Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Contemporary artist Aye Erkmen’s site-specific installation, Places, is the #artworkoftheweek. Commissioned as part of the Kemper Art Museum’s Art on Campus program, the #sculpture consists of nine abstract geometric forms covered in dark green, light green, and blue glass mosaic tiles. The forms are arranged in a half-circle near the intersection of two walking paths adjacent to Olin Library on the campus of Washington University. Erkmen chose this site, an area with sign...ificant pedestrian activity, with the intention of creating a social gathering place. Passersby can sit on, lean on, read on, or just look at the nine irregular forms. The colors of the tiles create an optical mixture of hues that both integrates the work with the surrounding landscape and provides a dissonant contrast to it. ---- Ayse Erkmen (Turkish, b. 1949), Places, 2015. Stainless steel reinforced concrete with glass mosaic tile, dimensions variable. University purchase, Art on Campus fund, Samuel Cupples Hall II and Scott Rudolph Hall, 2015. See more

Kemper Art Museum Student Educator Jay Buchanan explores how this 185455 sculpture by Harriet Hosmer--an interpretation of the myth of Oenone--reflects the artist's own time and relationships. The Museum’s student educators are Washington University in St. Louis students who facilitate dynamic conversations about artworks and exhibitions at the Museum. During the 202021 academic year, while the Museum is closed to the public, they are designing and leading live, online tours with audiences around the world. View all upcoming tours and register for the next "Figures of Myth and Legend" tour here: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/calendar/events/tours

Today we celebrate #EarthDay with the work of artist Dan Peterman, who creates ecologically themed installation art using reprocessed, postconsumer plastic. "Accessories to an Event" is composed of six combinations of gray rectangular forms. Located in the Kemper Art Museum’s Florence Steinberg Weil Sculpture Garden, the sculpture provides seating for visitors and exists in an intermediary position between art object and design. These photos show the sculpture being used and ...enjoyed by Museum guests over the years. Peterman’s combination of simplified geometric form and industrial materials recalls Minimalist sculpture of the 1960s, but his use of reprocessed plastics can also be read as a creative approach to countering environmental degradation and a form of political commentary concerning the exhaustion of goods and resources in late-capitalist society. ----- Dan Peterman (American, b. 1960), "Accessories to an Event," 2006.Postconsumer reprocessed plastics and stainless steel hardware. University purchase, Bixby Fund, and with funds from the Weil Family, 2006.

March 15April 15 is #DeafHistoryMonth. Here, Ketsi Hottle signs the Kemper Art Museum's text about "Stacking Traumas," a site-specific mural by Christine Sun Kim, installed in the Museum's atrium until January 31, 2022. View the online exhibition at https://sites.wustl.edu/christinesunkim/ Video by DEAF Inc.

On Saturday, April 24, at 11 am (CDT), join Lacy Murphy, PhD student in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, to consider the etchings of French printmaker Charles Méryon (18211868), which celebrate 19th-century Paris just prior to Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive urban renewal project. Free, but registration is required. Register: https://buff.ly/2YMn3mI ----- Charles Méryon (French, 18211868), "Le petit pont, Paris," 1850; "Le pont neuf, Paris," 1853; "L'abside de Notre Dame," 1854. Etchings. Gifts of Dr. Malvern B. Clopton, 1930.

We are thrilled to announce the promotion of Meredith Malone to full curator! Read about the promotion and Meredith's accomplishments here: https://buff.ly/3t2gABy

Next up in the #ArtworkoftheWeek series is #sculpture. Made from a piece of driftwood picked up on the beaches of the Côte d’Azur, French artist Jean Dubuffet’s sculpture Tête barbue (Bearded Head) is essentially a found object. The artist performed a minimum of intervention in order to heighten the human semblance already existing in the suggestive natural material. By burning a few lines and dotting the wood, a pair of eyes, a nose, and other details emerged. Instead of ...attempting, like the Surrealists, to use found objects to evoke a transcendent reality, Dubuffet replaced the evocative object with banal materiality. I’m a glutton for banality, he stated in 1959. A roadway free of any unevenness or peculiarity, a dirty floor, a bare and dusty terrain, that no one would ever dream of looking at all are reaches of intoxication and jubilation for me. This sculpture is part of a larger series Dubuffet began in 1954 titled Little Statues of Precarious Life, made from nontraditional materials such as newspaper, cinders, steel wool, sponges, and other found objects. The series speaks directly to Dubuffet’s bid to repudiate accepted notions of the monumentality of sculpture while also commenting on the disposable, commodity-driven nature of life in 1950s France. --- Jean Dubuffet (French, 19011985), Tête barbue (Bearded Head), 1959. Driftwood with barnacles, 11 1/8 x 8 1/2 x 4". Gift of Florence S. Weil, 1982. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris. See more

On Saturday, April 10, at 11 am (CDT), join artist Amy Sillman; Rebecca Sears, lecturer in the #WashU Department of Classics in Arts & Sciences; and curator Meredith Malone as they talk about Sillman’s animated film "After Metamorphoses" (201516), the artist’s response to the Roman poet Ovid’s mythic tale of transformation, desire, and power. Sillman’s five-minute film will be screened at the beginning of the program and will be available for viewing the week prior. Register and view the video here: https://buff.ly/39Afo0H Amy Sillman (American, b. 1955), still from "After Metamorphoses" (201516). Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

Since the late 1960s, German photographer and filmmaker Katharina Sieverding has taken her own face as a point of departure. "Maton," the #artworkoftheweek, is a large-scale self-portrait comprising two parts. The right side of the diptych shows a flattened and enlarged photograph of the artist’s face that is so heavily made-up it appears androgynous, while the left side consists of a mirror. The initial photograph was taken in a photo booth. Sieverding then reshot the image ...using a camera that eliminated the gray tones before photographing it yet again with color film. Sieverding’s mediated self-portraits do not exist as unique original images but in the form of a series, interrogating the photographic medium's attempt to document, reproduce, and represent. The presence of the mirror implicates the viewer as well, emphasizing their role in the process of image production and reception. --- Katharina Sieverding (German, b. Prague, 1944), "Maton," 1969/1996. Color photograph and mirror, 74 3/4 x 49 1/4" (each). University purchase, Art Acquisition Fund, 2002. See more

In this self-portrait, the #ArtworkoftheWeek, German Expressionist painter Ludwig Meidner depicts himself with a distorted face and eerie grin, coupled with bold, sweeping brushstrokes that articulate the artist’s inner psychic state as one penetrated by anxiety and agitation. Rather than attempting to create a realistic representation of himself and his surroundings, Meidner strove to integrate his experiences of the multitude of sensual impressions of life in the turbulent ...environment of Berlin on the eve of World War I. On the back of this canvas is an earlier composition that he painted of his bedroom around 1909. The cramped space and simple furniture suggest the humble existence of the then impoverished artist. The double-sided painting is framed so that both sides are visible. --- Ludwig Meidner (German, 18841966), Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait) [recto] / Untitled, c. 1909 [verso], 1912. Oil on canvas, 31 3/4 x 23 11/16". Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Sydney M. Shoenberg, Jr., 1963.

Did you know that the Kemper Art Museum offers tours of the collection in Mandarin? Chinese speakers are invited to enjoy this video of student educator Yue Dai exploring Pablo Picasso's etching "Les pauvres" (1905). Join Yue this Friday, March 26, at 8 pm (CT), for her Chinese-language tour "Picasso and Spain." Tour is free, but registration is required: https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/events/tours/14345 . . . .... . . #PabloPicasso #Picasso #printmaking #etching #modernism #artmuseum #museumtour #Chineselanguage See more

The contemporary artist Elizabeth Peyton’s 2006 etching with aquatint, Georgia (After Stieglitz, 1918) is a portrait of a portrait. The source image for Peyton’s etching, our #artworkoftheweek, is a photograph of the renowned American painter Georgia O’Keeffe, which was taken by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz in 1918. In Stieglitz’s famous image, and Peyton’s adaptation, O’Keeffe stands confidently in front of one of her own artworks, a charcoal drawing of Palo Duro Cany...on titled No. 15 Special (191617). Throughout her career Peyton has depicted friends, lovers, prominent celebrities, and historical figures alike. She often looks to published photographs or popular culture for her source images, examining how art and mass media affect the viewer’s emotional and intellectual response to the person depicted. In this gestural print Peyton transforms the static photographic moment as captured by Stieglitz into a dynamic interpretation that brings to life the passion and intensity of O’Keeffe’s imagined personality. The layered compositional narrative engages equally with O’Keeffe’s relationship with her photographer and with Peyton’s reverence for her subject. Elizabeth Peyton (American, b. 1965), Georgia (After Stieglitz, 1918), 2006. Direct gravure etching with aquatint on Hahnemühle Copperplate Etching paper, 30 x 22". University purchase, Bixby Fund, 2009. Installations view of Ghost: Elizabeth Peyton at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2011. Photos by Whitney Curtis.

The Kemer Art Museum stands with the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, Washington University in St. Louis in support of our Asian and Asian American students, faculty, staff, alumni, and visitors, and all those impacted by this week's violence.

Why do artists sometimes label their works "Untitled"? In this video Student Educator Lingran Zhang explores how the title of "Untitled (Colored People Grid)" by Carrie Mae Weems relates to the meaning of the artwork. The Kemper Art Museum’s student educators are Washington University in St. Louis students who facilitate dynamic conversations about artworks and exhibitions at the Museum. During the 202021 academic year, while the Museum is closed to the public, they are designing and leading live, online tours with audiences around the world. Register for the next "Art, Untitled" tour at https://www.kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu/calendar/events/tours

Our #ArtworkoftheWeek series turns to the theme of Portraiture with the site-specific installation O N E E V E R Y O N E St. Louis, by the contemporary artist Ann Hamilton. To create the artwork Hamilton photographed nearly four hundred students, faculty, staff, and members of the community associated with the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis for social work, public health, and social policy during two weeklong residencies in 2015. Positioning herself an...d her camera on one side of a semi-opaque film (Duraflex), Hamilton used her voice to guide and pose the sitters. Only the points of contact with the membranea face, a hand, or a chosen research-related object, such as a book or photographappear in clear focus, while the sitters’ gestures and bodies are softly obscured. Hamilton was drawn to this material because, as she states, the way it makes touch visible seemed magic to me. The emphasis on physical touch extends Hamilton’s longstanding interest in the distance between tactile experience and visual evidence. By trading literal appearance for a less tangible resemblance, a different kind of portrait emerges, one that is both intimate and ethereal. A selection of thirty-three of these portraits is permanently installed along the curved interior walls of the School’s Thomas and Jennifer Hillman Hall as part of the Kemper Art Museum’s Art on Campus program. Ann Hamilton (American, b. 1956), O N E E V E R Y O N E St. Louis, 2015. Photomechanical prints in porcelain enamel on steel panels, 58 x 45 x 1" (each). University purchase, Art on Campus fund, Thomas and Jennifer Hillman Hall, 2015.

Join Washington University in St. Louis Assistant Professors of Architecture Constance Vale and Shantel Blakely this Saturday, November 7, 11 am Central, for a discussion of the historical consequences and future potential of automobiles, infrastructure, and autonomous vehicle technology. Free, but registration is required. Visit https://buff.ly/2ZIUQye. This conversation is organized in coordination with the fall 2020 Teaching Gallery exhibition, The Autonomous Future of Mobility -- curated by Vale and on view at sites.wustl.edu/autonomousfuture/ -- an exploration of the car’s legacy over the past century as depicted in art and visual culture. #KemperConnect

Today's the day! Get out and vote! Illustration by students in assistant professor Penina Acayo Laker's Design for Social Impact class @Samfoxschool @justvotewashu

#FridayFavorite from Kimberly Singer, director of communications at @WUSTLlibraries: "Andrea Fraser cuts a striking figure as the centerpiece of her video 'Little Frank and His Carp,' as she's captured on hidden cameras listening to an audio tour of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, designed by Frank Gehry. With layers of satire, voyeurism, and feminism, she invites the viewer to reconsider the ways we talk about art and architecture, with the shifting camera perspectives sub...tly underscoring the various ways viewers experience both the video itself and the space in which they watch it. I'm always drawn to pieces that utilize humor to connect with audiences, and the video is genuinely funny. Plus it feels especially relevant at the Kemper Art Museum, part of the Sam Fox School, a place dedicated to shaping future artists and architects." #KemperConnect Andrea Fraser (American, b. 1965), still from Little Frank and His Carp, 2001. Video on DVD, 6 min. University purchase, Parsons Fund, 2006.

Join us for this free talk by Max Dunbar, PhD candidate in the Department of Art History & Archaeology in Arts & Sciences, exploring the ambiguous nature of this enigmatic painting. For more information and to register, visit https://buff.ly/2TupQ1g #KemperConnect Max Ernst (German, 18911976), detail of "L'oeil du silence" (The Eye of Silence), 194344. Oil on canvas, 43 1/4 x 56 1/4". University purchase, Kende Sale Fund, 1946. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Vote, baby, vote The American artist Robert Rauschenberg reproduced a protest poster with this popular phrase in his collaged print from 1968. Commonly employed by civil rights leaders at the time, this call still inspires today. Whether you’re voting in person, by mail, absentee, or are not eligible to vote, there are many ways to get involved this election season. Talking to friends and family about their voting plans, researching ballot measures, and sharing accurate inf...ormation about voting rights are all important ways to combat voter suppression and contribute to the democratic process. Robert Rauschenberg, Guardian, 1968. Lithograph, 4 11/16 x 30 1/4". Gift of Constance Wittcoff, 1979. Estate of Robert Rauschenberg / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

#FridayFavorite from David Lobbig, curator of environmental life at the Missouri Historical Society: "One of his best-known works, Bingham’s depiction of Daniel Boone’s trans-Mississippi migration from Kentucky dramatically illuminates the centrality of the ideology of Manifest Destiny in the United States. In light of today’s focus on broadening popular understanding of American history, this iconic painting becomes particularly interesting. In 1819 Bingham moved into the lo...wer Missouri River Valley very near to where Boone, by then heralded as a hero, lived (and would soon die). The same year a treaty with the Osage Nation took their land, enabling Missouri to enter the Union as a compromise slave state 2 years later. Bingham’s painting glorifying this time thus can be seen, beyond its intended celebration of the western march of 'civilization,' as a key substantiation for the colonial development of this country." #KemperConnect George Caleb Bingham, "Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap," 185152. Gift of Nathaniel Phillips, 1890.

The Kemper Art Museum is happy to announce the acquisition of Rodney McMillian’s "Untitled (clouds)," 2019. The work is from McMillian’s recent series of landscape paintings that critically engage the domestic realm, the history of abstraction, and the genre of American landscape painting. Using postconsumer objects, in this case a crocheted blanket bought from a thrift store, McMillian explores the concept of home as a site of psychological comfort and a place where belief...s and biases, including about class, race, and identity, are shaped and indoctrinated. #ThinkArtToday #KemperConnect Rodney McMillian, "Untitled (clouds)," 2019. Latex on blanket, 61 x 98". University purchase, Bixby Fund, 2020.

#FridayFavorite from Rebecca Messbarger, professor of Italian at Washington University in St. Louis: "As a teacher of a freshman course on the history of museums, I always begin the semester by taking students to the Kemper for a tour of the collection by its director, Sabine Eckmann. Her insight into art, artists, collecting, curating, and the role of the patron stay with them all semester. A regular feature is standing under Olafur Eliasson's massive hanging aluminum globe,... 'Your Imploded View,' reflecting on our own reflections mirrored in the artwork, which speaks to the role of the viewer's placement, viewpoint, and angle of visionboth physical and metaphysicalwith respect to art and the space of art. Students are blown away by the experience." #KemperConnect Olafur Eliasson, Your Imploded View, 2001. Polished aluminum, 51 3/16". University purchase, Parsons Fund, 2005.

Those who make a plan to vote are more likely to actually vote. Make your plan today! The deadline to request an absentee or mail-in ballot in Missouri is October 21. Visit Vote.org for more information. #PlanYourVote... Artwork by @chrisunkim Christine Sun Kim

This #FridayFavorite comes from Sarah María Medina, a poet, fiction/creative nonfiction writer, in the International Writer´s Track of Comparative Literature: Last spring when I brought my poetry students to the Kemper, one work that captured my attention was Ai Weiwei´s ‘Bombs,’ a wallpaper of weapons of mass destruction that spans a two-story wall. I stood before it for a long time, beneath it in some way too, struck by the weight that the images carried; not just by the f...ull-scale weapons presented, but also by the history of war and armed conflicts that are called forth by the images that tower overhead. After the American War in Viet Nam, images of wars and armed conflicts have been tightly controlled by the US government; often my young students are shocked to learn that the War in Afghanistan has been going on since they were born; they inherited a war that they are distanced from visually. Here, the weapons do not allow the viewer to forget, but rather conjure the destroyed landscapes, the grieving families, the refugees who´ve fled and who´re continually displaced. The history of the destructive weapons is powerfully, silently placed on view. Ai Weiwei, Bombs, 2019. Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio. Installation view, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, 2019. Photo by Joshua White / JWPictures.com

Latin American artists in the mid-20th century reimagined the relationship of art to its public; art was no longer considered entirely autonomous and internally coherent but relationally dynamic, prompting the imaginative engagement of the spectator and producing meaning through this very relationality. (Alexander Alberro, Abstraction in Reverse) This Saturday at 11 am (CDT) Alexander Alberro, author of Abstraction in Reverse: The Reconfigured Spectator in Mid-Twentiet...h-Century Latin American Art, will present a lecture examining the invention of a participatory mode of abstract art in Argentina and Venezuela. Focusing on the development of research-based artistic practices aimed at demystifying the creative process by such artists as Julio Le Parc and Jesús Rafael Soto, Alberro will unpack how and why these experiments evolved into a greater concern with the participation of the viewer. Learn more and register at https://buff.ly/3nu3tXq #ThinkArtToday #KemperConnect Jesús Rafael Soto, Boîte (Box), 1964. Screen printing on Pelxiglas in wood frame, 12 5/8 x 12 5/8 x 6 1/2 in. Published by Edition MAT / Galerie Der Spiegel, Cologne. Kern Collection, Großmaischeid, Germany.

ARE YOU REGISTERED? The deadline for voter registration in Missouri is tomorrow! #PlanYourVote