Fall 2021 Exhibitions
The museum’s permanent collection gallery is named in honor of F&M alumnus Thomas
W. Nissley ‘55 and his wife Emily Baldwin Nissley, who together generously provided
funding for its care and programming. The exhibition is a broad sampling from the
museum’s various core collections and includes indigenous material culture, regionally
created furniture, fiber arts and crafts, as well as paintings, sculptures, works
on paper and glass arts. Highlights include works by renowned artists such as Vivan
Springford, Bill Hutson, Mary Frances Merrill, Fritz Scholder, and Jacob Eichholtz. Jerome Wright is known for his figurative and abstract paintings as well as being
an accomplished professional cellist. Wright was born in Richmond, Virginia before
settling in Washington, D.C. where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School and
The Workshop for Careers in the Arts. He then moved to Brazil for five years playing
as Assistant Principal Cellist with the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo
under Maestro Carvallho before joining the U.S. Army. His Lancaster home has become
an art and music studio, where he is surrounded by his instruments, paintings, and
eclectic collection of artwork.
Kathleen Elliot produces unique sequences of forms and images designed to prompt fundamental
questioning and discovery. Based in San Jose, in California’s Silicon Valley, Elliot
draws on her surroundings as well as on her extensive studies in philosophy and linguistics
to explore questions of reality, ethics, and the composition of everyday life. Elliot
combines and juxtaposes her own flameworked glass structures and more manufactured-looking
commissioned vessels with contemporary food packaging to explore how we are manipulated
into consuming physically unhealthy and environmentally harmful products. Using gaudily
designed packaging from cereal, candy, and other products, she questions the promise
of independence, flexibility, and fun they hold out. What, she asks, are the physical
and societal costs of accepting commercial hype and prioritizing convenience over
lasting health?
Between 1770 and 1830, both fashionable dress and theatrical practice underwent dramatic
changes in an attempt to become more “natural.” And yet this desire was widely recognized
as paradoxical since both fashion and the theater were longstanding tropes of artifice.
This exhibition examines this paradox as mirrored and expressed in fashionable dress.
Classical sculpture was acclaimed because it seemed so “natural.” But when actresses,
dancers, painters, or fashionable women posed themselves as classical statues come
to life, they acted as both Pygmalion and Galatea, both genius artist and living artwork.
“Artful Nature” refers to the simultaneous theatricality and deception typically attributed
to fashionable women in the late eighteenth century, and to the survival strategies
employed by women artists, authors, and actresses.
The Magnum cooperative was created in 1947 by photojournalists Henri Cartier-Bresson,
Robert Capa, George Rodger, and David “Chim” Seymour. Deeply affected by the horrors
of covering WWII assignments, they created a photography organization that supported
the artist’s choice of projects and acknowledged that the photographers would retain
copyrights to their images, a revolutionary approach at the time. During the first
years of the collective, the founding artists covered areas of the globe that had
not been photographed before and sold images to popular publications. This exhibition
highlights ten members of the Magnum cooperative and the vast span of content that
these photographers covered, and in some cases, died for.Nissley Gallery: Fall 2021
Local Artist Spotlight: Jerome Wright
Kathleen Elliot: Questionable Foods
Artful Nature: Fashion & Theatricality
Magnum Photographers: Capturing Moments
Vivian Springford
Vivian Springford, an American abstract painter, was active in the New York art world during the 1950s through the 1970s. While Springford started her career in portraiture, she soon ventured into abstract expressionism drawing inspiration from Chinese calligraphy, Taoism, and Confucianism. By the 1970s, Springford had developed her own individual color field painting process. Her technique of using thinned paint on a raw or thinly-primed canvas led to the creation of her own style of stain painting. Exhibition displayed at Susan and Benjamin Winter Visual Arts Center.
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