Haggerty Museum to Explore Concepts of Narrative, Community In Fall 2014-Spring 2015 Exhibitions
Schedule includes pilot faculty-student curated exhibit linked to humanities course work
MILWAUKEE – June 30, 2014 – The Haggerty Museum of Art today announced its fall 2014-spring 2015 exhibition schedule. The five exhibitions bring together works in different media in a sequential exploration of how art can be used to tell stories about personal journeys, national identities, and cultural and environmental transformations.
“At a time when current events around the world are bringing issues of community and national identities to the fore, we’re excited to be able to pull together works from different museums as well as from our permanent collection to examine relevant themes,” said Wally Mason, director and chief curator of the Haggerty Museum of Art.
The exhibitions include The Killing Cycle paintings by Alfred Leslie, the first time these works will be shown together in more than 20 years, and an experimental student-faculty curated show, Clear Picture, Looking at Communities from an Art Museum exploring the narrative of community which will also form the basis of four Marquette undergraduate courses over two semesters.
Read through to learn more or visit the exhibition website at http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/exhibits.shtml
Alfred Leslie, The Killing Cycle (August 20 through December 23, 2014)
The year 1966 was a turning point for painter and filmmaker Alfred Leslie. That fall, a devastating fire destroyed Leslie’s studio-home and all of its contents. This personal loss, as well as the death only a few months earlier of his close friend and collaborator, poet Frank O’Hara, proved fertile ground for artistic inspiration. The Killing Cycle is a series of constructed narratives that synthesize fact and fiction to describe the beach scene car crash that ended O’Hara’s life. Leslie began the paintings in 1966 as part personal testimony and part metaphor for loss. By the time he finished the cycle 14 years later, Leslie’s artistic goal had evolved to explore how to construct a non-linear narrative in a single work. These “painted stories,” which currently reside in disparate private collections and other museums, will be exhibited together for the first time in more than 20 years. In addition to large oil paintings, the exhibition includes preparatory drawings.
Nadav Kander, Yangtze – The Long River (August 20 through December 23, 2014)
Over a period of three years, Nadav Kander photographed scenes he encountered on the banks of China’s Yangtze River. More people live along the Yangtze, the third longest river in the world, than in the United States. Kander followed the Yangtze upstream more than 4,100 miles from its mouth at the coast, where there is a high-traffic shipping port, toward The Three Gorges Dam, the largest in the world, past Chongqing, a rapidly expanding urban and economic center, to the river’s source in the Himalayan mountains. As he traveled, Kander was struck by the human and environmental impact of China’s dizzying rate of development. His photographs of the people and landscapes he encountered explore themes of impermanence and displacement, and ultimately question the price of progress.
The large format photos examine the environmental and human impact of modernization.
Clear Picture, Looking at Communities from an Art Museum (August 20 through December 23, 2014 and January 17 through May 17, 2015)
Over the course of the fall 2014 and spring 2015 semesters, the Haggerty will present this exhibition featuring diverse works from the museum’s permanent collection. Clear Picture is a faculty-student pilot project led by two Marquette faculty members. The exhibition will serve as a multi-disciplinary textbook and laboratory for four undergraduate Journalism and Spanish courses. Works will be added to the exhibit throughout each semester as students explore ways of constructing narratives through the selection and display of art.
The project uses the Haggerty as a learning laboratory, giving students an opportunity to collectively start constructing their own narrative around community. It is being supported by a $20,000 Way Klinger Teaching Enhancement Award from Marquette University.
The exhibition will continue through the spring semester with new groups of students who will dismantle the initial selection of works and install new works, also from the Haggerty’s permanent collection. Visitors to both stages of the exhibition will be able to see how the narrative evolves during this second phase.
Mila Teshaieva, Promising Waters (January 17 through May 17, 2015)
For more than four years, photographer Mila Teshaieva documented the transformation of the three former Soviet republics on the shores of the Caspian Sea: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. The battle for control of the region’s vast oil and gas reserves and the search for a national identity have led to far-reaching changes for the society and the environment. Teshaieva’s images reveal an atmosphere of insecurity, where people pin their hopes and expectations on a transformation whose direction remains uncertain. Teshaieva taps into her background as an economist to take the viewer on a subtle and complex journey through the promises of a new oil region, raising questions as to the relationship between the state and private identity, the ties between past, present and future, and how to pinpoint the boundary between rise and fall.
This is the first time the photographs are being exhibited in the US. Promising Waters offers an interesting follow-up to the Yangtze exhibit that provides a similar search for national and cultural identity – another narrative of progress. The show examines the grandiose nationalistic themes of three countries trying to communicate economic prosperity without any real evidence.
States of Uncertainty (January 17 through May 17, 2015)
As a companion to Promising Waters, the Haggerty will feature a third exhibition of contemporary art curated from the Haggerty’s permanent collection which will explore similar themes including the relationship between ethnic and national identity and the ways in which cultural, geographical and political territories influence the formation of self.
This exhibition explores the concept of border as social and spatial construct and examines the complexities of establishing personal identity in areas of geopolitical instability. What social and cultural impact is felt when states are formed and disbanded, official languages sanctioned or forbidden, borders drawn then erased? When national boundaries shift, must personal identity? To what extent does a political territory influence the formation of the self? Through sculpture, video and sound-based installations, artists in this exhibition question nationhood, citizenship and identity as defined (or not) by geography.
The Haggerty Museum of Art is free and open to the public.
About the Haggerty Museum of Art
Opened in 1984 on the Marquette University campus, the Haggerty Museum of Art features approximately eight to nine exhibitions each year. Representing the diversity of work in the museum’s Permanent Collection, the exhibitions have celebrated the contributions of the Italian Renaissance “Petite Masters,” American self-taught artists, works addressing social change issues, modern American printmaking and photography, and contemporary art from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and Wisconsin. As a teaching museum, the Haggerty seeks to enhance the undergraduate educational experience by engaging students from various disciplines and encouraging them to think about the world and their studies through the lenses of the visual arts. Located just west of downtown Milwaukee, the museum regularly offers exhibitions showing cultural diversity and art influenced by modern technology. To learn more, visit http://www.marquette.edu/haggerty/index.shtml
Since the museum’s inception, its goals of being an integral part of the educational experiences offered at Marquette University, providing a rich variety of art to the Milwaukee community, with visibility on a national and international level, have remained constant. As a university museum, the Haggerty sponsors lectures, symposia, workshops and tours to interpret the arts to its various audiences.
Haggerty Museum of Art Hours
Monday-Saturday: 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Thursday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Sunday: noon to 5 p.m.
NOTE: This press release was submitted to Urban Milwaukee and was not written by an Urban Milwaukee writer. It has not been verified for its accuracy or completeness.
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Haggerty Museum to Explore Concepts of Narrative, Community In Fall 2014-Spring 2015 Exhibitions
Jun 30th, 2014 by Haggerty Museum of Art in MilwaukeeSchedule includes pilot faculty-student curated exhibit linked to humanities course work
