#fairfieldu

We’ve had a very exciting summer at the museum! As a result of our recent AAM Museum Accreditation, this was the first summer that we had professional guards and were thus able to be open through July. Our first two summer exhibitions proved very popular with our visitors, especially Peter Anton: Just Desserts!

We welcomed 5,732 visitors to our Peter Anton and Suzanne Chamlin exhibitions in the 10 weeks between graduation and the close of the exhibitions.

We broke our one-day attendance record with over 850 visitors (serving free frozen treats at an ice cream social that day probably didn’t hurt)!

Recently we've been busy repainting the walls, planning new programs, preparing our two fall exhibitions, and installing a new group of outdoor sculpture. We can't wait to welcome you all back to campus.

The Museum is all about works on paper this fall! A pair of exhibitions will introduce you and our other visitors to a broad range of works on paper, from Old Master prints in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries to prints by contemporary BIPOC artists in the Walsh Gallery. We hope you will check out both exhibitions and all of the programs on offer.

The first exhibition, opening in the Museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries on September 12 and on view through December 21st, is Ink and Time: European Prints from the Wetmore Collection. Curated by Michelle DiMarzo, PhD (Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture), the exhibition presents a group of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings from the late 15th through late 18th centuries, including Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Canaletto. From familiar favorites like Dürer’s Adam and Eve and Rembrandt’s Three Trees to hidden gems like the gold-sprinkled surface of Maria Katharina Prestel’s Virtue Overcoming Vice, the show explores more than three centuries of artistic innovation on paper.

The works are part of a collection formed by Fanny S. Wetmore in the first decades of the 20th century and bequeathed to Connecticut College in 1930. This exhibition is the second in the Museum’s history to have been co-curated with Fairfield University students and has been supported by generous funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

The second exhibition, on view in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts, is Sacred Space: A Brandywine Workshop and Archives Print Exhibition. This exhibition opens on September 20th and also runs through December 21st. Sacred Space, organized by guest curator Juanita Sunday, draws on the rich history of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, founded in Philadelphia in 1972 by artist Allan Edmunds. As of 2022, the Museum is home to a Brandywine “satellite collection” – the only such collection in Connecticut. This exhibition features works from the Museum’s own collection as well as loans from Brandywine itself.

Sacred Space encourages a deep exploration of spiritual connection, inviting viewers to reflect on the ancestral wisdom and memory passed down through generations. The exhibition serves as a portal into the interconnected realms of spirituality, time, space, memory, and culture. The artists pay homage to their forebears, drawing upon cultural traditions, rituals, and sacred practices to honor and preserve, as well as question, the invaluable heritage that shapes our identities.

In addition to the works from the Brandywine Collection, the exhibition will also feature local artists whose works are responding to the themes in Sacred Space. Artists invited by curator Juanita Sunday include Aisha Nailah, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, Arvia Walker, and Rebecca Fowke. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of corporate sponsor M & T Bank/Wilmington Trust.

A broad slate of programming complements both of these exhibitions, from hands-on workshops to rich public lectures, and can be explored on the museum’s website calendar at www.fairfield.edu/museum.

When you come to visit, or if you can join us for the Ink & Time festivities on September 26th, please make sure to seek out and enjoy Lauren Booth's fantastic bronze Tulip Family which has been installed on the Bellarmine Hall lawn, just below the building, on the slope heading down towards the Dolan School of Business.

Artfully yours, Carey

Captions:

Rembrandt van Rijn, Three Trees, 1643, etching, drypoint, and burin. Lent by Connecticut College.

Maria Katharina Prestel after Jacopo Ligozzi, The Triumph of Truth over Envy, 1780, etching and aquatint in brown and ochre ink, touched with gold leaf. Lent by Connecticut College.

Mikel Elam, Veil, 2019, offset lithograph, screenprint. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.13) © Mikel Elam

James Phillips, Untitled II, 1994, offset lithograph. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.33) © James Phillip

Ibrahim Miranda, El Túnel, 1999, offset lithograph. Lent by the Brandywine Workshop & Archives © Ibrahim Miranda

It has been an exceptionally busy season at the Museum! It has been a privilege for us to present the landmark exhibition In Real Times. Arthur Szyk: Artist & Soldier for Human Rights this fall. Since the exhibition opened on September 28, we have:

Offered free admission to over 3,700 visitors

Hosted more than 70 free online and in-person Szyk-related events, including exhibition tours led by the Director, the Exhibition Coordinator, our Educators, and a fantastic corps of community volunteers, which have been attended by over 2,000 people;

Received 20,000+ YouTube views of the Szyk video tour and recorded programs.

The Season of Giving is upon us, and we need your support to continue this good work!

The Museum operates on a modest annual budget, and exhibitions like the Szyk show are very expensive to produce. We depend on the contributions of generous donors like you to keep our museum offerings free and accessible both in person and online, in both English and Spanish.

If you participated in one of our numerous events this fall, enjoyed our virtual programs, or simply believe in the power of the arts in our community, will you please make a gift today to help enhance our exhibitions, ensure our unwavering commitment to excellence, and continue to inspire young minds?

Please take a minute and DONATE now.

Museum Accreditation News: Last week we had the privilege of hosting John Wetenhall, Director of the George Washington University Museum of Art, and The Textile Museum and Megan McAdow, Director of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum at Saginaw Valley State University. They spent two days with us on campus as our Site Reviewers for the American Alliance of Museums Accreditation process. They met with University students, faculty, staff, alumni, members of our Collections Committee, and of the University Board of Trustees, as well as foundation funders, community collaborators, and other Fairfield County arts and culture professionals. Their primary role was to confirm that all of the information that we had shared in our Self-Study was correct. They will write a report based on their findings which will be submitted to the AAM Accreditation Committee at their February 2024 meeting where they will vote on whether to grant us accreditation. We will certainly let you know!

Upcoming Winter 2024 Exhibitions: We are very excited about the two exhibitions we are opening in late January/early February, both of which focus on environmental and climate-related themes. In the Walsh Gallery, we are presenting Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp. Understood as one of the early pioneers in the field of ecological art activism, the artist, activist and thought-leader Christy Rupp has an international reputation. Streaming will feature a survey of Rupp’s wall installations and free-standing sculpture created with detritus gathered from the waste stream, which chronicle the ongoing tension between natural systems and the environment in transition, and call our attention to our interconnectedness with non-humans and habitat. Informed by science and the historical representation of natural history, the artwork in this exhibition examines the way we frame our opinions of nature, using irony and wit to represent the human impact on our natural habitat.

In the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, we will present Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica. This interdisciplinary exhibition includes photography and sculpture made from 3D scans of ice and rock formations, inspired and informed by Glazer’s experiences as a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. It also includes an audio tour which takes the visitor on a series of “walks” through the Antarctic landscape, narrated by the artist.

Please come see the Szyk exhibition before it closes if you have not yet had a chance to see it – it truly is a remarkable and timely collection of works. It is only open through December 16th! Keep in mind that thanks to a recent generous grant from the Art Bridges Foundation, we are now open for extended hours on Thursdays until 8pm.

Wishing you and yours a very happy Holiday season.

Artfully yours, Carey

Spring has sprung, and we have a new exhibition opening this Thursday in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries to celebrate the new season! In Their Element(s): Women Artists Across Media is a landmark exhibition that is the 1st in the museum's history to have been solo-curated by a student, Phoebe Charpentier '23, the 1st to feature recent acquisitions to the collection, and one that marks our 1st collaboration with the Westport Town Permanent Art Collection (WestPAC) which kindly lent 7 artworks.

I am particularly proud of this exhibition because it reflects some of the work we have accomplished during my tenure as museum director in terms of diversifying the collection (both through donations and through purchases from the Black Art Fund, which we created in 2020). In Their Element(s) is quite truly a show of recent acquisitions, as all of the works in this exhibition were donated or purchased since I became the director in 2019. Our student curator chose to focus on work by women artists, and we now have over 360 works by women in the collection from which she was able to choose. We acquired 42 works by women just in the last year! Work by women artists now makes up about 13% of our collection of over 2600 objects – an improvement from where we started, at less than 10%, but we know we still have a long way to go.

You may wonder how we acquire artworks for the museum, so I thought I would take this opportunity to provide some brief insight into the process. As a young museum, just in our 13th year, we do not yet have an acquisitions budget or fund, except for the small Black Art Fund, which we have used to purchase 34 works to date (of which 15 are by women). All other artworks acquired by the Museum come to us as donations or bequests through planned giving; most are solicited, but some come unsolicited from a variety of sources including University alumni, local collectors, artists and dealers. Solicited gifts are specific artworks that we ask people if they would consider gifting to the museum – these are objects that we know will fit into our collecting goals and plans. Some of these sources include Museum Exchange, artist foundations and estates, living artists, and collectors with whom we have close relationships. All donations (accessions) of artwork to the museum's collection must be approved first by me and then by the Museum's Collections Committee to ensure that they meet all of our Collections Plan criteria. Our Collections Committee is comprised of collectors, artists, and museum and gallery professionals, many of who are alumni.

As a young academic art museum, we are committed to assembling a collection that is broadly diverse and representative of the lived experience of the many communities that use our museum. As we continue to thoughtfully grow our collection, we increase the opportunities for object-centered learning, both in the study of individual artworks, in class-specific sessions for undergraduates and Art in Focus session in the galleries led by our Curator of Education and Academic Engagement, and in exhibitions such as this one. I hope that if you have a museum-quality artwork that would augment our collection you will consider donating it or making a bequest to the museum so that it can become a part of our teaching mission.

I would like to end with a quick preview of our fall 2023 exhibition. Both of our galleries will be dedicated to the work of Polish Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), in a remarkable exhibition created by the Magnes Collection for Jewish Art and Culture, at UC Berkeley, and now on view at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. At Fairfield, Dr. Philip Eliasoph is the exhibition coordinator, and will be presenting the opening night lecture. I know it seems far away, but we are hard at work readying a fantastic experience for you that will open in late September, with lots of exciting programming. Please take the time to read about it on the exhibition website.

The Women's Rights Are Human Rights international poster exhibition was extended through July 1, so also please don't miss the chance to see it in the Walsh Gallery, if you have not already done so.

Wishing you a lovely art-filled spring. I hope to see you in the galleries.

Artfully yours, Carey