Category Archives: Exhibits

Woodmere Art Museum exhibition features two works from Doris Staffel on loan from the Bryn Mawr College collection

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The Woodmere Art Museum, (9201 Germantown Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19118) is hosting a new exhibit titled ‘Doris Staffel: Painter, Teacher’ that will run through July 28 – September 30, 2012. It focuses on the work of painter Doris Staffel, described as one of Philadelphia’s preeminent abstract painters and colorists. This is the first exhibition to examine Staffel’s entire career, as well as her first solo show in a museum. Along with Staffel’s solo exhibition the Woodmere Art Museum will also be showing a smaller collection of works highlighting three-generations of Philadelphia artists: Staffel’s own teachers, her colleagues, and the students that she taught. Drawn mostly from Woodmere’s permanent collection, it includes several recent acquisitions and promised gifts exhibited for the first time.

The exhibition brings together all fourteen paintings and works on paper by Staffel that are held in the Woodmere’s collection, pieces that represent her various career phases from the 1940s to the present. The two pieces from Bryn Mawr College have been loaned along with other pieces from public and private collections to complete the exhibition.

The two pieces on loan from Bryn Mawr College Special Collections represent the different media within which the artist worked.

The piece below, Dragon’s Teeth, dates from 1984 and is a charcoal on paper (18 3/4 in. x 17 1/2 in.) and is from the William and Uytendale Scott Memorial Study Collection of
Works by Women Artists, a gift of Bill Scott.

This piece, Enfolding, from 1990, is an acrylic on paper (23 in. x 30 1/4 in.) and is also a gift of Bill Scott. Born in 1921 in Brooklyn, Staffel came to Philadelphia in 1940 to study at the Tyler School of Art where she stayed to teach for twenty-seven years at The University of the Arts in the city. She is described by the Woodmere Art Museum as being an influential figure to younger artists, and her work is displayed in galleries in Philadelphia and elsewhere in the US.

An interview with Staffel in which she discusses her work and life is available on You Tube

For more on the exhibition, please check the Woodmere Art Museum website.

Bryn Mawr student-curated exhibition described in a new book

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Through our Special Collections, Bryn Mawr offers a unique opportunity for students to use great literature in the form in which it first appeared, antique cookbooks, the working papers of important scholars, letters between the earliest administrators of the College, ancient pottery, original Japanese prints, and hundreds of other objects in their classes and research. Every year the curators work with dozens of classes and hundreds of students on projects that range from single classroom visits to semester-long collaborations.
In Fall 2007, fourteen undergraduate students joined a class that gave them a unique opportunity to work with medieval manuscripts for the entire semester, drawing on Bryn Mawr’s substantial collection of these beautiful hand -made volumes. As part of the class, students planned and created an exhibition with the books that ran in the Rare Book Room the following Spring. Marianne Hansen, Curator and Academic Liaison for Rare Books and Manuscripts, worked with the class throughout the semester and through the duration of the show. She spoke on her experience at a professional meeting (Rare Books and Manuscripts Section of the American Library Association), and her paper has just been published in a new book on the use of special collections and archives in undergraduate education.

You can read the article without borrowing the book by looking it up in the open access repository of the scholarship and publications of the Bryn Mawr community (on Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College), at http://repository.brynmawr.edu/lib_pubs/11/. Click the download button to read:

Marianne Hansen. “Real Objects, Real Spaces, Real Expertise: An Undergraduate Seminar Curates an Exhibition on the Medieval Book of Hours,” in Past or Portal?: Enhancing Undergraduate Learning Through Special Collections and Archives. Eleanor Mitchell; Peggy Seiden; Suzy Taraba, editors. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. 2012.

Alix Smith: States of Union

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ON VIEW NOW

Please be sure to stop by to see the six works by New York artist Alix Smith in Carpenter Library (B Level).

Alix will give a public lecture on her recent photographic series States of Union in Carpenter 21 on March 15 at 4pm.

Support for this program comes from the Center for Visual Culture, The Pensby Center, the Program in Gender & Sexuality Studies, and the Student Art Club.

“Double Take” exhibition extended; gallery talk scheduled

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Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1860s-present

Exhibition hours: Monday through Friday, noon to 4:30 pm
Through February 17, 2012
Rare Book Room, Canaday Library

Gallery talk
5 pm, Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Rare Book Room, Canaday Library

Zoe Strauss, Philadelphia, PA (Melissa’s Handstand), 2004, color inkjet print; Gift of Robert and Marianne Weldon (2010.35.2)

Bryn Mawr College’s exhibition Double Take: Selected Views from the Photography Collection at Bryn Mawr College, 1867-2009 has been extended through February 17, 2012. Culminating, chronologically, with a group of recent photographs by Philadelphia’s Zoe Strauss, the subject of a current exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the exhibition spans nearly the entire history of the photographic medium, presenting a wide variety of works in unexpected pairings and groupings.

Exhibition curator Carrie Robbins and exhibition intern Nathanael Roesch—both graduate students in history of art at Bryn Mawr—will engage in an informal discussion of the exhibition at 5 pm on Wednesday, February 15, 2012, addressing the Bryn Mawr photography collection as well as the manner in which this exhibition was conceived, selected, and installed. Brian Wallace, Bryn Mawr’s new Curator and Academic Liaison for Art and Artifacts, will introduce Robbins and Roesch.

More information on, and selected images from, the exhibition may be found at http://www.brynmawr.edu/library/double_take_exhibition.html.