It is the second in the Kemper Art Museum's recently inaugurated Focus series of exhibitions that examine significant works from the collection within the context of contemporary discourses.

Ansel Adams: Reverence for Life

Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery
Teaching Gallery

This exhibition examines Adams's landscape photography and its relationship to his environmental activism, paying special attention to his focus on water and preservation while also highlighting key personal connections and influences, all of which play into the theme of a "reverence for life."

Annual MFA Thesis Exhibition

College of Art Gallery
Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery

This exhibition features works from fourteen Master of Fine Arts candidates in Washington University's Graduate School of Art, part of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

Spring 2007 Exhibitions

February 9 - April 29, 2007

Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany

Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery
College of Art Gallery

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 instigated a new era of German history, rapidly -- yet profoundly -- altering everyday German life. Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany, the first exhibition of its kind, gathers the work of over 30 artists who created art in Germany in the last 15 years. Intentionally international in scope, and with an eye to exploring new meanings of the avant-garde, this exhibition surveys varied attempts to challenge the relationship between art and the everyday reality of German life since the fall of the Wall.

Container Narratives: Literary and Visual

Teaching Gallery

A Teaching Gallery exhibition co-organized by Emma Kafalenos, senior lecturer in comparative literature, and Catharina Manchanda, curator at the Kemper Art Museum, Container Narratives is presented conjunction with a new comparative literature course taught in spring 2007. This exhibition examines visual artworks that contain, embed, or quote other artworks. Both the course and the exhibition address the ways that contained artwork -- a painting within a painting, a story within a novel, or a painting within a novel -- reinforce or alter the message that the containing artwork communicates. Works on display will include photographs, prints, collages, and objects by artists such as Eleanor Antin, M.C. Escher, Robert Motherwell, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Fall 2006 Exhibitions

October 25 - December 31, 2006

[Grid < > Matrix]

Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery

As a simple method of arranging individual elements into perpendicular lines, the grid is a familiar pattern in contemporary life -- from traffic patterns to computer screen pixels -- sorting out the visible world in a way that is easy to recognize and navigate. While the grid remains a fundamental element in aesthetics and technology, the matrix takes the grid structure and pushes it into a new digital dimension, transforming its structure to embody relationships, connections, and organization in new and intentionally capricious ways. Gathering artworks that illustrate the tenuous and interconnected nature of the grid and matrix, [Grid < > Matrix] explores how these concepts relate or diverge as they organize our understanding of aesthetics, art, and media.

Models and Prototypes

Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery

Models are used as tools in countless professions and academic disciplines. Whether developing a new theory or working on a new building, models help us explore and test new ideas or designs, and as such they include an aspect of experimentation. While sketches, notes, and sculptural maquettes are the kinds of models that traditionally served as preparatory steps in the creative process, artists of the early twentieth century began to think about them as works of art and vastly expanded their use. Examining the development and intersection of artistic approaches to models since the 1920s, Models and Prototypes encompasses a wide range of styles and media--including installations, sculptural objects, prints, photography, and painting--and considers them in three interrelated groups: multiple as model, conceptual models, and structural models.

Pure Invention: Tom Friedman

College of Art Gallery

A St. Louis native and alumnus of Washington University's College of Art (BFA, 1988), Tom Friedman's art has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally. A showcase of his work organized by College of Art faculty member Michael Byron, Pure Invention is the inaugural exhibition in the Kemper Art Museum's College of Art Gallery. A mix of sculpture, installation pieces, and prints -- two of which were created at Washington University's Island Press -- the show offers an exciting opportunity to experience the work of this visionary contemporary artist.

Pressing Issues: The Social Agency of Prints

Teaching Gallery

Planned in conjunction with an innovative new Studio Seminar that pairs the practice of printmaking with the study of the history of the medium, this show invites viewers to examine prints in their cultural roles, including prints as representations of other works of art, representations of shared religious or social values, and vehicles for social and political critique. Works on display include prints by Rembrandt van Rijn, Albretcht Dürer, Honoré Daumier, Edgar Degas, Käthe Kollwitz, Andy Warhol, Hung Liu, and Sue Coe.

Pressing Issues was organized by Lisa Bulawsky, associate professor of art, and Elizabeth Childs, associate professor of art history and archaeology.

Spring 2005 Exhibitions

January 21 - April 25, 2005

Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women's Health in Contemporary Art

Spring 2004 Exhibitions

January 23 - April 18, 2004

American Art of the 1980s: Selections from the Broad Collections

Selections from the Permanent Collection I: Painting America in the 19th Century

Selections from the Permanent Collection II: American Art on Paper from the 1960s to the Present

Fall 2003 Exhibitions

September 5 - Decmeber 7, 2003

Inscriptions of Time/Topographies of History: The Photographs of Alan Cohen

Influence 150: 150 Years of Shaping a City, a Nation, the World

Spring 2003 Exhibitions

January 17 - April 20, 2003

Contemporary German Art: Recent Acquisitions

Made in France: Art from 1945 to the Present

Italian Renaissance Engravings, c. 1470-1510

Arnold Odermatt Photographs

Fall 2002 Exhibitions

August 30 - December 8, 2002

H.W. Janson and the Legacy of Modern Art at Washington University in St. Louis

Christian Jankowski's Targets

Spring 2001 Exhibitions

January 19 - March 18, 2001

Caught by Politics: Art of the 1930s and 1940s

Farewell to Bosnia: Photographs by Gilles Peress

Fall 2000 Exhibitions

September 8 - November 12, 2000

Eleanor Antin: A Retrospective

Spring 2000 Exhibition

January 21 - March 19, 2000

Beginnings: The Taste of the Founders