Announcement: Hillstrom Museum of Art hours during Spring Break
During the Spring Break of Gustavus Adolphus College (April 1-9, 2023), the Hillstrom Museum of Art will be open: Monday, April 3, 1-4 p.m.; Tuesday, Aprll 4, 1-4 p.m.; Wednesday, April 5, 1-4 p.m.; Thursday, April 6, 1-4 p.m. The Museum will resume regular hours (weekdays, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., and weekends, 1 to 5 p.m.) on Monday, April 10.
The Museum's current exhibits, Elizabeth Catlett in the Hillstrom Museum of Art, and Improvised Structures: Recent Sculptural Works by Nicolas Darcourt, will remain on view through Sunday, April 23. For additional information on these exhibits, please see below.
The Museum's next exhibit, the annual juried exhibit of works by graduation studio art majors, will be on view from Honors Day, Saturday, May 6 (with an Opening Reception that day, 4-6 p.m.) through Commencement, Saturday, May 27.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:
Two concurrent exhibits, Improvised Structures: Recent Sculptural Works by Nicolas Darcourt, and Elizabeth Catlett in the Hillstrom Museum of Art, will be on view at the Hillstrom Museum of Art from February 13 through April 23, 2023.
Nicolas Darcourt has taught ceramics in the Art and Art History Department of Gustavus Adolphus College since 2012, and he serves as the studio and visual arts programs manager for the department.
Darcourt’s ceramic works use press-molded objects and hand-built shapes to focus on a mix of architectural ornament, exposed layers of earth, engineered forms, monument, and manufactured byproduct. These coalesce into accumulations that express abstract notions of the confluence of memory, geography, and society. The works in Improvised Structures all date from 2020 or later, including works from this year. Among the works on display are wall reliefs, three-dimensional tableaux that combine multiple ceramic pieces, and garniture sets, for an examination, through repetition and rumination, of what the artist terms “the grand decorative object.”
An illustrated brochure for Improvised Structures is available free of charge at the exhibit. A pdf version of the catalogue is available on the Museum website at https://gustavus.edu/finearts/hillstrom/exhibitions.php, as is a link to a video walk-through tour of the exhibit that is being hosted on the College’s YouTube channel.
Most of the works on view in Improvised Structures are available for purchase directly from the artist. A price list can be requested from the Museum attendant.
The concurrent exhibit, Elizabeth Catlett in the Hillstrom Museum of Art, considers African American artist Catlett (1915-2012) through works recently acquired by the Hillstrom Museum of Art and through new poetry by exhibition collaborator Philip S Bryant, a faculty member in the African/African Diaspora Studies Program and the English Department of Gustavus Adolphus College.
Catlett’s color linocut I Am the Black Woman (1946-1947) is featured in the exhibit. In some ways the image is emblematic of the artist, considered by many to be the most significant Black female artist of her period. The early years of her long career were spent in the US until she moved to Mexico in 1946, where she lived the rest of her life. Catlett took her own culture as an African American woman as her primary subject matter, adding to it her adopted Mexican culture when she moved there, married Mexican artist Francisco Mora (1922-2002) and raised a family with him.
Catlett’s artworks and Bryant’s poetry are supplemented by paintings by Catlett’s contemporaries, African American artists Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) and Eldzier Cortor (1916-2015), lent by the Art Bridges Foundation.
Art Bridges is the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton, also founder of the renowned Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The mission of Art Bridges is to expand access to American art in all regions across the United States.
Art Bridges has also supplied a generous grant to produce a brochure for the exhibit (available to visitors at the Museum), to support outreach for the exhibition, and to support the visit to campus by Catlett scholar Melanie Herzog, who presented a lecture titled Elizabeth Catlett: Kinship. Herzog’s lecture was coupled with a reading of poetry by Philip S Bryant in a program held on Sunday, February 26, 4:00-5:30 p.m., Wallenberg Auditorium, Nobel Hall, Gustavus Adolphus College; this program will be available on the College's YouTube channel.
More information about the Hillstrom Museum of Art and its offerings can be found on its website at: https://gustavus.edu/finearts/hillstrom/.
Regular Museum hours are Monday through Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. and weekends from 1:00 to 5:00 p.m. All exhibitions and related programming are free and open to the public.