Announcement: Hillstrom Museum of Art Exhibitions
Give a gift to Hillstrom Museum of Art
The Hillstrom Museum of Art currently has on view three concurrent exhibitions: Voices: Contemporary Ceramic Art from Sweden; ENNESBO (multi-media installation by artist Sandra Binion); and FOCUS IN/ON: Henry Varnum Poor's Autumn Still Life. These exhibits will remain on view through November 7, 2010. A public reception will be held during the Nobel Conference, on Tuesday, October 5, 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibitions, reception, and related talk (listed below) are free and open to the public.
Voices: Contemporary Ceramic Art from Sweden features ten artists who are leading proponents of the dynamism and originality of contemporary ceramic art in Sweden. Their work redefines ceramics as an art form used for freedom of expression, no longer as objects designed primarily for function. The artists, chosen for the exhibition by Inger Molin, a prominent figure in contemporary Swedish ceramic art who has owned and operated Galleri IngerMolin in Stockholm since 1998, include Frida Fjellman, Renata Francescon, Eva Hild, Pontus Lindvall, M??rten Medbo, AnnaSofia M????g, Gustaf Nordenski??ld, Kjell Rylander, Per B Sundberg, and Kennet Williamsson. Voices was developed by the Swedish Institute, Stockholm, and was organized for tour by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC. The exhibition was previously shown at European venues including Hamburg, Paris, and Ghent, and in a U.S. tour including the House of Sweden/Swedish Embassy in Washington, D.C., the Yellowstone Art Museum in Billings, Montana, and the Dubuque (Iowa) Museum of Art.
In conjunction with Voices, Nicole Roberts Hoiland, who teaches ceramics in the College's Department of Art and Art History, will present a public gallery talk in the exhibition space, at noon on Thursday, October 14, 2010. The Voices exhibition is accompanied by a cloth-bound catalogue, on sale at the Museum, and by an illustrated brochure available free of charge to visitors.
In the exhibition ENNESBO, artist Sandra Binion offers, through the use of various media including multi-channel video installation, surround sound, photographs, paintings, and wallpaper, a unique interpretation of a humble but richly emblematic place. Ennesbo is a small farming settlement in rural southern Sweden where the artist's family has lived and worked for over 300 years, and from which her great-grandmother emigrated to the U.S. in 1896. The artist was drawn to the family farm in an effort to delve into her personal, familial, and cultural roots, and through the richness of her time spent there, it became a locus for investigating broader issues of one's sense of place, the effects of landscape on individual sensibility, and the transmission of cultural values across history.
Binion's exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, available for purchase at the Museum.
FOCUS IN/ON: Henry Varnum Poor's Autumn Still Life will consider a still life painting by prominent American painter and ceramicist Henry Varnum Poor (1887-1970), in another of the Museum's FOCUS IN/ON projects, in which a single work from the Hillstrom Collection is analyzed in depth in collaboration with a colleague from across the Gustavus Adolphus College curriculum. An essay co-written by Lisa Heldke, Professor of Philosophy and Raymond and Florence Sponberg Chair in Ethics, and Museum Director Donald Myers, will consider Poor and his career, and the still life elements in the painting, tying it to contemporary movements in locally grown and organic food. This exhibit is presented in conjunction with the College's 2010 Nobel Conference, Making Food Good (October 5-6, 2010). Heldke, a philosopher of food, is the faculty coordinator for this year's Conference, and she is co-editor of Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research.
On Saturday, September 25, these three exhibitions will be featured as part of the Smithsonian Magazine's 6th Annual Museum Day. Further details on this nation-wide event can be found on the web at: http://microsite.smithsonianmag.com/museumday/.
The Museum's regular hours are weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and weekends, 1 to 5 p.m. Additional information can be found on the Museum's website at www.gustavus.edu/finearts/hill