Museums protect and preserve works of art, but they also use them to educate and inspire. And recent exhibitions at museums around the country, each informed by the work of MICA alumni and faculty, employ visual artifacts as a conduit for the public to consider — and sometimes reconsider — people, places, and events of the past. These exhibitions not only reveal history, they connect it to issues that challenge us still today, and remind us that the stories that began before our time have yet to reach their conclusion.

 

Shannon Perich, history of photography faculty at MICA and curator of the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History, recently presented (re) Framing Conversations: Photographs by Richard Avedon, 1946-1965, on view at the museum through fall.

The show includes twenty of the iconic photographer’s portraits — including Louis Armstrong, Judy Garland, Humphry Bogart, George Wallace, Malcolm X, and William Casby, a man born into slavery. Avedon’s work is organized to highlight events that shaped post-World War II American culture, from the Civil Rights movement to McCarthyism, and though the images are of individuals, each speaks to broader events of their time. They underscore themes of racism and sexism, as well as religion’s influence on society — and remind us that these issues continue to impact contemporary society.

Perich, who curated artifacts from nearly a thousand pieces of Avedon’s work in the museum’s collection, said she took the words of essayist and playwright James Baldwin to heart when organizing the exhibition: “It doesn’t do any good to blame the people or the time — one is oneself all those people. We are the time.”

For more information, read more at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

David J. Mack ’75 (Art Education MFA) contributed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition, “Hear Me Now” The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, SC. The exhibition, which presents approximately 60 ceramic objects from Old Edgefield District, South Carolina, sheds light on the work and lived experiences of African American potters in the 19th-century American South — including enslaved potter and poet David Drake.

The Old Edgefield district was a center of stoneware production in the 1800s, and Hear Me Now tells a story of the African Americans who worked there in the decades before the Civil War. The exhibition features monumental storage jars created by Drake, utilitarian wares by unrecorded makers of the time, and work from contemporary Black artists. Mack, who is a ceramicist, educator, and author of the congressional reparations bill, “The Stolen Bones Act of 1619,” which seeks to resolve the theft of artifacts created by slave labor, created an audio presentation discussing the legendary potter, as well as Drake’s throwing process, that is incorporated into the exhibition.

Co-organized with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.

For more information, read more at The Met’s website.

 

The Beginning, In the land around me, a solo exhibition featuring the work of Kei Ito ’16 (Photographic & Electronic Media MFA), is on view at the Allicar Museum in Fort Collins, CO, through April 2, 2023. Funded in part by a project grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the exhibition features five projects that converge and center around Ito’s personal nuclear heritage and research into the American nuclear experience.

Ito’s work is rooted in the general trauma of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, which his grandfather witnessed and eventually fell victim to, and the projects in The Beginning delves into the shared past and present of those impacted by nuclear weapons. It also highlights the experiences of “downwinders” (those exposed to contamination or fallout due to nuclear weapons testing and the uranium industry), creating an environment to discuss contemporary issues surrounding health, environmentalism, and the current global system of war and peace.