The featured fall exhibition “Four x Four: Community Curators and the Syracuse University Art Collection,” will be on view at the SUArt Galleries in the Shaffer Art Building through Oct. 24.
The exhibition is co-curated by four Syracuse personalities chosen for their association with the Syracuse visual arts community: journalist Nancy Keefe Rhodes, former SU lacrosse coach Roy Simmons, Community Folk Art Director Kheli Willetts and artist Jack White. The four individuals were invited by the SUArt department to participate in the exhibition using works drawn from the University’s extensive permanent collection.
Rhodes, art critic for the City Eagle newspaper, curates an exhibition that examines the public art programs of the 1930s. To achieve this, Rhodes uses select pieces of the SUArt collection created between the two world wars that is deep and significant.
Simmons, an artist in his own right, examines the work of Ivan Mestrovic, the Croatian artist and former professor from SU’s School of Art who had a direct impact on the coach’s appreciation for works in fine arts. Simmons makes collages, assemblages and constructions that captivate the eye.
White, a former Syracuse resident and internationally recognized artist of abstract paintings, selected works from the art collection featuring figurative subjects involving hand-to-hand sports, including boxing and wrestling.
Willetts uses pieces from the collection that represent her innate creative abilities using visual interrelationships in the ethnographic and art collections through vice and virtue. Her collection shows how different groups and individuals look at the artifacts of other cultures.
Other exhibitions opening at the SU Art Galleries this fall include “Impassioned Images: German Expressionist Prints” and “Monument to a Warlord: Photographs of Nikko and the Temple of Ieyasu.” The first reviews the major artists and approaches to the expressionist aesthetic in the early 20th century; the second presents 40 19th-century hand-colored albumen prints that highlight a tour of Nikko, the final resting place of Ieyasu Tokugawa, Japan’s first shogun of the Edo period. The exhibition’s design provides an experience similar to that of a 19th century visitor’s tour of the Tosho-gu, the emperor’s burial complex. These exhibitions will be installed in the Print and Photo Study Galleries, respectively, and will be on view throughout the academic year.
The Syracuse University Art Collection is one of the country’s oldest University collections, dating back to 1874. Numbering more than 45,000 objects, it contains large collections of American and European art, as well as ethnographic holdings including Chinese, Pre-Columbian, Korean, Japanese, African and Asian Indian material.
Recent renovations in the SUArt Galleries will enable visitors to see more of the University’s permanent collection and its storage facility than ever before. The reconstruction has turned a once-closed facility into an open storage space where visitors are welcome to examine 1,450 ethnographic objects illustrating different cultures and time periods in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas. A connecting hallway, containing further collections of sculpture, glass and ceramics, creates a loop enabling visitors to move in one continuous direction.
SUArt Galleries is open Tuesday-Sunday, from 11 a.m.-4 p.m., and Thursday until 8 p.m. It is closed on Mondays. For more information, call 443-4097 or email suart@syr.edu.
