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Direct from the Director Late Summer 2024

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

Lauren Booth, The Tulip Family: Mama Tulip, Papa Tulip and Child Tulip, 2017-2023, Bronze. On loan from the artist. © Lauren Booth

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Direct from the Director Late Fall 2023

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

Captions: Christy Rupp, Petroplankton, 2019-2021. Collected single use plastics. Courtesy of the artist. Helen Glazer, Cloudburst, Erebus Ice Tongue Cave, Antarctica, 2015/2017; photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Direct from the Director Spring 2023

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

Captions: Lucy Sallick, Studio Floor Still Life #4, 1975. Oil on canvas. Lent by Westport Public Art Collections, 530. Bicentennial Trust for Westport Art, 1976-1978. © Lucy Sallick Sonya Clark, Afro Blue Matter, 2017. Offset lithograph on paper. Edition 38/70. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.10) © Sonya Clark Miriam Schapiro, Shrine, 1962. Oil on canvas. Gift of Charles P. Regensberg, 1991. (2022.36.01) © 2023 Estate of Miriam Schapiro/ Artist's Rights Society (ARS), New York Arthur Szyk, Thomas Jefferson's Oath, watercolor, gouache, ink and colored pencil on board. Courtesy of Taube Family Arthur Szyk Collection, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, UC Berkeley Nancy Hom, Catalina’s World, 2011 © Nancy Hom

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We're Back! A New Season of Exhibitions and Programs!

Direct from the Director - Fall 2022

I look forward to welcoming you back into the museum's galleries this fall! We have two exciting special exhibitions to share with you which have been years in the making, as well as a wonderful array of complementary programs.

In the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, you will find a milestone exhibition of Renaissance paintings: focused on representations of women in paintings with sacred subject matter, it is the first ever co-curated by a seminar of Fairfield University undergraduate students, as well as our first Old Master loan exhibition since The Holy Name, the Art of the Gesu: Bernini and his Age in 2018. On view are paintings loaned from museums across the country, including five spectacular works lent by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Michelle DiMarzo, PhD, the exhibition curator/professor of the seminar, will be offering a few guided tours of the exhibition (register quickly, as they will fill up fast!) We also have distinguished speakers coming to talk about "Living with Art in Renaissance Italy," "A Mother's Touch: The Agency of Mary in Renaissance Art," and "Conserving Old Masters: The Kress Program in Paintings Conservation."

Also on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, in the rear gallery, is a collaborative exhibition celebrating the interiors of Roman churches. Entitled Specimens and Reflections, this exhibition includes digitally manipulated photographic panoramas of the interiors of churches by Claudia Esslinger (Professor of Art, Kenyon College) accompanied by the poetry of Royal Rhodes ‘68 (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Kenyon College) in a unique exploration of the intersection of word and image.

Opening on September 23rd (with a reception featuring Cuban jazz by the Cocomama Trio and mojitos on Saturday, September 24th) is Gladys Triana - A Path to Enlightenment: 1971-1921 / Beyond Exile. This exhibition marks our first collaboration with a fellow academic art museum, the Art Museum, University of Saint Joseph, to provide a two-venue survey of an artist’s work. Having the additional space of a second venue is allowing us to present close to 100 works created by the Cuban-born, New York-based Triana. It is exciting to have the opportunity to place Triana’s artworks in revealing dialogue with one another, and to offer overdue critical attention to her artistic practice in all of the many media in which she has worked in the course of her long and distinguished career.

Highlights of the Gladys Triana programming include a poetry reading by her friend, the distinguished Cuban-born poet Maya Islas, and a lecture by the faculty liaison for the exhibition, Silvia Marsans-Sakly, PhD, "Conceived in Revolution: Cuba's Long Freedom Struggle."

We have an array of museum experiences lined up this fall, waiting to be enjoyed by loyal enthusiasts, or to be experienced for the first time! These include Meditation and Mindfulness sessions with Jackie DeLise (both in-person in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Virtual), monthly Family Days, and regular Art in Focus sessions with Michelle DiMarzo (close looking in the galleries - both in person and virtual).

We hope there truly is something to interest each and every one of you at the museum this fall! I look forward to seeing you in the galleries one day soon.

With warm regards, Carey Captions: Installation view, Out of the Kress Vaults: Women in Sacred Renaissance Painting, in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. Claudia Esslinger, Santa Maria ad Martyres, Pantheon, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Gladys Triana, Evolution III, 2014, C-Print. Courtesy of the artist. Gladys Triana, Shipwreck, 1991, Oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.

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Direct from the Director Winter 2022

Dear Friend,

I would like to wish a very happy, joyful, and art-filled new year to you, and send a special thank you to those of you who gave so generously to the museum's recent annual appeal. For those of you who have not yet had a chance to give, we would welcome your support at any time – you can easily give online through our website. It is with the support of donors like all of you that our small but mighty institution is able to achieve the high level of excellence we strive for in all of our exhibitions, educational initiatives, and programs. Your donations allow us to continue to keep everything that we do free of charge, including making almost every one of our spring programs available in a hybrid form – you can join our offerings in person, streaming from the comfort of your home via thequicklive.com, or recorded at a later date on our YouTube channel.

This spring semester, we are presenting four exhibitions in the museum’s galleries and one new outdoor sculpture installation. In the Walsh Gallery, we will present two exhibitions focusing on contemporary Chinese art: ink/stone and SEEING IS BELIEVING: CROSSINGS AND TRANSPOSITIONS, PART II (January 21-March 5). We hope you will join us on January 20th for the opening night lecture with Ive Covaci, PhD, curator of ink/stone as she highlights artworks and themes in the exhibition. She will be followed by Professor Jo Yarrington who will introduce a short film featuring a conversation between her and the five Chinese artists whose work comprises SEEING IS BELIEVING and speaks about how this exhibition came to fruition.

Bingyi (Chinese, b. 1975) The Tree of the Invisible, 2018, ink on paper. Lent by Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts, Gift of Adam Sokol, 2018.19. Photograph by Laura Shea.

After the opening talks, join us for a reception and first look at the exhibitions – ink/stone will feature some 15 contemporary Chinese paintings and works on paper, presented together with stone sculpture, including a scholar’s rock. By showing late 20th and 21st century works inspired by traditional Chinese artistic subjects of rocks and mountains, ink/stone will investigate how contemporary artists deploy, evoke and transform this motif, using a range of media from ink on paper to oil on canvas. SEEING IS BELIEVING, features works in a variety of media by He Jiancheng, Xiao Yao Ning, Luo Biwu, Zuo Zeng Yao and Zhang Zeng Min. Professor Yarrington travelled to China in 2016 with four other American artists, where they presented Part I of this international exchange.

Luo Biwu (Chinese, b. 1964) Landscape in Bag No. 3, 2021, silkscreen print. Courtesy of the artist.

On January 27th, we hope you will join us again for the opening of Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility (January 28-June 18), featuring the jazz of Grammy award winning saxophonist Patience Higgins and a book signing for Cowans' newest book of photography. The exhibition on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries will explore how Adger Cowans uses photography as a vehicle to articulate the beauty within the human condition and the world in which we live. It will feature over fifty works from across Cowan’s illustrious career as a photographer of portraiture, landscape, and film.

Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936) Egg Nude, 1958, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Finally, to give you something to look forward to during these cold days of winter, as we dream about summer, the beach, and leaves back on the trees, 13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver’s Connecticut Photographs will be our final spring exhibition, opening on March 25, in the Walsh Gallery. Photographer and Photo League member Larry Silver moved to Westport, CT in 1973 and with his camera, began exploring its regional environs, and pushing the boundaries of what landscape is. This exhibition, curated by Leslie K. Brown, PhD, will bring together over 40 years of Silver's work made of and in Connecticut.

Larry Silver (American, b. 1934) Sitting at Water’s Edge, Sherwood Island, Westport, Connecticut, 2014, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Now on view on the Bellarmine Hall lawn, through next fall, are four fantastic, newly installed sculptures by environmental artist Alan Sonfist depicting leaves. The work is entitled, The Endangered Species of New England. Please look for the works as you drive on campus, and look forward to a series of programs around these sculptures in conjunction with Earth Day in April, when Sonfist will be coming to campus to speak about this project and his esteemed career as an eco-artist.

Alan Sonfist (American, b. 1946) The Endangered Species of New England, 2011, aluminum. On loan from the artist.

Finally, I would like to highlight an exciting new acquisition. Fairfield University alumnus Russell Panczenko and his wife Paula donated a print and etching by Sam Gilliam to the museum's Black Art Fund. Gilliam is an African-American color field painter and abstract artist, associated with the Washington Color School.

Sam Gilliam (American, b. 1933) Fasttrack, 1992. 8-color relief print with etching. Gift of Russell and Paula Panczenko, 2021.25.01

I look forward to seeing you in the weeks and months ahead, in the galleries, and at our programs (either in-person or online), and hope you enjoy the rich roster of lectures, conversations, gallery talks, workshops, meditations sessions, and family programs, that we have put together to keep you busy over the next few months!

With warm regards, Carey Carey Mack Weber

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Dean Greenwald’s Take on Solutionism for Students

The military have a phrase, VUCCA. It stands for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, chaos and ambiguity. It seems this applies to our current state of affairs. We live, as the saying goes, in uncertain times. And higher education, as a sphere, has been trying to deal with this uncertainty. But, as a historian, I know we have always lived in uncertain times and colleges and universities are tanacious institutions. A recent book on how this uncertainty plays out on colleges and university campuses has garnered a great deal of attention. That book is The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  I just reviewed the book for The Baffler and would like to share it with you here, as these are important issues. Click HERE to read the full review on The Baffler.