Past Exhibitions

Art into Art: Inspired Responses

This fall, the Spencer explores how the art in its collection inspires other expressions of creativity, with a variety of programming meant to stimulate important conversations about the creative process. Art into Art: Inspired Responses is a campus and community project inviting creative responses to works of art in the museum, and includes transformations of the Spencer's front entrance, foyer, and Central Court to reflect the theme of visual art inspiring other forms of creativity.

The Spencer thanks Sabatini Architects, Inc., for its corporate sponsorship of Art into Art.

The original inspiration for Art into Art was fairly straightforward: the idea that a work of art, as conceived and executed by an artist, is only part of the art experience. The other part is the response. What is a painting without a viewer, a poem without a reader or a musical performance without a listener? We often talk about the qualities of works of art, but what about the qualities of the responses? Can a response be as creative and inspired as the work of art that stimulates it?

Yes. And a prime example is a book recently published by the Spencer.

Conversations: Art into Poetry at the Spencer Museum of Art collects 27 poems by Elizabeth Schultz, all inspired by works in the Spencer's collection. The book, which includes an introductory essay by Susan Earle, the Spencer's Curator of European and American Art, pairs images of the artworks with Schultz's poems, and is available for $14.95 in the Museum Shop. Schultz's poems will be prominently featured next to the works that inspired them in the Spencer's galleries this fall. Conversations is made possible in part by the generous support of Colette and Jeff Bangert, Janet Hamburg, Carol and Del Shankel, Linda and David Stevens, Georgia and Keith Stevens, Peggy Sullivan, and Marjorie Swann and Bill Tsutsui.

Art into Art also intends to challenge the ways we traditionally expect to see art presented in a museum. In the Central Court, works spanning centuries of art history are hung, salon-style, unhinged from time- or geography-based divisions. This installation of objects from the permanent collection celebrates not only art itself, but what we as viewers bring to it.   The works have inspired poems, songs, dances, and scholarship. The unusual arrangement of paintings, photographs, prints, and sculpture challenges our traditional method of seeing. In combination the works invite comparisons to the presentation of 19 th -century salons, as objects span heights and depths that exceed our traditional gaze across gallery walls. Some works will rotate during the course of this exhibition, while others will stay in place.   Some objects on the wall may seem as comfortable as the face of an old friend, while others are initially unfamiliar. We present these objects as part of a continuum of engagement that includes your reactions and participation.

View programming, including events related to Art into Art: Inspired Responses

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Views of Vietnam

Views of Vietnam provides a starting point for reflecting on the complex history of Vietnam through works of art available in the Spencer Museum. The period of U.S. involvement in Vietnam is most fully represented in our collections and therefore makes up most of the exhibition, but also included are several ceramic pieces from around 1600, as well as work made since the conflict. The exhibition is also enhanced by several loans from the Wilcox Collection of the Spencer Research Library.

A group of propaganda watercolors by an artist working for the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) and the North Vietnamese Army provides perhaps the most uncommon view in the exhibition. The watercolors, on long-term loan to the museum, do not show combat scenes, but scenes of preparation for battle, life in the base camp, work on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, agricultural work, and possibly a scene of boat people fleeing Vietnam.

The exhibition will also include photographs by Larry Burrows, who provided powerful images of the war to Life magazine; prints by American artists active in the 1960s that reference the war, including Jasper Johns and James Rosenquist; camera work for an article in Esquire magazine featuring senior military staff who opposed the war; and photographs by Han Nguyen, who left Vietnam for the U.S., and Craig Barber, who returned there in the late 1990s to make stunning landscape photographs.

The exhibition will be accompanied by an installation of books about various aspects of the war in Vietnam, with an emphasis on books concerning the arts.

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Using the Past to Serve the Present in 20th-Century Chinese Painting

For China, the 20th century was an era of constant change. The imperial order of the Qing dynasty collapsed and the first Republic of China was established in 1912. The new Republic was soon subject to civil wars and the Second World War, before the Communist Party took over and founded of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, closing China to most of the world.   From 1966 to 1976, the "Cultural Revolution" sought to destroy what were perceived as "pernicious influences" from China's imperial past. In the 1970s, China gradually opened her gates again, finally establishing formal diplomatic relations with the U.S. in 1979. China quickly became "the" tourist destination of the 1980s.

Trained in traditional Chinese and Western methods, 20th-century Chinese artists responded in various ways to the continually shifting political landscape. The paintings in this gallery represent the response with the strongest ties to China's past. This genre of painting, known as "guohua," or "National style painting," uses traditional Chinese media, formats, and themes, and draws on the venerable literati painting tradition in emphasizing expressive brushwork.

While guohua artists took pride in preserving and reenergizing the literati tradition, their art was inherently political. This art form from the past lent its cultural prestige to social and political aspirations of the present. Once meant for scholars' studios, brush-and-ink painting moved into public arenas. Artists employed by the government after 1949 brushed tributes to the power and beauty of the motherland, the abundance promised by agricultural and industrial programs, and the joy of all nationalities under Communist rule. Ink painters produced grand works for meeting halls, airport waiting rooms, and hotel restaurants. Eventually, portable paintings sold to foreigners in government shops.

Most of the paintings in this exhibition date either from before the founding of the PRC in 1949 or after 1979, when China reopened to the world. The Spencer's collection was shaped in large part by Dr. Chu-tsing Li, Professor Emeritus of Chinese Art History at The University of Kansas. Dr. Li served as the museum's principal advisor in Chinese art from 1966 to 1991.

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Chairman Mao's Golden Mangoes

On August 5, 1968, two years into the chaos of China's Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao Zedong sent mangoes to the Worker's Propaganda Team during their standoff with the Red Guard occupying the campus of Qinghua University in Beijing. The Red Guard, a mass militia of youth established in 1966 and sanctioned by Mao himself, was then spinning out of control. Mao mobilized workers from factories in Beijing to bring the Red Guard into submission. The gift of the mangoes- exotic fruits presented to Mao by the foreign minister of Pakistan-signified that Mao was now siding with the worker-peasant class instead of the students; he was designating workers as the leading class in the Cultural Revolution.

An unexpected side effect of this benevolent yet highly political gesture was the elevation of the mango from fruit to a "religious" symbol. The last half of 1968 marked the height of Mao's personality cult, and the gift of golden mangoes inspired something close to a religious frenzy. The generous gesture from the god-like Chairman Mao inspired poetry and newspaper articles devoted to the golden mangoes bearing the good will of Mao. Workers lined up to see and sniff the mangoes in awe; when mangoes showed the inevitable signs of decay, they were boiled in huge pots of water, so each worker could share a spoonful of Mao's blessing. Even then, their veneration for the sacred object did not diminish: wax replicas were made to replace fresh mangoes, and the mango was used as a political/religious motif not only on the National Day Parade floats, but also on everyday utensils praising the kind regards of Chairman Mao.

The enthusiasm for mangoes as a demonstration of the worker-peasant class's support for Mao endured for about a year. After 1969, mangoes disappeared from the active symbolic repertoire of Chinese politics. Although the Cultural Revolution symbolism of the mangoes has been largely forgotten, its ephemeral significance is inscribed in the artifacts of the era.

Objects on display are loans from private collections.

The above text was adapted from
"Golden Mangoes of Pakistan-The Life Cycle of a Cultural Revolution Symbol," by Alfreda Murck, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing. Murck will lecture September 21 at 5 PM in the Spencer Auditorium, supported by the Franklin D. Murphy Lecture Fund. Murck's lecture and this installation are co-sponsored by the Spencer Museum of Art, the Kress Department of Art History & the Center for East Asian Studies.

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John Steuart Curry: Agrarian Allegories

This monographic exhibition presents work by noted Regionalist and Kansas native John Steuart Curry (1897-1946).   John Steuart Curry: Agrarian Allegories considers both the artist's working methods, and his creation of iconic, Midwestern characters in his development of a regional identity. The exhibition features sketches for projects such as the Topeka Statehouse murals, including designs for the Statehouse Rotunda that were never executed, and costume designs intended for an adaptation of Carl Sandburg's poem, "Prairie." These examples reveal Curry's use of symbols and archetypes such as the farmer, the tornado, and livestock to further his Midwestern pictorial narrative.   The exhibition draws primarily from the Spencer's permanent collection with additional loans from the Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University and the Lawrence Arts Center.   Invaluable assistance in documenting Carl Sandburg's "Prairie" on our walls was provided by Candi Baker, Ione Unruh, and Mike Manley.

Curry was born on a farm near the town of Dunavant (near Oskaloosa, in northeast Kansas) and spent his youth in Kansas before leaving for art school in Kansas City, Mo., and later, Chicago. He received major attention in 1931, when the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased Baptism in Kansas. In the 1930s, Curry, along with Thomas Hart Benton from Missouri and Grant Wood from Iowa, earned national acclaim for his Midwestern imagery. The popularity of Curry's work in New York contrasted sharply with its mixed reception in the Midwest, where some Kansans felt paintings of baptisms in cattle troughs and wild weather popularized only negative aspects of the Sunflower State. In 1937, Curry's exposure in Kansas increased when he earned a commission to paint the Topeka Statehouse murals. This project created such tension between Curry's vision of the state and that held by many Kansans that some of the murals were never completed, and those on view in Topeka today were never signed.

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Cabinets of Curiosity: Musing about Collections

Organized by Joseph Keehn, Loo Family Intern in Education, and Madeline Rislow, Mellon Foundation Intern in Prints & Drawings, under the curatorial supervision of Steve Goddard, senior curator of prints and drawings.

Beginning June 17 and continuing into fall, the Spencer Museum of Art will explore historical aspects of collecting in Cabinets of Curiosity: Musing about Collections. The exhibition examines the history of museums through the current holdings of several KU repositories:   the Spencer Museum of Art, the Spencer Research Library, and the Natural History Museum & Biodiversity Research Center.

Sixteenth- and the seventeenth-century European curiosity cabinets might be described as microcosmic reflections of the world's wonders.   Inspired by Renaissance ideas with an emphasis on remarkable examples of naturalia and artificialia (natural and human-made creations), these cabinets emphasized the rare, the marvelous and the virtuoso.   Cabinets of curiosities, often known by the German terms " kunst-und wunderkammern," or cabinets of art ( kunst ) and wonder ( wunder ), were encyclopedic in scope and aspired to form a "theater of knowledge."

Collections of curiosity became the catalyst for the eighteenth-century emergence of the modern museum. These more recent collections were also marked by a shift away from notions of theatricality and universality and toward empirical modes of classification generally associated with modern science. Specimens of the natural world and artifacts of cultural heritage often made their way into natural history and anthropology museums while objects classified as art were displayed and stored in art museums.

Cabinets of Curiosity considers these divided collections together and includes objects typically found in early cabinets with highlights from the Spencer Museum of Art's founding collection, which was donated to KU in 1917 by Sallie Cassie Thayer.   The broad and eclectic array of items assembled in Cabinets of Curiosity can also be used to examine the relationship between collecting and colonialism as well as to interrogate ongoing practices of collection and display. While essentially historical in nature, Cabinets of Curiosity offers an opportunity to reflect on the idea of the museum today, as well as to consider its possible future permutations.

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Summer in the Central Court

This summer in the Central Court, the Spencer brings the outside—in. Organized by Kate Meyer, curatorial assistant in the department of prints & drawings, this small selection from the permanent collection includes quilts inspired by the flora of summer, prints and photographs showcasing Midwestern harvest scenes, and a 15-foot-wide Japanese kite. Beat the heat and enjoy art inspired by four thematic categories: growth, patterns, entertainment and gatherings.

Artists and works that were on view in Summer in the Central Court are listed below by thematic section.

Summer Growth
Lisa Grossman, 86 Bends of the Kaw , 2004; Terry Evans Tractor and Combine, June 22, 1990; Thomas Hart Benton, Threshing, 1941; Thomas Willoughby Nason, Summer Storm , 1940; Grant Wood, Approaching Storm, 1940.

Summer Patterns
Rose Frances Good Kretsinger, Paradise Garden or The Garden quilt, 1946; Christina Hays Malcom, Sunflower quilt , 1884; Currier & Ives, Publisher, Fruits of the Garden , 1871; Anna Atkins, Robinia pseud-acacia America , circa 1851-1854; Louis Lozowick, Sunflowers, 1957; Denise Low and Linda Samson Talleur, Quiltmaker, 1984, Flower Garden quilt , 1984, from Quilting.

Summer Entertainment
Tal Streeter, Flying Red Line, 1972; Jeff Brouws, Twelve Drive-Ins I, 2005; Tom Huck, Playland: The Great Sharkburger Shortage of '95, 1999, from 2 Weeks in August: 14 Rural Absurdities; Dr. Harold Eugene Edgerton, Water Ballet from Underwater , mid-late 1900s; Joseph Judd Pennell, Jack Guddy, Baseball Parade, 1896.

Summer Gathering
Fairfield Porter, July, 1971; Earl Iversen, Kansas State Fair, 1977-1978; Tony Ray-Jones, Fourth of June, Eton, 1967; W. Eugene Smith, untitled , 1958, from Silver Lake; Weegee, Coney Island Beach, 4 p.m., July 28, 1940, circa 1940.

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Gordon Parks At Home and Abroad: A Small Selection

Presented in conjunction with the KU School of Journalism and Mass Communications honoring Gordon Parks with the 2006 William Allen White National Citation: On display are nine Parks photographs from the Spencer's collection, and also a portrait of Parks made in the late 1970s by Patricia DuBose Duncan.

Gordon Parks, who passed away March 7 at the age of 93, was born in Fort Scott, Kansas, but in a life that spanned ten decades he was in every way a citizen of the world--a Renaissance man known internationally for pursuing a wide array of interests and making art that reflected those experiences. Parks worked as a piano player, a busboy, and a basketball player. He painted, wrote poetry, published books, directed movies, and composed music. Parks was also a gifted photographer with a natural sense of composition and an eye for simple narratives that elicit broader themes. His stark and unblinking photographic portraits of life in the United States have helped to shape our national identity and have provided an uncompromising mirror for the American public. Parks also worked for Life magazine, which sent him around the globe as he continued to tackle issues of race, class, and status in our modern world.

This February, KU's William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications honored Parks with the William Allen White National Citation, presented annually since 1950 to journalists who exemplify the ideals of White (1868-1944), a nationally influential Kansas editor and publisher. Other notable recipients of the William Allen White National Citation have included James Reston, 1950; Walter Cronkite, 1969; Arthur O. Sulzberger, 1974; James J. Kilpatrick, 1979; Helen Thomas, 1986; Charles Kuralt, 1989; Bernard Shaw, 1994; Bob Woodward, 2000; Molly Ivins, 2001; and Cokie Roberts, 2002.

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Transformations

The spring exhibition in the Asia Gallery, organized by Mary M. Dusenbury, guest curator of Asian art, addresses the human drive to explore, discover and transform the world around us to meet our needs, to satisfy our curiosity, and to delight us. For instance, in the painting Pine Spirit, Chinese artist Wu Guanzhong looks both to the ancient Chinese tradition of shan-shui-hua and to abstract expressionism, transforming both into a highly individual and compelling vision of "mountains and rivers."

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Flowers, Dragons and Pine Trees: Asian Textiles in the Spencer Museum of Art

Stacked in boxes and accessible only by ladder, the Asian textile collection at the Spencer Museum was virtually hidden from public view for almost eighty years. Flowers, Dragons, & Pine Trees is the result of fifteen years of quiet work behind the scenes to research, clean, conserve, re-house, photograph, publish and exhibit this little known section of the museum's collections.

The exhibition is made possible by the generosity of the David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation, the Breidenthal-Snyder Foundation, Dave and Gunda Hiebert, the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Additional support provided by corporate sponsor The World Company. The Spencer also received a great deal of support for conserving, researching, photographing and publishing the collection. We are grateful to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Japan Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Blakemore Foundation. A complete catalogue of the Spencer's Asian textiles collection, authored by Mary M. Dusenbury, guest curator of Asian art and organizer of the Flowers, Dragons, & Pine Trees exhibition, was published in fall 2004 by Hudson Hills Press and is available for purchase in the Spencer's Museum Shop. The exhibition focuses on 90 textiles from India, Iran, China and Japan, including:

• Persian velvets and brocades Kashmir shawls Embroideries of northwest India and Pakistan Chinese court/official costume and Han and Manchu women's formal and informal dress Buddhist and Daoist costume and temple furnishings
• Japanese cotton and bast fiber costume, furnishings, and festival textiles

The core of the Asian textile collection was part of Sallie Casey Thayer's original 1917 gift to the University of Kansas of 7,500 objects of Western and Asian art--a gift that founded the KU art museum. Throughout the twentieth century, the Asian textile collection grew almost exclusively through occasional gifts--some magnificent, others modest--until the 1990s, when the museum actively began to seek out a few key objects. In Asia, textiles were important. Worth their weight in gold, luxury silks traversed the trade routes that linked East Asia with the Mediterranean, carrying technical knowledge and new design ideas within their structures. A venerated Buddhist abbot's robe was believed to incorporate his essence and, long after his death, was preserved as a sacred treasure by his followers. In northwest India, women embellished and protected their households and family with layers of embroidered textiles whose strong colors and vibrant patterns stood in sharp contrast to the surrounding desert. A lively interplay (and competition) between designers and craftsmen in Kashmir, France, and Great Britain transformed a simple man's sash into the opulent woman's Kashmir shawl that remained at the height of fashion for an astonishing 75 years, throughout most of the nineteenth century.

The Spencer's Asian textile collection represents great geographical breadth as well as diversity of function, technique, and patronage. The approximately 300 objects include court, merchant, military, theatrical, and folk costume, temple and household furnishings, and numerous discrete pieces of complex weaving, embroidery, and dyeing. The textiles range in date from the fifteenth to the late twentieth century. The largest number come from China, followed by Japan, the Indian subcontinent, Iran, Indonesia, Central and West Asia, and Korea.

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Embodiment

Recent discussions about the body and how it can convey our social and cultural identity make use of the concept of "embodiment."  Embodiment expresses the idea that the body and mind form a unity, in contrast to the notion that has prevailed in Europe and America ever since the writings of the seventeenth-century philosopher, René Descartes, that the body and mind form a duality. Works of art from different cultures that concern the body and its adornment offer valuable opportunities for discussing the evolving ideas of embodiment. The wide-ranging selection of objects in Embodiment was specifically chosen to provoke reflection about these ideas without necessarily suggesting conclusions.

Embodiment is presented in conjunction with a History of Art seminar, "Body Art and Embodiment," offered by Gitti Salami, assistant professor of art history. The students in this class are studying body arts of different cultures, paying special attention to the concept of embodiment as a tool for interrogating culture. The exhibition draws from the Spencer's holdings of photographs, prints and Asian art; the Wilcox Classical Collection; and the KU Anthropological Research and Cultural Collection's holdings of Native American, Mesoamerican, African, and New Guinean works.

Spencer Curator of Prints and Drawings Steve Goddard says the exhibition offers a small laboratory for thinking about the concept of embodiment, much as Professor Salami's goal for the seminar is to "wrap itself around the idea that attitudes towards the body and beingness are culturally determined, and that people's sense of who they are in a body is vastly different from one culture to another."

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The Sacred & the Secular: Buddhist Imagery in Religious & Popular Contexts

Buddhism originated in India in the fifth-century B.C.E., when Prince Siddhartha renounced his privileged lifestyle to discover the truth about existence. He came to believe that all existence is suffering, that desire causes suffering, to cease desire is to cease suffering, and to cease suffering one must follow the teachings of the dharma, or Buddhist law.   Buddhism teaches that our present world is an illusion, and that to break free from this illusion and the cycle of rebirth is to reach enlightenment and become a Buddha. From India, Buddhism spread eastward through Central Asia, China, Southeast Asia, Korea, and Japan, becoming one of the world's major religions.   This fall, an exhibition in the Spencer's Asian Gallery aims to illustrate how Buddhism is manifested in Asian art. Organized by Hillary Pedersen, last year's Carpenter Foundation Intern in Asian art and a KU doctoral candidate in art history, The Sacred & the Secular: Buddhist Imagery in Religious & Popular Contexts opens Oct. 4.

Most of the works selected for the exhibition were created after Buddhism had become well enough established that different schools of Buddhism had emerged--represented visually by very different artistic styles and practices. On view will be prints, paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, and Buddhist objects and texts from a variety of geographical sources, including China, Japan, and Tibet.   Some objects have been used in ritual and worship practices, while others incorporate Buddhist motifs and themes as decorative elements in secular objects. The incorporation of Buddhist imagery into non-sacred visual media illustrates an intersection between the sacred and secular realms. Pedersen says the exhibition is intended to provoke thoughts of how religious imagery is used, and about the possible definitions of religious art.

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Selecciones: Mexican Art from the Collection

Professor Emerita of English Elizabeth Schultz's recent gift to the museum of four works by Mexican artist Rafael Coronel forms the centerpiece for a small exhibition, Selecciones: Mexican Art from the Collection, on view in the Study Gallery from Nov. 12 through Jan. 8. Associated in the early 1960s with a group of artists known as Los Interioristas (The Insiders), Coronel's artworks from that period respond to the era's global tensions by acknowledging the importance of, and difficulties faced by, the individual in society. Here we present Coronel's paintings and drawings in visual dialogue with highlights from the Spencer's collection of twentieth-century Mexican works on paper.

Within the Study Gallery's intimate space, marked differences and affinities emerge among these works. Coronel's investigation of the individual contrasts with the art of his artistic predecessor José Guadalupe Posada, whose prints frequently emphasize the collective interests and needs of the Mexican people. At the same time, the links between Coronel's images and those by his contemporary Rufino Tamayo prove striking. Both artists contemplate the universal themes of death and spirituality. Collectively, these works span roughly sixty-five years of Mexican art. They prompt consideration not only of Coronel's distinctive contribution to this art, but also of the common sensibilities that can be found among works that share a national artistic heritage.

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