Category: Exhibitions

Octavio Medellín: Spirit and Form

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Octavio Medellín portrait

 

The exhibition Octavio Medellín: Spirit and Form is now open at the Dallas Museum of Art. This exceptional retrospective exhibition features many fabulous works of art on loan from Bywaters Special Collections.

Bywaters Special Collections holds the Octavio Medellin Artwork and Papers. A detailed finding aid and extensive digital collection are available.

https://www.smu.edu/libraries/digitalcollections/med

https://txarchives.org/smu/finding_aids/00272.xml

 

 

 

 

Image credit: Octavio Medellin with Hammer and Chisel. Medellin Studio, Bandera, Texas

Bywaters Special Collections, Southern Methodist University

Narrative as Reality: A World Reimagined/ Selections from the Jessica and Kelvin Beachum Family Collection opens Feb. 18

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Several paintings by contemporary Black artists from the Jessica and Kelvin Beachum Family collection will be on view at Hamon’s Hawn Gallery beginning February 18 and continuing to May 22. The exhibition, Narrative as Reality: A World Reimagined, presents the work of artists, Dominic Chambers, Ryan Cosbert, Robert Hodge, Nelson Makamo, Delita Martin, Sungi Mlengeya, Mario Moore, Robert Pruitt, Athi-Patra Ruga, and Ferrari Sheppard. As described by the exhibition’s curator, Dr. Valerie Gillespie, on the installation, “Each composition within the collection offers a unique story. These non-linear narratives on the Black experience, with their own distinct actualities exhibit a reality not often portrayed, yet a collective, lived experience that strives to represent a livelihood untouched.”

Dominic Chambers_The Night is Our Friend
Dominic Chambers, The Night is Our Friend, Oil on Canvas, 2020

This selection of paintings represents a fraction of the collection owned by the Beachums, who began acquiring works by Black artists in 2013. Of the works in their collection, they express a personal approach to their acquisitions, “We want to look back on each piece and know it represents something we love, something we remember, something historically significant, or something we never want to forget. The intergenerational component is what is most special.”

Kelvin Beachum graduated from SMU in 2010 with a B.A. in Economics and earned a Master of Liberal Studies in Organizational Dynamics in 2012. A four-year starter as offensive tackle for SMU Mustang football, he serves as a member of the Executive Boards for the Simmons School of Education and Human Development and Lyle School of Engineering. Named an SMU Emerging Leader in 2018, Kelvin honored the late Dennis Simon, his political science professor and mentor, by endowing SMU’s annual Civil Rights Pilgrimage in Simon’s name.

Drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 2012, Kelvin has played for the Jacksonville Jaguars, the New York Jets and now the Arizona Cardinals during his 10-year NFL career.

Jessica Beachum graduated from Baylor in 2011 with a degree in Sociology. She earned her B.S. in Nursing in 2017 from Duquesne University and her M.S. in Healthcare Delivery in 2021 from Arizona State University.

An exhibition catalogue of Narrative as Reality is available in print and pdf through the website.

OTHER SPRING 2022 EXHIBITIONS AT SMU LIBRARIES

Two other exhibitions at SMU Libraries offer excellent opportunities for visitors this spring. At DeGolyer Library, the exhibition, Black Lives, Black Letters: Primary Sources in African American History, opens February 10. It features archival holdings of the Library including rare books, pamphlets, broadsides, sheet music, prints, photographs, manuscripts, and ephemera documenting aspects of the Black experience in America, from the colonial period to the present. Among figures represented in the exhibition are documents from Phillis Wheatley to Toni Morrison, from Frederick Douglass to Barack Obama. Other figures, some who are unknown, portray Black lives in many fields.

Bridwell Library’s exhibition, A Symbiosis of Script, Font, and Form: A Selection of Artists’ Books, open through March 31, draws from the Library’s Special Collection. The selections for this exhibition offers artists’ books “in which artists or circles of collaborators have integrated corporeal elements of the book form into the literature in sensitive and sometimes astounding ways.”

More information: https://www.smu.edu/Libraries, or email hawngallery@smu.edu.

Skin Hunger – interactive installation in Hamon Arts Library, October 26-31

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Skin Hunger screen shotSkin Hunger is a telematic installation that plays on the zoom-style video-chat that has recently become ubiquitous. Participants can reach across their screens to virtually ‘touch’ one another.  By touching or moving together, participants create visuals and sounds that emerge and evolve from participant relation and interaction making the intangible connection tangible and also giving it life.
 
 
Participants from physically remote locations will be able to interact with each other, connecting participants across Dallas and the United States, including University of Texas Dallas, University of North Texas, and Florida Western University during the same time period, connecting participants in those places.
 
This work was created in response to the stress incurred by lack of touch as a result of social distancing. Lack of touch can result in skin hunger, and leads to feelings of social exclusion. While the remedy for skin hunger is physical touch, we offer a digital alternative.
 
Skin Hunger is a collaborative interactive web-based and telematic installation project realized by Meadows School of the Arts professors Courtney Brown, Melanie Clemmons, Ira Greenberg,  and Brent Brimhall.

Pèl & Ploma, Spanish modernist journal, at the Meadows Museum

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Pel & Ploma cover with womanTwo rare volumes of a Spanish modernist journal, Pèl & Ploma, are on display at the Meadows Museum until August 8. After this date, the works will return to Hamon’s unique collections housed in the library’s Limited Access. Published in Barcelona, the art and literary journal dates from 1899 – 1903. The poems, stories, and essays are written in Catalan with illustrations by the artist Ramón Casas, and much of the prose by Miguel Utrillo. Casas also contributed drawings for the covers and advertisements. Utrillo and Casas developed the concept and execution of this journal along with two other journals, Quatre Gats and Forma, both of which had shorter runs than Pèl & Ploma.

According to Eliseu Trenc, essay contributor to the Cleveland Museum of Art’s 2006 exhibition catalogue, Barcelona and Modernity: Picasso, Gaudí, Miró, Dalí, in which these volumes from Hamon were on display, Pèl & Ploma and Quatre Gats were inflected by the Parisian style. The journals “represent the French realist and synthetic school of the art of Toulouse-Lautrec and Steinlen.” 1 A few of the other artists represented in the journal were Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquin Mir, Joaquin Torres-Garcia, and others. 2

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Blog post: Beverly Mitchell, Assistant Director, Hamon Arts Library

Highlights from Fossils to Film: The Best of SMU’s Collections – Barbara Maples’ Taos Fiesta

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Two museums, the Meadows Museum and the Centre Pompidou, are featuring the work of Barbara Maples, a well-known printmaker. On loan from Bywaters Special Collections to the  Meadows Museum’s Fossils to Film: The Best of SMU’s Collections, is Maples’ Taos Fiesta. In addition, she is one of several female artists featured in the Centre Pompidou’s exhibition, Elles font l’abstraction (Women in Abstraction), which opened May 5, 2021. This exhibition also has a second venue at Guggenheim Bilbao.

Elle font l'abstraction_exhibition entranceBorn in Temple, Texas, Barbara Lucile Maples (1912 – 1999) graduated from Mary-Hardin Baylor College in Belton, with a BA degree in 1933. Six years later she received a MA degree from Teachers College, Columbia University in New York. She began her teaching career in Temple and Fort Worth before joining the Dallas Independent School District in elementary and secondary art from 1937 – 1964. In 1965, Maples became the Assistant Professor of Art Education, and in 1974, Associate Professor of Crafts Design at SMU. She taught at the University until retiring in 1978.

 

Elle font l'abstraction exhibition wall of portraitsIn the mid-1980s, when interest in Texas Regionalism re-emerged, Maples encouraged the exhibition, The Texas Printmakers, at the Meadows Museum at SMU. The 1990 exhibition again highlighted the group. The exhibition catalogue, written by Dr. David Farmer, former director of DeGolyer Library at SMU, and guest curator, Paul Rogers Harris, is available in both the Hamon Arts Library and Bywaters Special Collections.

Maples practiced painting, photography, and metalsmithing, but was known as a printmaker. She joined the Printmakers Guild (renamed Texas Printmakers in 1952) in Dallas and served as its president fromTaos Fiesta_Maples 1945 – 1946. Her color block print, Taos Fiesta, presents an image of the historic carousel, Tío Vivo (Uncle Lively), a main feature at the Taos Fiesta. The carousel is turned by hand-operation of a cog wheel to the accompaniment of Spanish music from fiddle and guitar. It was built in Germany, and originally owned and operated by a traveling circus. In the late 1800s, it was discovered abandoned and broken in the mountainous community of Peñasco in Taos County. In 1938 the Taos Lions Club purchased and restored the carousel with the help of the Taos Society of Artists. Members Oscar Berninghaus and Ernest Blumenschein repainted several of the horses. Other artists and photographers used the carousel as a subject in their work. A mystery writer in Santa Fe, Dorothy Hughes, wrote Ride the Pink Horse, basing the theme on Tío Vivo. In 1947, Robert Montgomery directed and starred in a movie based upon the novel.

Tío Vivo continues to be a highlight of the Taos Fiesta.

Blog post: Ellen Buie Niewyk, Curator, Bywaters Special Collections.

Images credit: Elles font l’abstraction, entrance to Centre Pompidou exhibition with view of portraits of female artists, and wall of portraits. © Centre Pompidou, Audrey Laurans

Image credit: Barbara Maples, Taos Fiesta, ca, 1947, color block print on paper, 14.25 x 13.25 in. (36.20 x 33.66 cm). Bywaters Special Collections, Hamon Arts Library, Gift of Susan Kennon Carruth in memory of Barbara Maples.

Curatorial Minds Lab – spring 2021 fellows & upcoming events

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Please join us in welcoming the five fellows for the spring 2021 Curatorial Minds Lab cohort, hosted by the Hawn Gallery in the Hamon Arts Library, SMU.  

CML logo
Aidan Ellis (she/her) is a second-year student from Austin, TX pursuing majors in Film & Media Studies and English with minors in Human Rights and Art History. She applies her diverse academic interests to examine how the ideation, production, curation, and reception of cultural texts respond and relate to Human Rights topics and issues. She is particularly fascinated by texts as mechanisms for empathy, and she hopes to produce and curate texts in ways that utilize this mechanism to achieve meaningful, cross-cultural understanding.

Elise Huff is a recent graduate from Southern Methodist University. During her time as an undergraduate, she was a recipient of SMU’s Engaged Learning Fellowship, conducting independent research on the intersection of nonverbal and verbal modes of communication and its impact on 1st and 2nd generation Germans and Mexicans in the United States. Recently, she interned for the Dallas Art Fair, as well as Site 131, a contemporary art gallery. She currently is enrolled in Harvard’s CopyrightX program, examining topics related to art law, as well as intellectual and cultural property. Elise plans to pursue a master’s degree in art history this upcoming fall, and her primary research interests include the use of legal documents in Conceptual art and the role of authorship in collaborative or performance-based works.

Adrienne Lichliter-Hines is a printmaking and paper artist and educator working in Dallas, Texas. She received her MFA from Clemson University in 2014 and has a Bachelors of Arts in art history and painting from Southern Methodist University. Her work has been shown throughout Texas and the United States as well as abroad in China, Japan, Egypt, Italy, and the UK. She has been an invited resident artist at The Kala Art Institute in Berkeley CA, 100 West in Corsicana TX, Artscape in Toronto, Canada, and Zygote Press in Cleveland OH. She is currently the Marketing and Programs Manager of The Cedars Union, a nonprofit art incubator in Dallas, TX, and the Advisory Board President of Corsicana Artists and Writers Residency. Adrienne maintains a modest studio practice exploring photographic textures and non-objective mark-making through lithography in an effort to challenge the hierarchy of commodified attention.

Gabriela Paiva de Toledo is a second-year Ph.D. student in the RASC/a: Rhetorics of Art, Space, and Culture at Southern Methodist University. She received her B.A. in History with an Art History minor from the University of Campinas (Brazil) in 2015 and her M.A. in Art History from the same institution in 2017. Currently, her interests lie in Contemporary Brazilian art and photography.

Sophia Salinas is a senior SMU undergraduate student working towards a BA of Art History and a BBA in General Business. She has focused her studies on modern and contemporary art with attention to feminist theories of agency, embodiment, and technology, and is currently completing a thesis on Cyberfeminist Art Practices. She is also the current AAMD Intern in Museum Education at the Meadows Museum.ABOUT

Curatorial Minds Lab is a bimonthly gathering (online/on-campus) of SMU alumni and current students interested in deepening their understanding of the historical development of curatorial practices and the study of contemporary art display theory/practice including exhibition typologies and curatorial models. In the framework of this program, history, theory, contextualization, organization, and execution of curatorial projects will be discussed, evaluated, and critiqued.

The Curatorial Minds Lab is a program designed by SMU Pollock Gallery Director, Sofia Bastidas Vivar in collaboration with Assistant Director of the Hamon Arts Library and Hawn Gallery curator, Beverly Mitchell. The space for this theorization and practice will be in the Hawn Gallery at the Hamon Arts Library, accompanied by materials and texts.

CML fellows will also moderate a series of online public talks given by curators established or emerging in their careers. Included in these series are Taylor Renee Aldridge, Sofia Casarín, Yina Jiménez Suriel, and May Makki. Dates for this series are March 17, April 7, April 28 and September 22 at 5:30 pm.

For more information please contact: abastidas@smu.edu

Extended date to December 18 for Michael Corris: Incidents on a Page, Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes

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Michael Corris, Retour à la Normale

Michael Corris
Incidents on a Page, Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes, 1976-2020
Extended to December 18
Hawn Gallery, Hamon Arts Library

The Hawn Gallery is pleased to extend this exhibition for one more week before the campus closure for the winter break on Monday, December 21.

SMU community hours (SMU I.D. required): 9 a.m.-9 p.m. Mon.-Thurs; 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Fri.; 12-5 p.m. Sat.; 2-9 p.m. Sun. Following Thanksgiving, Hamon’s hours change to Mon. – Fri. 8 am – 5 pm, closed weekends.

Public hours 12-5 p.m. After Thanksgiving by appointment during the weekdays. For appointments, please contact hawngallery@smu.edu.

SMU and all campus libraries require masks and six feet social distancing. Three people in the gallery at one time.

Continue reading “Extended date to December 18 for Michael Corris: Incidents on a Page, Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes”

Hawn Gallery presents Michael Corris: Incidents on a Page, Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes, 1976-2020

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Michael Corris, Incident on a Page 2
Michael Corris, Incident on a Page 2

Michael Corris
Incidents on a Page, Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes, 1976-2020
September 21 – December 11, 2020
Hawn Gallery, Hamon Arts Library

The Hawn Gallery is pleased to announce Incidents on a Page: Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes, 1976-2020. Michael Corris, SMU Professor Emeritus of Art, has been active as an artist since the early 1970s, first as a member of the collective Art & Language in New York, and later, as a founding editor of the publications The Fox and Red Herring. Subsequently, he began teaching art criticism and art history in England, and eventually came to Dallas as Chair of the Division of Art at SMU in 2009. His expansive practice is not easily distilled into distinct categories or media, but rather maintains a sustained engagement with and critical analysis of the conditions of production and dissemination of art. Over the course of his career Corris’s work has taken many forms, including but not limited to essayistic writing, graphic design, curation, public intervention, community activism and organization, and education, responding to the needs of a given circumstance or lived situation.   Continue reading “Hawn Gallery presents Michael Corris: Incidents on a Page, Dallas-Venice Dreamscapes, 1976-2020”

Allyson Packer: Sounding – now open until September 13th

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visitors in front of Packer exhibitAs the Hamon Arts Library opens up for the fall 2020 semester, the Hawn Gallery is very pleased to announce that the spring exhibition, Allyson Packer: Sounding, is also open for viewing until September 13. This exhibition, about which more can be read below, opened on February 7. Due to the campus closing in March, this exhibition did not continue its full run to March 29. Members of the SMU community holding an active ID to come into any of the SMU Libraries are now welcome to experience this exhibition. As throughout the University, staff at Hamon have also taken measures to create a safe and healthy environment in the building. All SMU visitors must wear a mask, remain six feet apart, and hand sanitizer is on site as well. Gallery occupancy is limited to three people at a time.

A virtual walkthrough of the exhibition can also be viewed on Glasstire from its April posting.

To read more about this exhibition, please see an Interview with artist, Allyson Packer, on Sounding at the Hawn Gallery, Hamon.

Fall 2020 exhibition hours: Monday, Aug. 24 – Friday, Aug. 28 – 8 am – 6 pm; closed Saturday, Aug. 29.  Beginning Sunday, Aug. 30 – 2 – 9 pm on Sundays; Monday – Thursday, 8 am – 9 pm; Friday, 8 am – 6 pm; and Saturday, 12 – 5 pm until September 13.

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Continue reading “Allyson Packer: Sounding – now open until September 13th”

Research in the archives: Texas Made Modern

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Spruce in Big Bend, c. 1935Since it opened in 1961, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art has always had a commitment to exploring the breadth and complexity of American creativity through its collections and exhibitions. Evaluating Texas art’s importance in relation to the museum’s collection and the larger canon of American art has been one of my focuses since 2013. Though I started to work on a potential exhibition on Texas artist Everett Spruce (1908–2002) that year, the museum world’s ever-changing nature redirected my attention to other urgent and pressing projects. Although it may not seem the case, scheduling exhibitions is like solving a Rubik’s cube—there are millions of combinations and only one solution. Changes to the permanent collection, timing and availability of an exhibition according to a lending museum’s guidelines, and the complexity of each installation (are there videos or special cabinetry needed? etc.) are only some of the factors affecting an exhibition’s timing. In 2019, all the colors aligned on each side of a Rubik’s cube for a summer 2020 exhibition of Spruce’s work. I had a shorter period than usual to curate the exhibition and write the catalogue for Texas Made Modern: The Art of Everett Spruce (August 18–November 1, 2020). Because many of Spruce’s works were available to see regionally in private collections, I thought my task would be much easier than I imagined. After meeting with the artist’s daughter, Alice Spruce Meriwether, who graciously shared the inventory she compiled of her father’s artwork, I discovered that Spruce had painted over 800 artworks during his lifetime, many of which are either lost or in unknown locations. Continue reading “Research in the archives: Texas Made Modern”