Yasuo Kuniyoshi, “Forbidden Fruit,” 1950
The SUArt Galleries will open the 2013-14 exhibition year with three new exhibitions installed in the permanent collection galleries. Highlighting the breadth of the collections’ encyclopedic holdings and exploring international artists and themes, these new displays explore the genres of photography, prints, paintings and sculpture. Two of the exhibitions on display in the Print and Photo Study galleries will highlight the University’s vast holdings of historical Japanese photographs and prints. The third exhibition will examine artwork created by international artists who have immigrated to the United States.
The exhibitions will run Sept. 5-May 11, 2014 in the Shaffer Art Building. Gallery hours are Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.- 4:30 p.m.; and Thursdays 11 a.m.-8 p.m. The SUArt Galleries will host an opening night reception from 5-7 p.m. on Thursday, Sept. 5. Patrons are welcome to view the exhibition until the gallery closes at 8 p.m. The reception is free and open to the public. Select programming associated with the exhibitions will include Lunchtime Lectures with the exhibition curators, to be announced on the SUArt Galleries website (http://suart.syr.edu).
“America’s Calling,” presented in the Gallery of American Art, is an exhibition of 16 works of art by 15 foreign-born artists, including Ben Shahn, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Josef Albers. The artists included in the exhibition, or their families, were drawn to the United States because it offered opportunities unavailable in their homelands. A variety of media is presented in the display, including painting, ceramics, sculpture and printmaking that are handled using often innovative techniques. Cumulatively, these artists had a profound and permanent effect on the evolution of American art.
The Photo Study Room will present “Visions for Sale: Photographs of Nineteenth Century Japan,” an exhibition of 22 hand-colored albumen prints from the 19th century exploring the country’s people, land and environment that was quickly changing as a result of modernization. European photographers such as Felice Beato and Baron Raimond Stillfield traveled to Japan to document the nation’s exotic landscape and historically idiosyncratic jobs before they were swept away by the tide of modernism.
“Ukiyo-e to Shin Hanga: Japanese Woodcuts from the Syracuse University Art Collection” will be installed in the Print Study Room and draws from the University’s collection of more than 300 examples from this important and hugely influential art movement. The prints on view date from the height of color Ukiyo-e printmaking (1780-1868) through Japan’s Meiji period (1868-1912) to 20th-century impressions of the Shin Hanga movement (1915-1940s). Masters of this medium are represented, including the work of Utamaro, Kuniyoshi, Hokusai, Hiroshida, Tsuchiya Koitsu and Yoshida Hiroshi. The prints exemplify the soft, painterly style that is synonymous with the Japanese woodcut, and illustrates the wide range of subjects from courtesans to Kabuki theater and the Japanese landscape.
