.fb-like span { overflow:visible !important; width:450px !important; margin-right:-200px; }             Social Justice and Civic Engagement On View Marcus Jansen: E Pluribus Unum What Women Want Art Encounters: Community or Chaos Storied Objects: Relics and Tales from the Thomas R. Baker Museum The Place as Metaphor: Collection Conversations  WINTER PARK, FL (DATE)—The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College announces […]" />
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The Cornell Fine Arts Museum At Rollins Announces Its Fall Season.

The Cornell Fine Arts Museum At Rollins Announces Its Fall Season.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Justice and Civic Engagement On View

Marcus Jansen: E Pluribus Unum

What Women Want

Art Encounters: Community or Chaos

Storied Objects: Relics and Tales from the Thomas R. Baker Museum

The Place as Metaphor: Collection Conversations

 WINTER PARK, FL (DATE)—The Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College announces its Fall season, which focuses on social justice, civic engagement, and activism through five timely exhibitions and a variety of programs that speak to current events and examine them in their historical context.

Cornell Fine Arts Museum is pleased to present the first solo museum exhibition of Marcus Jansen in the United States. Based in Bronx, New York, and Fort Myers, Florida, Jansen creates powerful, monumental canvases that address poignant social and political themes. Using an arresting visual language characterized by colorful and expressive brushwork, and references to contemporary and historical issues, Jansen invites viewers to reflect on the human condition.

Dynamic and gestural, these images are visual metaphors for the chaotic landscapes Jansen encountered as a member of the US Armed Forces while deployed in conflict zones during Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm, among others. For him, the power of art is personal: “Painting was always a visual, mental, and intellectual combat to me, an exercise that could lead to closure.” Through irony, familiar tropes, and unexpected juxtapositions, Jansen’s visual explorations of these terrains and the characters that inhabit them signal the nuanced and painful reality of our time. Created in the last 15 years, the selection of works on view in the exhibition encourages us to reimagine the meaning of the politically charged phrase E pluribus unum—out of many, one—against the backdrop of the general election, the devastating effects of a pandemic, and massive protests demanding racial justice and equality. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

This exhibition is organized by the Cornell Fine Arts Museum and is made possible, in part, through the General Exhibition Fund and the Rachel and Kenneth Murrah Exhibition Fund. Programming is funded in part by Orange County Government through the Arts & Cultural Affairs Program. Additional support comes from the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, The Florida Council on Arts and Culture. The Cornell Fine Arts Museum is generously funded in part, by Rollins College, Winter Park, FL.

What do Women Want?  Political, economic, social, and cultural equality. This year, 2020, marks the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States and the amendment that granted women the right to vote. Though a monumental moment in history, activists around the world since then have worked to enact social reform and equal opportunity for all. A range of women’s movements evolved over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries to unveil, confront, and challenge the private and public faces of sexism, commonly building on the notion the “personal is political.” The art world continuously echoes and shapes the progression of these movements through limitless artistic expression. Artists have often favored photography as an effective medium to record and redefine women’s history. Some photographers further challenge gender conventions by turning the camera on themselves as a statement of power. In doing so, women are no longer the object of the composition but rather, become the subject.

 

This exhibition, drawn from the Cornell Fine Arts Museum’s Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, features self-portraits by artists Carrie Mae Weems, Shirin Neshat, Zanele Muholi, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Dana Hoey. These artists engage deeply with history and the present to disrupt the established gender norms and construct new definitions of women in society.

 

 

Art Encounters: Community or Chaos

Amidst recent worldwide protests against racial discrimination and police brutality sparked by the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis this past May, the works on view in this exhibition take on renewed meaning and urgency. In the last decade we have seen violence against African American men and women; the killings of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and so many others, demand that as a society we reexamine race relations. This moment asks us to reconsider our role in society, acknowledge the hard work we need to do, and do it together, to effect just and positive change.

Art Encounters: Community or Chaos presents a selection of works from CFAM’s collection by artists Hank Willis Thomas, Patrick Martinez, Sam Durant, Kota Ezawa, Pedro Reyes, and Andrea Bowers, whose practices are deeply informed by current and historical socio-political events. Flanked by Reyes’ The Protestors and Bowers’ Community of Chaos, the works on view reinforce the power of language and visual gestures to protest and denounce injustice through statements that resonate with our current context while grounded in impactful historical moments. Together, with our campus and our community, we affirm the need to acknowledge those who have been rendered invisible, silenced, overlooked, and killed because of their ethnic background or the color of their skin, and vow to create a space for meaningful dialogue, listening, inclusion, representation and participation.

 

Storied Objects: Relics and Tales from the Thomas R. Baker Museum

After a devastating fire destroyed the original Rollins Museum in 1909, the college made a broad public appeal via letters, posters, and newspaper ads for donations of “museum quality” specimens (of any type), in hopes that the museum could eventually be reestablished. Individuals and institutions across the country responded generously, and by 1920 almost 10,000 objects of cultural, historical, and natural significance had been received. These donations would form the nucleus of what came to be called the Thomas R. Baker Museum of Natural History, a campus and community fixture until its closure in the 1970s.

 

This exhibition relates the story of the eclectic Baker Museum collection by highlighting the life histories or “biographies” of a selection of its cultural artifacts, which collectively span five continents and more than 5,000 years of the human past. The disparate origins and meandering trajectories of these individual works help to illuminate a remarkable entanglement of historical events, individuals, and artifacts whose paths intersected at Rollins during the first half of the 20th century. Storied Objects: Relics and Tales of the Thomas R. Baker Museum is the culmination of a collaboration between Zackary I. Gilmore, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Archaeology at Rollins College, Robert Vander Poppen., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Classical Art & Archaeology, and students from their Public Archaeology, Museum Studies Practicum, and Digital Methods in Archaeology courses.   

The Place as Metaphor: Collection Conversations

Ideas of place can range from a physical location or imagined setting, to a state of mind or a constructed memory of an experience. Visual representations of place invite reflections on identity, faith, and daily life. How do our surroundings affect the way we see ourselves? Are we defined by the land we inhabit? How do politics or religion shape our ideas of certain parts of the world?

Featuring a selection of collection favorites and new acquisitions, this exhibition examines the multiple meanings of place through diverse representations across time and region. Two new works that address environmental concerns, Mel Chin’s L’artique Est Paris, a video piece from 2015, and Hellen van Meene’s photographic portrait of climate change activist, Greta Thunberg (2019), encourage viewers to reflect on our interactions with the natural world.  Connections between the contemporary works and the historical pieces on view transcend mere thematic parallels and suggest a more nuanced approach to the concept of place. This exhibition is organized by the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. Support for this exhibition comes from the Director’s Circle and the General Exhibition Fund of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. Additional support comes from the State of Florida, Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, and the Florida Council on Arts and Culture. The Cornell Fine Arts Museum is generously funded, in part, by Rollins College, Winter Park, FL.

RELATED PROGRAMMING

Wednesday, September 9 | 12 p.m.

Virtual Town Hall: The Carceral Landscape: Art as Activism

Police brutality and mass incarceration are among the most crucial legal and social issues of our time and their study illuminates the ways in which “We the People” conceive of ourselves and our societal responsibilities. Art is an important vehicle for civic participation and this town hall initiates a dialog on art and mass incarceration between Omari Booker, an artist participating in the upcoming NEA-sponsored exhibition Illuminating the Darkness: Our Carceral Landscape, at the UCF Art Gallery, Gisela Carbonell, Curator at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, and Keri Watson, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Central Florida. This Town Hall is a UCF and Rollins College collaboration in partnership with For Freedoms.

 

Tuesday, September 22 | 6 p.m. 

Arte y Café con la Curadora: Art Encounters: Community or Chaos

Join CFAM curator Gisela Carbonell for a tour of this new installation that focuses on works that address protest and social justice.

Acompaña a la curadora Gisela Carbonell en un recorrido por esta nueva exhibición que aborda el tema de las protestas y la justicia social.

 Tuesday, September 29 | 6 p.m.

ARTIST TALK: Antonio Martorell: Puerto Rican Art Here and There During the Pandemic

Join Puerto Rican artist Antonio Martorell and CFAM Curator Gisela Carbonell for a lively conversation about how artists on the island and the diaspora are addressing the socio-cultural impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Tuesday, October 6 | 6 p.m. 

EXHIBITION TOUR Storied Objects: Relics and Tales from the Thomas R. Baker Museum

Join Professors Zack Gilmore and Robert Vander Poppen, guest curators of this exhibition on a tour to discover the stories of the cultural artifacts on view and the original Rollins Museum dating back to 1909.

Tuesday, October 13 | 6 p.m. 

Arte y Café con la Curadora:  What Women Want

Join CFAM curator Gisela Carbonell on a guided tour of this exhibition that marks the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States.

Acompaña a la curadora Gisela Carbonell en un recorrido por esta nueva exhibición que marca el centenario del derecho al voto para las mujeres en los Estados Unidos.

Tuesday, October 27 | 6 p.m.

ARTIST TALK: Marcus Jansen: E Pluribus Unum

Join artist Marcus Jansen and CFAM Curator Gisela Carbonell for an in-depth conversation about the artist’s trajectory and the powerful messages in the works included in this exhibition.

Photo by Krista Kowalczyk

Friday, November 6 | 11:00 a.m. 

TOUR: Art Encounters: Community or Chaos

Join Isaac Gorres ‘21, Fred Hicks Curatorial Fellow, on a guided tour of this exhibition, which explores themes of social justice, protest, and freedom of speech.

Tuesday, November 17 | 6 p.m.

Arte y Café con la Curadora: Marcus Jansen: E Pluribus Unum
Join curator Gisela Carbonell on a guided tour of this new exhibition which focuses on exploring socio-political themes and structures of power.

Acompaña a la curadora Gisela Carbonell en un recorrido por esta exhibición la cual explora temas sociopolíticos y estructuras de poder.

Friday, November 20 | 11:00 a.m.

TOUR: What Women Want

Join Isaac Gorres ‘21, Fred Hicks Curatorial Fellow on a guided tour of this exhibition which celebrates the 100-year anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States.

Friday, December 4 | 11:00 a.m.

EXHIBITION TOUR: Marcus Jansen: E Pluribus Unum

Join us for an in-depth tour of this exhibition. We will explore works that address structures of power, surveillance, and politics and will examine these images in the current context.

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