The Cupola: Scholarship at Gettysburg College

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  Method and Meaning: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection

  Yan Sun, Shannon Callahan, Ashlie M. Cantele, Maura E. D'Amico, Xiyang Duan, Devin N. Garnick, Allison J. Gross, and Emily A. Zbehlik

  What is art historical study and how it should be carried out are fundamental questions the exhibition Method and Meaning: Selections from the Gettysburg College Collection intends to answer. This student-curated exhibition is an exciting academic endeavor of seven students of art history majors and minors in the Art History Methods course. The seven student curators are Shannon Callahan, Ashlie Cantele, Maura D’Amico, Xiyang Duan, Devin Garnick, Allison Gross and Emily Zbehlik. As part of the class assignment, this exhibition allows the students to explore various art history methods on individual case studies. The selection of the works in the exhibition reflects a wide array of student research interests including an example of 18th century Chinese jade chime stone, jade and bronze replicas of ancient Chinese bronze vessels, a piece of early 20th century Chinese porcelain, oil paintings by Pennsylvania Impressionist painter Fern Coppedge, prints by Salvador Dalí and by German artist Käthe Kollwitz, and an early 20th century wood block print by Japanese artist Kawase Hasui. [excerpt]

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  Judy Chicago: The Birth Project

  Francesca S. DeBiaso

  When I was a first year student sitting in the art history classroom of Professor Carol Small’s introductory survey course in the fall of 2008, Creation of the World #7 was on display in a large Plexiglas case along with the work’s documentation panels. At first, Creation of the World #7 seemed unimpressive and bland. The dim room, the text-heavy panels and the dusty case did not inspire close examination of the work. When I eventually approached it, I realized that it was a birthing scene and the result of a national art-making endeavor advanced by feminist art pioneer Judy Chicago.

  As I continued to have more art history courses in that room, I was always tickled by the fact that my peers were unknowingly faced with a two breasts and a birthing vagina on a daily basis. Although the anatomy is delicately embroidered as painterly strokes of warm blended colors with whimsical creatures, the scene does graphically express the physical and emotional strife of labor. The work is accompanied by documentation panels used by Chicago to offer viewers a more in-depth understanding of the art-making process, the participants’ creative processes and their personal lives, as well as ethereal and temporal interpretations of birthing and mothering.

  For my senior capstone project, I comprehensively researched the legacy of Judy Chicago and sought to bring awareness to the two Birth Project works in Gettysburg College’s collection. The thesis paper, entitled “Judy Chicago: Visions for Feminist Art,” was an opportunity to document and honor the presence of these works on campus and place them in a larger context of feminist art history. From the onset, it was my hope to curate an exhibition of the works. When I met with Chicago in the spring of 2012, her great dislike of the detached and cold “specimen-like” display of the works also prompted me to consider alternative options for the display and care of the Creation of the World #7 and Birth #4. [excerpt]

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  Kara Walker: Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated)

  Shannon Egan

  The preface to the original edition of Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War, published in 1866 by Alfred H. Guernsey and Henry M. Alden asserts, “We proposed at the outset to narrate events just as they occurred; … to praise no man unduly because he strove for the right, to malign no man because he strove for the wrong." The suite of lithographs on display at Schmucker Art Gallery by prominent contemporary African-American artist Kara Walker entitled Harper’s Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), on loan from the Middlebury College Museum of Art, challenges the truth Guernsey and Alden claimed to recount and inject a discourse about rightness and wrongness the authors professed to omit. Walker’s silhouettes of distorted, fragmented and flailing black bodies are silkscreened over an enlargement, using offset lithography of woodcut plates, of the original Harper’s prints published in Guernsey and Alden’s text to incorporate a new understanding of suffering, loss and horror absent from the nineteenth- century illustrations. [excerpt]

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  Melissa Ichiuji: In the Flesh

  Shannon Egan

  When she dances, acts, sculpts, sews or films, artist Melissa Ichiuji presents the human figure in political and personal terms, examining its various states of desire or distortion. This exhibition In the Flesh presents three discrete recent bodies of Ichiuji’s work: a series of busts of political figures from the 2012 election season entitled Fair Game, a trio of life-sized sculptures of female bodies, and lastly, Everything to Lose, a film and corresponding photographs of the artist donning an elaborately sculpted costume. Despite seeming differences in medium and subject in this exhibition, Ichiuji works with similar materials and artistic practices in each. She sculpts with fabric and pantyhose and does not hide raw, purposefully crude stitches and seams. Because the pantyhose stands in for flesh; bits of thread under the surfaces look like veins, and gestures seem animated, Ichiuji’s heads and bodies are paradoxically naturalistic and doll-like. “My background as a dancer and an actor,” Ichiuji explains, “informs the physicality of my figures.” Mimeticism, or the evocation of the “real” body, in Ichiuji’s work is mesmerizingly fraught. One sees abstraction and strange realism at once. Her political portraits are uncannily accurate; life-size sculptures approximate the presence of a live figure, and her own body in performance and film hypnotically and paradoxically is obscured and revealed. The perceived fantasy implicit in her work chafes against the viewer’s detection of the “real.” This friction can be seen in how Ichiuji’s real body—her hand, her upper back, her own curves and flesh—is perceptible through the doll-like costume she wears in Everything to Lose. Likewise, from the Fair Game series, one can recognize Newt Gingrich’s characteristic smile through a tangle of women’s underwear, and the distorted figures in her larger-scaled sculptures appear on the brink of movement. [excerpt]

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  Andy Warhol: Polaroids & Portraits

  Emily A. Francisco

  Enigmatic Andy Warhol claimed he had “no real point to make” in producing art. Yet, his silkscreens, sculptures, paintings, and photographs reveal the artist’s profound interest in the way art intersected with fields like advertising, fashion, film, mass culture, and underground music. In his experimentations with photography and portraiture, Warhol was fascinated with representations of both the individual and the masses and used the Polaroid portrait to illustrate the fine lines between art and popular culture, celebrity and anonymity. [excerpt]

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  Field and Factory: Chinese Revolutionary Posters

  Molly E. Reynolds

  The images on display for Field and Factory, political propaganda used by the Communist Party of China during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, construct a fictitious world. In perceiving these kinds of illustrations, the audience is asked either to visualize the society in its ideal form or unify in opposition to a national enemy. In the first half of the twentieth century, before the possibilities of the television advertisement were fully realized, posters were one of the most popular forms of propaganda: cheap to produce in mass quantities and simple enough to hang in any public building. The art form’s bold aesthetics encouraged mass mobilization during intense periods of war and political upheaval. The posters in this exhibition represent a myriad of political agendas promoted by the Communist Party of China during its early development after the formation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Posters were viewed by all citizens in both the private and public sphere; by abolishing other varieties of personal expression, the Communist Party sought control of its population. Whether the posters were sought after as decoration in the home or transmitters of political policy, they became, by default, the most popular form of imagery in China during that time. By glorifying certain aspects of Chinese life, these images help to shape the elements of national identity for a newly founded modern China. [excerpt]

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  Jim Agard: A Retrospective

  James D. Agard and Kerri R. Rosenstein

  The subject of illusion has been at the core of Jim’s work from the get-go. So when he serendipitously met some guy one night who was toying with a bent hanger, insisting Jim entertain him by seeing if he could visually make the wire cube turn inside out, Jim was captivated. Moving from side to side, as instructed, Jim experienced the cube floating on an invisible axis. He went rampant. Up until then, his work had implied illusion rather than created actual illusion. A chance encounter and his discovery of the Necker cube propelled him into what would become the basis of his life’s work. Like when one learns to open one’s eyes underwater for the first time, everything becomes wildly different, just knowing there is a whole other way of seeing.

  Jim’s work is purely non-objective and formal, yet equally laden with profound conceptual significance. It invites an approach that is lucid and straightforward, while encouraging a willingness to let the focus blur. To hold these views simultaneously. To see and then hyper-see and be willing to not see, and in not seeing, see even more. [excerpt]

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  Visualizing War

  Alexandra C. Ward, Natalie S. Sherif, Andrew W. Egbert, and Peter S. Carmichael

  Curators Andrew Egbert, Natalie Sherif, and Alexandra Ward have designed an experience that allows us to consider why these images resonated with such power for Civil War Americans. In doing so, they have shifted the gallery experience away from a truth-seeking mission, giving us instead a platform from which to move beyond questions of whether visual culture was realistic or not. They offer us a chance to explore the emotional and intellectual connections that sustained Americans long after the shouts and cheers in rushing to arms had faded. [excerpt]

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  Ronald Gonzalez: Private Collection

  Shannon Egan

  In Ronald Gonzalez’s latest series of sculptures, old leather satchels, small antiquated appliances, dulled tools, bicycle handles, shoes, a fencing mask, an accordion, a bicycle seat, a toaster and helmets, among other various found parts and outdated detritus are combined to evoke the heads and torsos of human-like forms. The viewer identifies the components at once as what the objects literally are as well as the specific body parts they figuratively describe. As such, his art calls for an exercise in perceptual shifts that allow for more than one visual interpretation. While some objects are manipulated, others are left intact, as Gonzalez creates paradoxically human and strangely inanimate assemblages. [excerpt]

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  Sam Van Aken: New Edens

  Shannon Egan

  Hybridized fruit trees, grafted orchids on shiny, reflective aluminum pedestals, fluorescent lights placed vertically on stands, and sheets of silver Mylar create a lush and somewhat disorienting space in contemporary artist Sam Van Aken’s most recent body of work New Edens. Van Aken makes Gettysburg College’s Schmucker Art Gallery into a kind of fantastical and futuristic winter garden. Without daylight and despite the cool fall weather of the Northeast, the dozen trees in the gallery are leafy and green, some even bearing fruit. Peach, plum, cherry, nectarine and apricot branches emerge from a single trunk and grow productively alongside their sister fruits. These surprising new plants, carefully designed and created by the artist, are titled Trees of 40 Fruits, and as time passes the artist will continue to graft more branches of various kinds of fruits onto each “parent” rootstock until he has reached forty. The saplings on display are relatively small, but eventually these trees will reach an approximate height of twenty feet. Van Aken created a nursery as part of his studio in Syracuse, New York. As an artist-cum-horticulturalist, he, like a nurturing parent, cares for his grafted fruit trees with a steadfast devotion. In his studio Van Aken carefully concocts the best fertilizers, waters carefully and diligently, removes hoards of Japanese beetles from the leaves one-by-one, and provides adequate warmth and protection for the young trees (with huge mounds of mulch and careful wrappings) during harsh New York winters. [excerpt]

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  Art+Politics

  Shannon Egan, Jenna L. Birkenshock, Hillary B. Goodall, Tessa M. Sheridan, Josiah B. Adlon, Megan E. Hilands, Emily A. Francisco, Molly E. Reynolds, Shelby P. Glass, Colleen L. Parrish, and Francesca S. DeBiaso

  For the exhibition Art + Politics, students worked closely with the holdings of Gettysburg College's Special Collections and College Archives to curate an exhibition in Schmucker Art Gallery that engages with issues of public policy, activism, war, propaganda, and other critical socio-political themes. Each of the students worked diligently to contextualize the objects historically, politically, and art-historically. The art and artifacts presented in this exhibition reveal how various political events and social issues have been interpreted through various visual and printed materials, including posters, pins, illustrations, song sheets, as well as a Chinese shoe for bound feet. The students' essays that follow demonstrate careful research and thoughtful reflection on the American Civil War, nineteenth-century politics, the First and Second World Wars, World's Fairs, Dwight D. Eisenhower's campaign, Vietnam-War era protests, and the Cultural Revolution in China. [excerpt]

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  Lisa Blas: Meet Me at the Mason Dixon

  Shannon Egan and Miguel de Baca

  The Schmucker Art Gallery at Gettysburg College is extremely pleased to mount the remarkable series of paintings, photographs, and mixed-media installation by contemporary artist Lisa Blas entitled Meet Me at the Mason Dixon. This exhibition is an official part of Gettysburg area’s 150th Commemoration of the American Civil War as well as Gettysburg College’s Kick-Off event for this significant anniversary. Gettysburg provides an especially appropriate backdrop for the exhibition, as the artist took the history of this “hallowed ground” and its current resonances as the subject of her work. Blas traveled the Gettysburg National Military Park, as well as to the Antietam National Battlefield, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Archives and the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, among many other sites, to investigate how national identity and cultural myths are shaped in response to this momentous period of American history.

  The title of this exhibition, Meet Me at the Mason Dixon, invokes an encounter at a historical boundary line known for centuries of conflict. The Mason-Dixon Line originally was intended to solve a British colonial dispute. Later, it divided the northern from the southern United States based on the legality of slavery, and as such, symbolizes the massive fracturing of the country during the American Civil War. To contemporary artist Lisa Blas, however, the Mason-Dixon emblematizes the tensions implicit in the concept of historical memory. How are traumas witnessed and remembered? What becomes codified as history, and what other narratives are thereby repressed? What age-old divisions haunt us in the present? Blas comprehends such questions as open-ended, visualizing the past as fundamentally, and persistently, conflicted. [excerpt]

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  Maren Hassinger: Lives

  Shannon Egan

  Gettysburg College’s Schmucker Art Gallery is pleased to present Maren Hassinger: Lives, an exhibition of the artist’s films, sculptures, and installations held in conjunction with the Central Pennsylvania Consortium Africana Studies Conference, “Public Health, Human Prosperity, and Justice: Public Policy in the African Diaspora,” and co-sponsored by the Eisenhower Institute in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania February 26 and 27, 2010. Hassinger’s work provides a contemplative perspective on complicated issues of nature, culture and identity in relation to broader themes of race, gender, as well as politics, and social policy. Ethereal and evocative installations of branches, plastic bags, and twisted newspapers powerfully reveal the tenuous intersection of the mass-produced and the organic. Complimenting the coiled strands, circular forms, and ascending paths of Hassinger’s sculptures are projections and films that similarly examine notions of circularity and biological (or natural) connectivity, in addition to linearity and lineage. These installations compellingly address the various complexities of lives: personal and public identities, Hassinger’s autobiographical lineage, and the legacies of broader African-American experiences. [excerpt]

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  ID

  Shannon Egan

  The five sculptors in ID challenge the conventions of representational self-portraiture. In their selective and often abstract use of figuration, these artists engage the identification of self as it is situated socially and institutionally—one’s “I.D.”—as well as the psychoanalytic dimensions of the “id.”

  The exhibition’s title introduces a kind of paradoxical conflict between public identification, found in various bureaucratic forms of I.D. (passports, drivers’ licenses, and Social Security numbers, for example), and the id, a Freudian classification for the most basic and unconscious physical drives (sex, food, aggression).

  All of these artists respond to the seeming incongruities of I.D. and id by exhibiting subtle awareness of the complicated construction of identity. Abandoning the tradition of simply mirroring one’s outward appearance, they not only reconsider what it means to represent oneself as an art object, but also question the literal and figurative boundaries of the human form in sculpture. [excerpt]