The Official Blog of the Allen Memorial Art Museum

Allen After Hours Returns!

On Tuesday, December 1, the Allen Memorial Art Museum will open its doors for a special evening event – one of the last chances Oberlin College students will have to explore the collection before the museum closes for a sixteen-month renovation project.

This semester’s “Allen After Hours” will take place from 7:00 to 9:30pm, and will feature food, games, door prizes, and the launch of the museum’s audio tour! Student docents will be on hand to discuss and explain the many aspects of the museum’s renowned collection. Museum staff will answer questions about renovation activities and talk about how the museum’s involvement with the campus will continue throughout the project period (and, yes, Art Rental will continue!).

Originally known as “Art After Hours,” this student-only event ran from 1997 until 2002. Relaunched in the fall of 2007, “Allen After Hours” gives Oberlin College students a chance to experience the museum in a unique way at a time that fits with their busy schedules.

Click here for the AAH Facebook event page.

Click here to see images from last year’s event.

3pm

We start a new feature today on the AMAM Blog, where we will post a podcast a week until the museum closes (on Wednesday, December 23) for its sixteen-month renovation project.

Today, we take it all back to the very beginning of the museum and focus on the Charles F. Olney collection. Inspired by Oberlin College’s educational ideals, Olney, a Cleveland educator, bequeathed his collection of nearly 8,000 paintings, ivories, and bronzes to the College in 1904 to aid in the teaching of art. Importantly, since Olney’s gift came without restrictions, only the 700 best works were retained. The remainder were sold off during the following decades, with the proceeds used to purchase objects of superior quality, to which Olney’s name was then attached.

Here, Melissa Duffes, AMAM Media, Membership, and Publications Coordinator, talks about Olney’s collection and how it developed.

5pm

This Tuesday, November 10,
will bring our next Tuesday Tea lecture. Dr. Laura Baudot, Assistant Professor of English, will talk on the painting “Dovedale by Moonlight” by Joseph Wright of Derby.

Baudot also regularly offers courses on 18th Century British satire and its cultural heritage. In this podcast, she discusses the use of satire in the works of William Hogarth, along with former Curator of Academic Programs, Colette Crossman. This discussion was held in conjunction with the exhibition, “Out of Albion: British Art from the Allen Memorial Art Museum.”

12pm

Bound Tetrahedron

Tuesday, November 3, saw the arrival of Bound Tetrahedron to the Oberlin campus—specifically, outside the William and Anabel Perlik Commons at the Science Center. The 8- ft. bronze sculpture was designed by California  artist Roger Berry, who was on site yesterday  to oversee its installation. Though Berry was  commissioned almost four years ago to design  a piece for the college, a lot of the time was  spent searching for the perfect location. The  new Science Center was an obvious choice for  Berry—who has worked on installations with  other science institutions around the country —and the OC science faculty’s enthusiasm for a sculpture became part of the project.

Once the Science Center was chosen, the exact location around the building had to be considered. “I chose the area next to the Commons for a specific reason,” says Berry. “Sculptures can often fight with the scale of the structures around them. With such a large building as the Science Center, I knew the piece had to be on a more human-sized scale—more approachable.” The size and location of the sculpture also allows for a more intimate viewing; the artist says that Bound Tetrahedron is more for viewers inside the building than for those driving by on the street.

The idea of a tetrahedron had fascinated Berry for some time: “The tetrahedron is a basic structure in science—a basic building block—and I wanted to use it to relate to the field of science in a very literal way.” Berry designed the piece using AutoCAD, something he has been doing for the past 10 years. “Using a computer to design my work allows me to build more complex structures than what I can imagine in my own mind,” he says. “I can build and delete the piece until I get it right.” However, the artist’s journeyman background was very important; without his early, hands-on experience of designing and building sculptures, Berry says, making computer models would be impossible.

Though Bound Tetrahedron was built at the artist’s studio in California, it was structurally designed to withstand bleak Ohio winters. The sculpture’s surface will evolve, however, and that is just what Berry wants. “Bronze is a very live material,” he says, “and its patina changes over time. I want this piece to wear its environment. As a public sculpture, that’s very important.”

5pm

The Role of College Art Museums

“The nation’s best university museums have long been engaged in the practice of fostering critical thinking and visual literacy, the understanding of times and cultures dramatically distinct from our own, the awareness of a common humanity, and thus, ultimately, the shaping of good citizenship.” - from the article by James Christen Steward.

This link was sent in by one of the AMAM’s community volunteer docents, with the note - “Thought you would like the article. It makes many good points that I see reflected in AMAM’s successful outreach to college departments and beyond.”

Nice to hear words of encouragement. We will keep it going!

4pm

How Museum Membership is Like the N.B.A.

To mark the first day of the NBA regular season (Go Cavs!), we’re linking to an interesting post on the Brooklyn Museum’s blog about the similarities between museum membership and N.B.A. season ticket holders from The Brooklyn Museum’s membership manager, Will Cary:

“If you’re asking, “Wait, how are N.B.A. teams and museums alike, again?” I’ll explain. In the big picture, the N.B.A. has its franchises as the U.S. has its museums: one in every major U.S. city. Museums and N.B.A. teams both inhabit large, instantly identifiable structures that provoke civic pride (for the most part) among locals. Museums and N.B.A. teams both have their star players (either signature works or exhibitions that draw people in), and N.B.A. teams-like membership departments–use those stars in hopes of convincing their fans that the entire experience (collection) is worth a yearly donation. Like the roster of an N.B.A. team, some exhibitions are created internally by curators using the museum’s own collection (or “drafted”) and some are brought in from other cities (”traded”). Like N.B.A. teams, museums have their coaches (directors) and owners (trustees), and-at least in NYC-media that dedicate staff to covering and analyzing the moves they make…”

11am

The AMAM at the Philly Museum of Art

A retrospective on the work of Arshile Gorky opens Wednesday at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and includes two important works from the AMAM collection - his 1947 painting The Plough and the Song, along with a preparatory sketch for this painting. This painting is one of three surviving versions that explored the same theme, one of the most important of Gorky’s later years.

AMAM Curator of Collections Andria Derstine recently traveled to Philadelphia to oversee the installation of these works, and noted that several related works are all on view in the same gallery, including three hand-carved wooden ploughs, as well as the other two painted versions, alongside their studies. Derstine noted that the carvings in particular were interesting for their exploration of a monumental theme on an intimate level.

Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective runs through January 10, 2010, before traveling to London and Los Angeles.

3pm

The final chapter in the "Eye-Cup" story.

Dietrich von Bothmer, former Chairman of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has died. Mr. von Bothmer had a long and storied career, and has a direct connection to the AMAM collection. Through his research efforts in the mid-1980s, a ceramic fragment related to our Greek red-figure kylix (or eye-cup) was discovered.

His research began in 1984, when he visited Oberlin with his son for an admissions interview. During that visit, von Bothmer studied our eye-cup, and he was later provided photographs of the work, “since I had hopes of adding to your cup,” he wrote.

In December 1986, he wrote the museum a letter giving us some good news:

“This hope has now been fulfilled: a fragment in the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu…acquired earlier this year with the Bareiss collection, fills part of the big gap on the reverse of your cup and supplies, moreover, the alpha and phi of ‘egraphsen,’ the verb of Epiktetos’s signature (his name is on the other side). Now I have to be on the lookout for the rest.”

Thanks to his efforts, and the generosity of the Board of Trustees of the Getty Museum, this fragment was donated to the museum in 1988, and is currently on display with the eye-cup in the museum’s East Ambulatory gallery.

11am

Our Tuesday Tea speaker this afternoon at 2:30pm is Classics Professor Kirk Ormand. Today, he will be speaking on “The Finding of Erichthonius” painting in the AMAM collection by Peter Paul Rubens.

Here, Ormand discusses the mythological story of the “Rape of Persephone,” to go along with the painting on the same theme by Adolph Gottlieb (also in the AMAM collection).

10am

Tonight's Lecturer has an asteroid named after him.

Jay Pasachoff, Director of Hopkins Observatory and Field Memorial Professor of Astronomy, Williams College.

Dr. Pasachoff, an internationally-recognized expert on total solar eclipses and co-author of “Fire in the Sky: Comets and Meteors, the Decisive Centuries, in British Art and Science,” will lecture on the intersections between astronomy in art in conjunction with the “Starry Dome” exhibition.

Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Department of Physics and Astronomy.

10am