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Direct from the Director Late Summer 2024

We’ve had a very exciting summer at the museum! As a result of our recent AAM Museum Accreditation, this was the first summer that we had professional guards and were thus able to be open through July. Our first two summer exhibitions proved very popular with our visitors, especially Peter Anton: Just Desserts!

We welcomed 5,732 visitors to our Peter Anton and Suzanne Chamlin exhibitions in the 10 weeks between graduation and the close of the exhibitions.

We broke our one-day attendance record with over 850 visitors (serving free frozen treats at an ice cream social that day probably didn’t hurt)!

Recently we've been busy repainting the walls, planning new programs, preparing our two fall exhibitions, and installing a new group of outdoor sculpture. We can't wait to welcome you all back to campus.

The Museum is all about works on paper this fall! A pair of exhibitions will introduce you and our other visitors to a broad range of works on paper, from Old Master prints in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries to prints by contemporary BIPOC artists in the Walsh Gallery. We hope you will check out both exhibitions and all of the programs on offer.

The first exhibition, opening in the Museum’s Bellarmine Hall Galleries on September 12 and on view through December 21st, is Ink and Time: European Prints from the Wetmore Collection. Curated by Michelle DiMarzo, PhD (Assistant Professor of Art History & Visual Culture), the exhibition presents a group of woodcuts, engravings, and etchings from the late 15th through late 18th centuries, including Albrecht Dürer, Raphael, Rembrandt, and Canaletto. From familiar favorites like Dürer’s Adam and Eve and Rembrandt’s Three Trees to hidden gems like the gold-sprinkled surface of Maria Katharina Prestel’s Virtue Overcoming Vice, the show explores more than three centuries of artistic innovation on paper.

The works are part of a collection formed by Fanny S. Wetmore in the first decades of the 20th century and bequeathed to Connecticut College in 1930. This exhibition is the second in the Museum’s history to have been co-curated with Fairfield University students and has been supported by generous funding from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

The second exhibition, on view in the Museum’s Walsh Gallery in the Quick Center for the Arts, is Sacred Space: A Brandywine Workshop and Archives Print Exhibition. This exhibition opens on September 20th and also runs through December 21st. Sacred Space, organized by guest curator Juanita Sunday, draws on the rich history of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives, founded in Philadelphia in 1972 by artist Allan Edmunds. As of 2022, the Museum is home to a Brandywine “satellite collection” – the only such collection in Connecticut. This exhibition features works from the Museum’s own collection as well as loans from Brandywine itself.

Sacred Space encourages a deep exploration of spiritual connection, inviting viewers to reflect on the ancestral wisdom and memory passed down through generations. The exhibition serves as a portal into the interconnected realms of spirituality, time, space, memory, and culture. The artists pay homage to their forebears, drawing upon cultural traditions, rituals, and sacred practices to honor and preserve, as well as question, the invaluable heritage that shapes our identities.

In addition to the works from the Brandywine Collection, the exhibition will also feature local artists whose works are responding to the themes in Sacred Space. Artists invited by curator Juanita Sunday include Aisha Nailah, Iyaba Ibo Mandingo, Arvia Walker, and Rebecca Fowke. This exhibition is made possible by the generous support of corporate sponsor M & T Bank/Wilmington Trust.

A broad slate of programming complements both of these exhibitions, from hands-on workshops to rich public lectures, and can be explored on the museum’s website calendar at www.fairfield.edu/museum.

When you come to visit, or if you can join us for the Ink & Time festivities on September 26th, please make sure to seek out and enjoy Lauren Booth's fantastic bronze Tulip Family which has been installed on the Bellarmine Hall lawn, just below the building, on the slope heading down towards the Dolan School of Business.

Artfully yours, Carey

Captions:

Rembrandt van Rijn, Three Trees, 1643, etching, drypoint, and burin. Lent by Connecticut College.

Maria Katharina Prestel after Jacopo Ligozzi, The Triumph of Truth over Envy, 1780, etching and aquatint in brown and ochre ink, touched with gold leaf. Lent by Connecticut College.

Mikel Elam, Veil, 2019, offset lithograph, screenprint. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.13) © Mikel Elam

James Phillips, Untitled II, 1994, offset lithograph. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.33) © James Phillip

Ibrahim Miranda, El Túnel, 1999, offset lithograph. Lent by the Brandywine Workshop & Archives © Ibrahim Miranda

Lauren Booth, The Tulip Family: Mama Tulip, Papa Tulip and Child Tulip, 2017-2023, Bronze. On loan from the artist. © Lauren Booth

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Spring 2024 Direct from the Director

Woohoo! I am very excited to share the fantastic news that we are an accredited Museum!

The Fairfield University Art Museum has been awarded Accreditation from the American Alliance of Museums, the highest national recognition afforded to American museums. Receiving accreditation signifies excellence to the entire museum community, to government agencies and institutional funders, to collectors, partners, and visitors. This prestigious distinction will bring national recognition to our Museum for its commitment to excellence, accountability, high professional standards, and continued institutional improvement.

About the Accreditation process: Accreditation is a rigorous but highly rewarding process that examines all aspects of a museum’s operations. To earn accreditation, a museum first must conduct a year of self-study and then undergo a site visit by a team of peer reviewers. Our small-but-mighty team at the Fairfield University Art Museum worked on the self-study from May 2022 through May 2023. As part of the process, we hosted two peer reviewers on campus for a two-day site visit in November 2023. The Alliance’s Accreditation Commission, an independent and autonomous body of museum professionals, considered the self-study and visiting committee report to determine whether we should receive accreditation. We were just notified of this happy result!

Our accreditation distinguishes the Fairfield University Art Museum on the national stage:

Of the nation’s estimated 33,000 museums, just over 1,080 are currently accredited.

Fairfield University Art Museum is one of only 21 accredited museums in Connecticut and one of only 12 accredited art museums in the state. 

Only 11% of museums in New England and only 16% of the academic art museums in the country are accredited.

Only 15% of the museums with staffs the size of Fairfield’s Art Museum have achieved this honor, and only one other Jesuit University has an accredited museum (the De Saisset Museum at Santa Clara University).

We are incredibly proud to be an accredited Museum and to have been recognized for all that we have accomplished since the Museum’s inception in 2010. Among the achievements we are most proud of are: having grown and diversified the permanent collection, which now numbers almost 2,700 objects; making our programs accessible to the broadest possible audiences through livestreaming, recording and archiving; keeping our exhibitions and events always completely free and open to all year after year; and making all of our exhibition materials available bilingually in Spanish. Our accreditation is a testament to the incredible generosity of our wonderful donors and supporters, who make our work possible and enable us to present programs of the highest quality for the benefit of our students, faculty, and the broader community.

We have recently acquired a number of new works, some by donation and several via the Black Art Fund, in our continued quest to diversify our collection by purchasing works by Contemporary Black artists. This stunning photograph, entitled Sun and Trees, by Adger Cowans was included in our 2022 solo exhibition of the artist's work. We are thrilled to now be able to add it to our permanent collection, and it is making a reappearance in our Landscape in Focus exhibition opening next week.

This work by Martina Johnson-Allen was acquired, along with two others, from Brandywine Workshop and Archives to augment our Satellite Collection of works created there. It will be included in an exhibition this coming fall focusing on Brandywine prints entitled Sacred Spaces, guest curated by Juanita Sunday.

We are absolutely delighted and extremely grateful that the Quetzal that is included in Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp, the current exhibition in the Museum's Walsh Gallery, has been donated by the artist to the Museum's permanent collection. You have just one month left to see this fantastic exhibition - do not miss it!

I look forward to seeing you in the galleries this spring for Christy Rupp (followed by Peter Anton: Just Desserts), Suzanne Chamlin: Studies in Color, and our Focus on Landscape photography exhibition.

Artfully yours, Carey Carey Mack Weber Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director

Captions: Adger Cowans, Sun and Trees, 1959, archival pigment print. Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2024 Martina Johnson-Allen, Another Realm, 2006, offset lithograph. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2024 Christy Rupp, Quetzal, 2020, credit cards, wood, steel, mixed media. Gift of the artist. Christy Rupp, Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp, Gallery Installation shot, Walsh Gallery, February 2024

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Winter 2024 Direct from the Director

I hope you will join us for the two winter exhibitions described in the current newsletter, which open with receptions on Jan. 18th (Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp) and on Feb. 1st (Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica) respectively.

I am excited to give you a sneak preview of what will be coming up in the galleries after that! Following Helen Glazer in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries will be a solo show of recent works by a Fairfield University Studio Art professor, entitled Suzanne Chamlin: Studies in Color.

In this exhibition of recent work, Chamlin explores ideas about color theory and light through a series of landscape and interior stills. Since 2012, the artist has carefully charted her paints using the Munsell color system, which analyzes colors in terms of hue (the color itself), value (relative light and dark) and chroma (level of saturation or brilliance). For each of her paintings, Chamlin sets a highly specific palette; experimentation within this limited range then guides her decisions about process and pictorial space.

Chamlin's works will be complemented by an exhibition entitled The Landscape in Focus: Recent Acquisitions of Photography, on view in the rear gallery. The photographs on view will include recent donations to the Museum of work by artists including Alen MacWeeney, Bea Nettles, Victoria Sambunaris, Larry Silver, James Welling, and Huang Yan, among others.

Following Christy Rupp in the Museum's Walsh Gallery, in the Quick Center for the Arts, will be Peter Anton: Just Desserts, a solo exhibition of Anton’s incredibly realistic, oversized pop sculptures of desserts, on view from May 10 through July 27, 2024.

Anton’s models for his array of desserts come from products that are instantly familiar to the viewer and evoke a nostalgia for childhood (and adult) favorites. Sculptures that will be featured in the exhibition include a melting chocolate-covered ice cream pop, a gigantic box of donuts, and an open box of chocolates with a few missing a bite, together with numerous crumpled brown candy cups.  

I hope this brief preview has whet your appetite for all that we have in store for you this spring and summer!

I want to also remind you that thanks to a generous Access for All grant from the Art Bridges Foundation the Museum is now open until 8 p.m. on Thursday nights! I encourage you to plan an evening visit to take advantage of these wonderful new expanded hours.

Looking forward to seeing you in the galleries! Artfully yours, Carey

Captions: Suzanne Chamlin, Autumn Yellow, 2022. Oil on linen. 9 x 12 inches. Lent by the artist. Suzanne Chamlin, Painter Hill Road 4, 2022. Oil on linen. 10 x 20 inches.Lent by the artist. Suzanne Chamlin, Window Study – Summer, 2023. Oil and charcoal on linen. 8 x 10 inches. Lent by the artist. Victoria Sambunaris, Untitled (train on salt flats), Great Salt Desert, Utah, 2002. Chromogenic print. Edition: 5. 39 × 55 inches. Gift of Avo Samuelian and Hector Manuel Gonzalez. Peter Anton, Super Donuts, 2020. Mixed media. Lent by the artist.

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Direct from the Director Late Fall 2023

It has been an exceptionally busy season at the Museum! It has been a privilege for us to present the landmark exhibition In Real Times. Arthur Szyk: Artist & Soldier for Human Rights this fall. Since the exhibition opened on September 28, we have:

Offered free admission to over 3,700 visitors

Hosted more than 70 free online and in-person Szyk-related events, including exhibition tours led by the Director, the Exhibition Coordinator, our Educators, and a fantastic corps of community volunteers, which have been attended by over 2,000 people;

Received 20,000+ YouTube views of the Szyk video tour and recorded programs.

The Season of Giving is upon us, and we need your support to continue this good work!

The Museum operates on a modest annual budget, and exhibitions like the Szyk show are very expensive to produce. We depend on the contributions of generous donors like you to keep our museum offerings free and accessible both in person and online, in both English and Spanish.

If you participated in one of our numerous events this fall, enjoyed our virtual programs, or simply believe in the power of the arts in our community, will you please make a gift today to help enhance our exhibitions, ensure our unwavering commitment to excellence, and continue to inspire young minds?

Please take a minute and DONATE now.

Museum Accreditation News: Last week we had the privilege of hosting John Wetenhall, Director of the George Washington University Museum of Art, and The Textile Museum and Megan McAdow, Director of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum at Saginaw Valley State University. They spent two days with us on campus as our Site Reviewers for the American Alliance of Museums Accreditation process. They met with University students, faculty, staff, alumni, members of our Collections Committee, and of the University Board of Trustees, as well as foundation funders, community collaborators, and other Fairfield County arts and culture professionals. Their primary role was to confirm that all of the information that we had shared in our Self-Study was correct. They will write a report based on their findings which will be submitted to the AAM Accreditation Committee at their February 2024 meeting where they will vote on whether to grant us accreditation. We will certainly let you know!

Upcoming Winter 2024 Exhibitions: We are very excited about the two exhibitions we are opening in late January/early February, both of which focus on environmental and climate-related themes. In the Walsh Gallery, we are presenting Streaming: Sculpture by Christy Rupp. Understood as one of the early pioneers in the field of ecological art activism, the artist, activist and thought-leader Christy Rupp has an international reputation. Streaming will feature a survey of Rupp’s wall installations and free-standing sculpture created with detritus gathered from the waste stream, which chronicle the ongoing tension between natural systems and the environment in transition, and call our attention to our interconnectedness with non-humans and habitat. Informed by science and the historical representation of natural history, the artwork in this exhibition examines the way we frame our opinions of nature, using irony and wit to represent the human impact on our natural habitat.

In the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, we will present Helen Glazer: Walking in Antarctica. This interdisciplinary exhibition includes photography and sculpture made from 3D scans of ice and rock formations, inspired and informed by Glazer’s experiences as a grantee of the National Science Foundation Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. It also includes an audio tour which takes the visitor on a series of “walks” through the Antarctic landscape, narrated by the artist.

Please come see the Szyk exhibition before it closes if you have not yet had a chance to see it – it truly is a remarkable and timely collection of works. It is only open through December 16th! Keep in mind that thanks to a recent generous grant from the Art Bridges Foundation, we are now open for extended hours on Thursdays until 8pm.

Wishing you and yours a very happy Holiday season.

Artfully yours, Carey

Captions: Christy Rupp, Petroplankton, 2019-2021. Collected single use plastics. Courtesy of the artist. Helen Glazer, Cloudburst, Erebus Ice Tongue Cave, Antarctica, 2015/2017; photograph. Courtesy of the artist.

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Direct from the Director Fall 2023

We are busy installing our major fall exhibition, In Real Times: Arthur Szyk: Artist and Soldier for Human Rights!

Please take a look at our Eventbrite site, and register for the events and programs that interest you - some of them are starting to sell out, and we don't want you to miss anything! If you can't make it to one of the programs, remember we will livestream and record as much as we can, so you will always have the option to join us remotely.

Arthur Szyk's artwork has to be seen in person to be appreciated, because the level of detail is absolutely incredible. We can't wait to welcome you to the Bellarmine Hall Galleries starting on September 29th.

We hope this exhibition and the symposium on October 4-5 will provide opportunities for conversations around the difficult topics that Szyk raises in his work, from antisemitism to racism to the rights of global refugees.

If you are attending programs in the Quick Center for the Arts this fall, make sure to check out Szyk: The Interactive Experience in the museum's Walsh Gallery. Expanding on the power of the main exhibition, the immersive Szyk experience features two digital workstations that allow visitors to explore Szyk’s miniatures in high resolution, reconstructing the artist’s gaze through a “digital magnifying glass.” Visitors will be able to remix and repurpose individual elements, characters, and motifs drawn from the works in the exhibition, to create new cartoons that will be instantly “published” as projections on large wall surfaces in the gallery itself and online, giving the contemporary exploration and reinterpretations of Szyk’s art a broad audience in real-time.

Other features of Szyk: The Interactive Experience will include a screening room with films about Szyk’s art and life, a reading room, an art-making space, a comment wall, and an ambient soundtrack of American music from the era of Szyk’s prominence in the late 30s and 40s.

We look forward to hearing your responses to the Szyk exhibition!

The other thing that is keeping us busy this fall at the Museum is preparations for our Museum Accreditation site visit. We will be visited in November by a team selected by the American Alliance of Museums who will tour our facilities, review our accreditation documents, interview staff and stakeholders, and assess the Museum's readiness for accreditation. We are very excited for this next step in our institutional journey!

Looking forward to seeing you in the galleries this fall! Carey

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Direct from the Director Summer 2023

What a fantastic year of exhibitions and programs it has been - thank you all for being a part of it! I am delighted to share with you a brief recap of our successes - we presented six exhibitions, together with 74 in-person and virtual programs! We had over 8000 in person visitors, and over 60,000 digital engagements with our virtual tours, lectures and other programs. One reason this number is so high is that almost 30,000 people have watched the beautiful video tour we created for the Norma Minkowitz exhibition this past winter. Did you see it? If not, you should check it out.

I have just returned from the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries annual conference and am full of ideas for how to make our museum even stronger! It is always so inspiring to hear what our colleagues in the field of academic art museum are doing at their institutions all over the country. Michelle DiMarzo and I were both able to present some of the innovative and exciting work that we are doing at our museum as well. Michelle lead a round table discussion about student-curated exhibitions, sharing the two that we presented to you this past year, and the one we have coming up in fall 2024 (focusing on Old Master prints). I lead a group discussion about virtual programming, and shared our commitment to continuing to providing this service to our communities, where I was able to boast about our remarkable virtual engagement numbers!

This summer at the Museum we are all very busy getting ready for our major fall exhibition, In Real Times: Arthur Szyk: Artist and Soldier for Human Rights. Please take a look at our Eventbrite site, and register for the events that interest you, because some of them may sell out. We have people joining us from all over the country to attend this exhibition, the symposium, and some of the other programs. As always, we will livestream and record as much as we can, but events like gallery tours are limited to small groups and are in person only. We are the exclusive venue for this exhibition in the northeast, and are very excited to be able to share Szyk's remarkable and important artwork with our community. We look forward to welcoming you to the exhibition opening on September 28th, please sign up now for Philip Eliasoph's opening night lecture and for the opening reception.

We continue to work hard to build our collection through donations, and I would like to share the wonderful news of a recent gift to the Museum by a generous Fairfield alum. Patrick J. Waide, class of '59, had previously lent a collection of works from his collection, by artist Andrew Forge, to an exhibition that the museum presented in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries in fall 2020. Very few of you had the opportunity to see this beautiful and important exhibition because the campus was closed to outside visitors, due to Covid-19, during this time. Happily, these works have all now been gifted to the Museum, to be part of our permanent collection. We look forward to sharing them with you again in the galleries someday soon, but in the meantime please visit the exhibition webpage linked above.

Wishing you all an art-filled, relaxing, and restorative summer. Looking forward to seeing you in September! Carey

Image Captions: Arthur Szyk, ‘My People’, Samson in The Ghetto – (The Battle of the Warsaw Ghetto), 1945, watercolor, gouache, ink, and graphite on board. Taube Family Arthur Szyk Collection, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, University of California, Berkeley (2017.5.1.129) Arthur Szyk, Thomas Jefferson's Oath, watercolor, gouache, ink and colored pencil on board. Courtesy of Taube Family Arthur Szyk Collection, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, UC Berkeley(2017.5.1.224) Andrew Forge, Winter, Kent, 1973, oil on canvas. Collection of Patrick J. Waide Jr. '59

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Direct from the Director Spring 2023

Spring has sprung, and we have a new exhibition opening this Thursday in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries to celebrate the new season! In Their Element(s): Women Artists Across Media is a landmark exhibition that is the 1st in the museum's history to have been solo-curated by a student, Phoebe Charpentier '23, the 1st to feature recent acquisitions to the collection, and one that marks our 1st collaboration with the Westport Town Permanent Art Collection (WestPAC) which kindly lent 7 artworks.

I am particularly proud of this exhibition because it reflects some of the work we have accomplished during my tenure as museum director in terms of diversifying the collection (both through donations and through purchases from the Black Art Fund, which we created in 2020). In Their Element(s) is quite truly a show of recent acquisitions, as all of the works in this exhibition were donated or purchased since I became the director in 2019. Our student curator chose to focus on work by women artists, and we now have over 360 works by women in the collection from which she was able to choose. We acquired 42 works by women just in the last year! Work by women artists now makes up about 13% of our collection of over 2600 objects – an improvement from where we started, at less than 10%, but we know we still have a long way to go.

You may wonder how we acquire artworks for the museum, so I thought I would take this opportunity to provide some brief insight into the process. As a young museum, just in our 13th year, we do not yet have an acquisitions budget or fund, except for the small Black Art Fund, which we have used to purchase 34 works to date (of which 15 are by women). All other artworks acquired by the Museum come to us as donations or bequests through planned giving; most are solicited, but some come unsolicited from a variety of sources including University alumni, local collectors, artists and dealers. Solicited gifts are specific artworks that we ask people if they would consider gifting to the museum – these are objects that we know will fit into our collecting goals and plans. Some of these sources include Museum Exchange, artist foundations and estates, living artists, and collectors with whom we have close relationships. All donations (accessions) of artwork to the museum's collection must be approved first by me and then by the Museum's Collections Committee to ensure that they meet all of our Collections Plan criteria. Our Collections Committee is comprised of collectors, artists, and museum and gallery professionals, many of who are alumni.

As a young academic art museum, we are committed to assembling a collection that is broadly diverse and representative of the lived experience of the many communities that use our museum. As we continue to thoughtfully grow our collection, we increase the opportunities for object-centered learning, both in the study of individual artworks, in class-specific sessions for undergraduates and Art in Focus session in the galleries led by our Curator of Education and Academic Engagement, and in exhibitions such as this one. I hope that if you have a museum-quality artwork that would augment our collection you will consider donating it or making a bequest to the museum so that it can become a part of our teaching mission.

I would like to end with a quick preview of our fall 2023 exhibition. Both of our galleries will be dedicated to the work of Polish Jewish artist Arthur Szyk (1894-1951), in a remarkable exhibition created by the Magnes Collection for Jewish Art and Culture, at UC Berkeley, and now on view at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. At Fairfield, Dr. Philip Eliasoph is the exhibition coordinator, and will be presenting the opening night lecture. I know it seems far away, but we are hard at work readying a fantastic experience for you that will open in late September, with lots of exciting programming. Please take the time to read about it on the exhibition website.

The Women's Rights Are Human Rights international poster exhibition was extended through July 1, so also please don't miss the chance to see it in the Walsh Gallery, if you have not already done so.

Wishing you a lovely art-filled spring. I hope to see you in the galleries.

Artfully yours, Carey

Captions: Lucy Sallick, Studio Floor Still Life #4, 1975. Oil on canvas. Lent by Westport Public Art Collections, 530. Bicentennial Trust for Westport Art, 1976-1978. © Lucy Sallick Sonya Clark, Afro Blue Matter, 2017. Offset lithograph on paper. Edition 38/70. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Archives and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022 (2022.17.10) © Sonya Clark Miriam Schapiro, Shrine, 1962. Oil on canvas. Gift of Charles P. Regensberg, 1991. (2022.36.01) © 2023 Estate of Miriam Schapiro/ Artist's Rights Society (ARS), New York Arthur Szyk, Thomas Jefferson's Oath, watercolor, gouache, ink and colored pencil on board. Courtesy of Taube Family Arthur Szyk Collection, The Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life, UC Berkeley Nancy Hom, Catalina’s World, 2011 © Nancy Hom

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Direct from the Director Winter 2023

Happy new year, and welcome to the spring semester! We are thrilled to welcome you to two new exhibitions this month!

We are delighted to have opened Women's Rights Are Human Rights, last week, in the museum's Walsh Gallery. Channel 12 news came to the lively opening, and did a lovely story about the exhibition which aired that night.

This week we hope you will join us in Bellarmine Hall this coming Thursday for the opening night festivities for the exhibition Norma Minkowitz: Body to Soul. The guest curator, Sarah Parrish, PhD will present the opening night lecture, which will be followed by a reception in the Great Hall.

The video tour of this newly installed exhibition, which was just posted late last week, has already garnered over 3000 views - enjoy - and don't forget you can find video tours of all of our post-2019 exhibitions on our YouTube channel.

I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to the museum's annual appeal this winter - your generosity allows us to continue to present high quality exhibitions, programs and events, all for free and open to all, and to present all of our exhibition materials bi-lingually in Spanish. If you have not yet given, and would like to, you can donate using this link.

Those of you who have kindly contributed to our Black Art Fund have been instrumental in helping us to continue the important work of diversifying our collection. Our most recent acquisitions using these funds were three lithographs by Tennessee artist Althea Murphy-Price, from the series Ombre, including Deep Wave (illustrated above).

Our most recent donation of artwork to the Black Art Fund, is the beautiful Romare Bearden color lithograph Three Women (Easter Sunday) (shown above). We are very grateful to Evelyn Boulware and Russell Goings for this generous gift, and splendid addition to our collection.

We hope to help you to brighten the dark days of winter with our exhibitions and programs. Don't forget that almost all of them are live-streamed and recorded, so you can enjoy them from the warmth and comfort of your home if you don't feel like venturing out. We have two more exhibitions opening in late April, In Their Element(s): Women Artists Across Media, and Peter Anton: Just Desserts (you can check our upcoming exhibitions page anytime to see what is coming). There is lots to look forward to in the months ahead - don't forget to check our Eventbrite page to see all of the upcoming events and programs. I hope to see you in the galleries one day soon!

Artfully yours, Carey

Carey Mack Weber Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director

Image Captions: Norma Minkowitz, Victim, 1995. Fiber, paint, resin. Courtesy of the artist and browngrotta arts. Althea Murphy-Price, Ombre. Color lithograph. Museum purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022. Romare Bearden, Three Women (Easter Sunday), 1979. Color lithograph. Gift of Evelyn Boulware and Russell Goings, 2023.

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Direct from the Director November News - 2022

We are pleased to announce that we have been accepted into the American Alliance of Museums Accreditation program! This is the first step toward full museum accreditation, the museum field’s mark of distinction, a high-profile, peer-based validation of our operations and impact. We have begun a self-study that the museum staff will work on throughout this academic year. Once that has been completed, a team of Peer Reviewers will be chosen to conduct a site visit at the museum in November-December 2023. At this visit, they will seek to determine if the museum is operating according to the highest standards and best practices of the museum profession, and, if so, will recommend to the national Accreditation Commission that we be accredited, the gold standard of museum excellence. We will learn of that determination in February 2024. It is very exciting to have begun this work!

We have had some wonderful recent donations to the collection that I would like to highlight for you today. Mary Morris - Class of '88 - donated two prints to the permanent collection in honor of her father, Edward J. Morris, Class of '60. She was inspired by our call for donations to our Black Art Fund, and responded with a charming woodcut by Ted Jones of a neighborhood bus stop.

She also donated a wonderful print by the Pop Art genius Red Grooms which cleverly includes an homage to many of Édouard Manet's most famous works.

Please don't miss our fall exhibitions [Out of the Kress Vaults: Women in Sacred Renaissance Painting and Gladys Triana/Beyond Exile], which are both coming to a close on December 17th! As you may know, the most expensive part of presenting fine art exhibitions is the cost of packing and shipping. The cost of a Renaissance painting exhibition like Out of the Kress Vaults (which requires custom crating for each artwork, as well as special requirements for shipping and handling) exacerbates this situation. What this means for our community is that it will be at least 5-7 years before there will be another exhibition of this type here at the museum. The last one - The Holy Name: The Art of the Gesu - Bernini and his Age was almost 5 years ago! The works in this show are exquisite - and include five masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., including a painting of the Holy Family by idiosyncratic master El Greco. See them locally before they head home!

If you have already seen the Gladys Triana exhibition in the Walsh Gallery, don’t forget there is another venue full of her work awaiting your exploration! The Art Museum, University of Saint Joseph has a companion exhibition to ours entitled From the Female to the Infinite.

Finally, a little pop quiz!

Did you know that all of our exhibitions, events and programs are free and open to everyone?

Did you know that we livestream, and record every program that we can, and then post the recordings on our YouTube channel so that you can access them any time?

Did you know that all of our exhibition materials are available in English and Spanish? 

Don’t worry – this quiz wasn’t graded! But if have enjoyed any of our exhibitions or programs this year, please consider donating to our annual appeal (which will be arriving in your mailbox in the next few days). This will help us to continue to make all that we do accessible to everyone, free of charge. Thank you.

Wishing you an art-filled holiday season, Carey

Captions: Ted Jones, Bus Stop, 1994. Woodcut. Gift of Mary Morris '88, in honor of Edward J. Morris '60, 2022. Red Grooms, Manet/Romance, 1967. Etching Gift of Mary Morris '88, in honor of Edward J. Morris '60, 2022. El Greco, The Holy Family with Saint Anne and the Infant John the Baptist, ca. 1595-1600. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1959.9.4. Gladys Triana, Shadows XIV, 2017. C-print. Courtesy of the artist.

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We're Back! A New Season of Exhibitions and Programs!

Direct from the Director - Fall 2022

I look forward to welcoming you back into the museum's galleries this fall! We have two exciting special exhibitions to share with you which have been years in the making, as well as a wonderful array of complementary programs.

In the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, you will find a milestone exhibition of Renaissance paintings: focused on representations of women in paintings with sacred subject matter, it is the first ever co-curated by a seminar of Fairfield University undergraduate students, as well as our first Old Master loan exhibition since The Holy Name, the Art of the Gesu: Bernini and his Age in 2018. On view are paintings loaned from museums across the country, including five spectacular works lent by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Michelle DiMarzo, PhD, the exhibition curator/professor of the seminar, will be offering a few guided tours of the exhibition (register quickly, as they will fill up fast!) We also have distinguished speakers coming to talk about "Living with Art in Renaissance Italy," "A Mother's Touch: The Agency of Mary in Renaissance Art," and "Conserving Old Masters: The Kress Program in Paintings Conservation."

Also on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, in the rear gallery, is a collaborative exhibition celebrating the interiors of Roman churches. Entitled Specimens and Reflections, this exhibition includes digitally manipulated photographic panoramas of the interiors of churches by Claudia Esslinger (Professor of Art, Kenyon College) accompanied by the poetry of Royal Rhodes ‘68 (Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Kenyon College) in a unique exploration of the intersection of word and image.

Opening on September 23rd (with a reception featuring Cuban jazz by the Cocomama Trio and mojitos on Saturday, September 24th) is Gladys Triana - A Path to Enlightenment: 1971-1921 / Beyond Exile. This exhibition marks our first collaboration with a fellow academic art museum, the Art Museum, University of Saint Joseph, to provide a two-venue survey of an artist’s work. Having the additional space of a second venue is allowing us to present close to 100 works created by the Cuban-born, New York-based Triana. It is exciting to have the opportunity to place Triana’s artworks in revealing dialogue with one another, and to offer overdue critical attention to her artistic practice in all of the many media in which she has worked in the course of her long and distinguished career.

Highlights of the Gladys Triana programming include a poetry reading by her friend, the distinguished Cuban-born poet Maya Islas, and a lecture by the faculty liaison for the exhibition, Silvia Marsans-Sakly, PhD, "Conceived in Revolution: Cuba's Long Freedom Struggle."

We have an array of museum experiences lined up this fall, waiting to be enjoyed by loyal enthusiasts, or to be experienced for the first time! These include Meditation and Mindfulness sessions with Jackie DeLise (both in-person in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries and Virtual), monthly Family Days, and regular Art in Focus sessions with Michelle DiMarzo (close looking in the galleries - both in person and virtual).

We hope there truly is something to interest each and every one of you at the museum this fall! I look forward to seeing you in the galleries one day soon.

With warm regards, Carey Captions: Installation view, Out of the Kress Vaults: Women in Sacred Renaissance Painting, in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. Claudia Esslinger, Santa Maria ad Martyres, Pantheon, photograph. Courtesy of the artist. Gladys Triana, Evolution III, 2014, C-Print. Courtesy of the artist. Gladys Triana, Shipwreck, 1991, Oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.

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Direct from the Director - Juneteenth

The Fairfield University Art Museum is very pleased to announce the acquisition of 40 artworks from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. Works by Adger Cowans, Janet Taylor Pickett, Eduardo “Choco” Roca Salazar, and Larry Walker are among those in the new “satellite collection” at FUAM. The collection includes works from the early 1980s to today by primarily BIPOC artists, with more than 50% of the works by women artists.. The acquisition of these prints was partly funded by the museum’s Black Art Fund, created by the museum in early 2021 to address a lack of diversity in its permanent collections. The Black Art Fund is dedicated to the acquisition of contemporary art by Black artists.

Founded in Philadelphia in 1972 by artist Allan Edmunds, the Brandywine Workshop and Archives is a nonprofit cultural institution celebrated for its engagement with the local community and its educational programming. For five decades, the workshop has offered arts programming in the neighborhoods of Philadelphia and sponsored printmaking residencies for both undiscovered and well-known artists. At Brandywine, collaboration and the exchange of ideas feed a culture of experimentation, in which master printers and artists continually challenge conventions of the creative process and push the technical boundaries of printmaking to produce exciting new works.

The Fairfield University Art Museum has acquired 39 works by artists from the Brandywine Workshop as part of the workshop’s initiative to place “satellite collections” in university art museums across the United States. According to Brandywine, the satellite program is intended to “bring the art of diverse cultures to institutions and communities that wish to enrich or diversify existing collections.” FUAM joins prestigious institutions including Harvard Art Museums, RISD Museum and the University of Delaware Museums.

Artists whose works are in the new Fairfield University Art Museum Brandywine Satellite collection include: Rick Bartow, Selma Burke, Adger Cowans, Allan Edmunds, Mikel Elam, Rodney Ewing, Maya Freelon, Curlee Raven Holton, Jacob Landau, Samella Lewis, Tanya Murphy-Dodd, Janet Taylor Pickett, Eduardo “Choco” Roca Salazar, Frank Smith, Larry Walker, and Jo Yarrington. The print by Yarrington, the 40th work in the collection, is a gift of the artist, who is a professor of Studio Art at Fairfield University. She did a residency at Brandywine in 1985, and has donated an impression of the print that she did there to the museum to fill out the collection.

A selection of these prints will be included in an exhibition focusing on the work of contemporary women artists. The exhibition, a curatorial collaboration between museum staff and Fairfield University student Phoebe Charpentier ‘23, will be on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries April 20 – July 15, 2023. A larger exhibition focused on the Brandywine Workshop and Archive is planned for Fall 2024. We hope you will explore the prints in this new Satellite Collection in the museum's online Collections Database, where you can view them individually or together in Brandywine Archive and Workshop Satellite Collections folder.

The works in Fairfield’s newly formed satellite collection have tremendously expanded the voices represented in our collection of contemporary prints and we are delighted to have been able to use our recently established Black Art Fund to partially finance this acquisition. However, we have spent almost all of the $30,000 which we have raised to date, so we hope you will help us to continue either through financial contributions or through donations of museum-quality artwork.

We know that this is ongoing work, and we are proud to share this step with you.

Carey Mack Weber Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director

Captions:

Rodney Ewing (b. 1964), My Country Needs Me, 1996 Offset lithograph on paper. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022.

Mikel Elam (b. 1964), Veil, 2019, Offset lithograph and screenprint on paper. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022.

Frank Smith (b. 1935), Be Bop Vamp, 1986. Offset Lithograph on paper. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022.

Tanya Murphy-Dodd (b. 1965), Men of Color to Arms, 2011. Offset Lithograph on paper. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022.

Adger Cowans (b. 1936), Modus, 1995. Offset Lithograph on paper. Partial gift of the Brandywine Workshop and Museum Purchase with funds from the Black Art Fund, 2022.

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Direct from the Director Spring 2022

We are thrilled to open our new exhibition, 13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver's Connecticut Photographs on Thursday, March 24th. We will celebrate with our first in person opening with food and drink, where we can raise a glass together, in over two years. I hope that you will be able to join us.

I am very grateful to those of you who contributed to our 2021-22 annual appeal, have renewed your membership in our 2010 Society, and have donated to our Black Art Fund. If you have not yet donated please do, and help us to keep our exhibitions and programs free and open to all. You can give on our website or you can send us a check.

I am very excited to announce our most recent gift to the museum's permanent collection: a very generous donation from the Sam Francis Foundation of six prints and two paintings on paper. We look forward to sharing these works with you in the gallery soon.

Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility is on view through June 18th - in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries, don't miss it. The rescheduled program featuring Deborah Willis in conversation with Adger Cowans, moderated by guest curator Halima Taha is now taking place on April 13th at 5 pm in the Quick Center. It will be followed by a wine and cheese reception. It is going to be fantastic, so please come!

Looking forward to seeing you in the galleries at at our programs this spring!

With warm regards, Carey

Carey Mack Weber

Captions top to bottom: Larry Silver, Shelter from the Rain, Sherwood Island State Park, Westport, CT, 1980, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York ©Larry Silver Sam Francis, Untitled, 1995, etching. Edition: 30. ©Sam Francis Foundation Installation shot, Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility, on view in the Fairfield University Art Museum's Bellarmine Hall Galleries, through June 18th

#adgercowans #larrysilver #ctarttrail #samfrancis

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Direct from the Director Winter 2022

Dear Friend,

I would like to wish a very happy, joyful, and art-filled new year to you, and send a special thank you to those of you who gave so generously to the museum's recent annual appeal. For those of you who have not yet had a chance to give, we would welcome your support at any time – you can easily give online through our website. It is with the support of donors like all of you that our small but mighty institution is able to achieve the high level of excellence we strive for in all of our exhibitions, educational initiatives, and programs. Your donations allow us to continue to keep everything that we do free of charge, including making almost every one of our spring programs available in a hybrid form – you can join our offerings in person, streaming from the comfort of your home via thequicklive.com, or recorded at a later date on our YouTube channel.

This spring semester, we are presenting four exhibitions in the museum’s galleries and one new outdoor sculpture installation. In the Walsh Gallery, we will present two exhibitions focusing on contemporary Chinese art: ink/stone and SEEING IS BELIEVING: CROSSINGS AND TRANSPOSITIONS, PART II (January 21-March 5). We hope you will join us on January 20th for the opening night lecture with Ive Covaci, PhD, curator of ink/stone as she highlights artworks and themes in the exhibition. She will be followed by Professor Jo Yarrington who will introduce a short film featuring a conversation between her and the five Chinese artists whose work comprises SEEING IS BELIEVING and speaks about how this exhibition came to fruition.

Bingyi (Chinese, b. 1975) The Tree of the Invisible, 2018, ink on paper. Lent by Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts, Gift of Adam Sokol, 2018.19. Photograph by Laura Shea.

After the opening talks, join us for a reception and first look at the exhibitions – ink/stone will feature some 15 contemporary Chinese paintings and works on paper, presented together with stone sculpture, including a scholar’s rock. By showing late 20th and 21st century works inspired by traditional Chinese artistic subjects of rocks and mountains, ink/stone will investigate how contemporary artists deploy, evoke and transform this motif, using a range of media from ink on paper to oil on canvas. SEEING IS BELIEVING, features works in a variety of media by He Jiancheng, Xiao Yao Ning, Luo Biwu, Zuo Zeng Yao and Zhang Zeng Min. Professor Yarrington travelled to China in 2016 with four other American artists, where they presented Part I of this international exchange.

Luo Biwu (Chinese, b. 1964) Landscape in Bag No. 3, 2021, silkscreen print. Courtesy of the artist.

On January 27th, we hope you will join us again for the opening of Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility (January 28-June 18), featuring the jazz of Grammy award winning saxophonist Patience Higgins and a book signing for Cowans' newest book of photography. The exhibition on view in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries will explore how Adger Cowans uses photography as a vehicle to articulate the beauty within the human condition and the world in which we live. It will feature over fifty works from across Cowan’s illustrious career as a photographer of portraiture, landscape, and film.

Adger Cowans (American, b. 1936) Egg Nude, 1958, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Finally, to give you something to look forward to during these cold days of winter, as we dream about summer, the beach, and leaves back on the trees, 13 Ways of Looking at Landscape: Larry Silver’s Connecticut Photographs will be our final spring exhibition, opening on March 25, in the Walsh Gallery. Photographer and Photo League member Larry Silver moved to Westport, CT in 1973 and with his camera, began exploring its regional environs, and pushing the boundaries of what landscape is. This exhibition, curated by Leslie K. Brown, PhD, will bring together over 40 years of Silver's work made of and in Connecticut.

Larry Silver (American, b. 1934) Sitting at Water’s Edge, Sherwood Island, Westport, Connecticut, 2014, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist and Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York.

Now on view on the Bellarmine Hall lawn, through next fall, are four fantastic, newly installed sculptures by environmental artist Alan Sonfist depicting leaves. The work is entitled, The Endangered Species of New England. Please look for the works as you drive on campus, and look forward to a series of programs around these sculptures in conjunction with Earth Day in April, when Sonfist will be coming to campus to speak about this project and his esteemed career as an eco-artist.

Alan Sonfist (American, b. 1946) The Endangered Species of New England, 2011, aluminum. On loan from the artist.

Finally, I would like to highlight an exciting new acquisition. Fairfield University alumnus Russell Panczenko and his wife Paula donated a print and etching by Sam Gilliam to the museum's Black Art Fund. Gilliam is an African-American color field painter and abstract artist, associated with the Washington Color School.

Sam Gilliam (American, b. 1933) Fasttrack, 1992. 8-color relief print with etching. Gift of Russell and Paula Panczenko, 2021.25.01

I look forward to seeing you in the weeks and months ahead, in the galleries, and at our programs (either in-person or online), and hope you enjoy the rich roster of lectures, conversations, gallery talks, workshops, meditations sessions, and family programs, that we have put together to keep you busy over the next few months!

With warm regards, Carey Carey Mack Weber

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Direct from the Director - Fall 2021

Dear Friend,   As I write this we prepare to reopen our galleries to the public after almost 17 months of closure to external visitors. While we enjoyed the visits of students, faculty and staff last year, we missed seeing our friends from the community. We are so pleased to be able to finally welcome you all back. 

This fall we are presenting three exhibitions simultaneously – all focusing on issues of Black history, racial justice, and police reform in America.  They open on September 18th and run for the entire semester, which we hope will give you ample time to come and visit us, and to once again experience the power of art together in-person.  

Carrie Mae Weems, All the Boys (Profile 1), 2016, archival pigment print on gesso board. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Carrie Mae Weems: The Usual Suspects, on view in the museum’s Walsh Gallery, will include recent photographic and video works that aim to pose the question about stereotypes that associate Black bodies with criminality. All the Boys and The Usual Suspects delve deeper into that topic with Black men and women as the focal point, forcing the view to confront the fact of judicial inaction in the face of systemic racism. People of a Darker Hue, a 14-minute film which will be screened in the gallery, is a meditative compilation of video, found footage, narration, and performance commemorating the deaths of George Floyd, Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor and, sadly, numerous others. Ebony magazine’s Kevin L. Clark has written: “With Black America in a heightened state of awareness, given the calamity that has been caused by state-sanctioned brutality, the COVID-19 crisis, and more—the Fairfield University Art Museum will host a fall exhibition that you cannot afford to miss.”

Roberto Lugo, Peaceful Protesters: Nina Simone I and Texture Study II, 2021, glazed ceramic, luster, steel, epoxy, enamel. Courtesy of the artist and Wexler Gallery. Photography by Megan Tranauskas courtesy of Wexler Gallery

Roberto Lugo: New Work and Robert Gerhardt: Mic Check will be on view together in the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. Self-described “ghetto potter” Roberto Lugo’s work takes familiar shapes drawn from European and Asian ceramic traditions, including ginger jars, amphorae, and teapots, but their hand-painted surfaces take inspiration from street art and feature contemporary iconography, including celebrations of Black and Latino figures. A number of the pieces in this exhibition, which features all-new work, also incorporate gun parts from decommissioned handguns obtained in a Hartford, Connecticut gun buyback in 2018 sponsored by #UNLOAD Foundation.

Robert Gerhardt, Protestors Raise Their Fists at the Start of a Protest for Jacob Blake, Times Square, New York City, August 24, 2020, 2020, silver gelatin print. Courtesy of the artist

Mic Check is a photography project by photojournalist and writer Robert Gerhardt,��who relied on the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to track and document these protests in New York City from 2014 through 2021. This remarkable body of work includes photographs of protests across New York, in massive crowds, in rain and sun, during night and day, in motion during marches and stationary during speeches, and in the past year in the midst of a global pandemic. These candid works capture the passion, righteous anger, and frustration of the protestors. The title comes from the shouts of “mic check!” which mobilized protestors into a game of repeat-after-me, a technique that united the crowd and enabled the spread of the speaker’s comments and instructions without amplification.

BLACK ART FUND UPDATE

In February 2021 the museum started a fund solely dedicated to the acquisition of museum-quality contemporary art by Black artists for the permanent collection. We continue to actively seeking financial contributions and donations of artwork by Black artists. 

The original goal was to raise $40,000 (which the museum will match with $20,000) by the end of this month, and to date we have raised $20,125.  

The first fund purchase was made in July, and is Cardboard Slave Kit, Abolitionist Blend DIY by artist Roberto Visani (image above). It finds inspiration in the kneeling male figure in chains from Wedgewood's 18th-century anti-slavery medallion and seal "Am I Not a Man and a Brother?"

The museum was gifted a fine example of the Wedgwood seal (image above) by Connecticut collectors Ben Ortiz and Victor Torchia Jr. earlier this year, and jumped at the opportunity to acquire a work by a Black contemporary artist responding to this very image.

Fairfield University students in this fall’s African American Art History class will play an active role in helping the museum make further selections for the collection. If you want to help us to continue to diversify our collections please click here to donate! If you have museum-quality art by Black artists that you would like to donate, please contact me at cweber@fairfield.edu.

I hope you will join us in the months ahead to experience our exciting fall exhibitions (either in person or virtually, and to participate in the array of upcoming virtual programs including lectures, Art in Focus discussions with Michelle DiMarzo, art workshops with Kate Wellen, Family Day programs, or Mindfulness and Meditation sessions with Jackie DeLise. Our fall slogan is “the art is live…the programs are virtual.” The museum is free and open to all, and you can register for all of our events at Eventbrite. Remember if you miss an event, they are all recorded, so you can enjoy it after the fact, at your leisure, on our YouTube channel.

Thank you for your continued support of the Fairfield University Art Museum. Please stay safe, be well, and I hope to see you in the galleries.

With warm regards, Carey

Carey Mack Weber

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Direct from the Director - Spring Edition

Dear Friend,   While the museum is still closed to the public, spring has finally sprung, vaccinations are happening, and after a long year, there are reasons to feel hopeful.

If you have not yet had a chance to “see” our spring exhibitions I hope you will check them out! Birds of the Northeast: Gulls to Great Auks has received great critical acclaim, including a fantastic review in the Wall Street Journal. My colleague Michelle DiMarzo and I are giving a virtual tour of this exhibition on April 8 – if you are unable to join us live (sign up on Eventbrite) it will be recorded and you can watch it later.

 In the museum’s Walsh Gallery and on the exhibition webpage you will find By Design: Theater and Fashion in the Photography of Lalla Essaydi. This remarkable exhibition, curated by Dr. Cynthia Becker can be viewed as a 360-degree virtual tour. You can engage with these stunning photographs by watching Dr. Becker’s opening night lecture on our You Tube Channel, listening to a playlist of Moroccan music or our audio tour, and by joining us live on thequicklive.com on April 20 to learn about “Women, Status and the Family Code in Morocco” with Faculty Exhibition Liaison and Assistant Professor Siliva Marsans-Sakly.

The silver lining of this catastrophic pandemic, for the museum, has been two-fold. First, we have enjoyed dramatically increased digital engagement with our exhibitions and our programming. People have tuned in from all over the world to listen to experts speaking about subjects ranging from Marsden Hartley to biodiversity to Moroccan fashion, and to enjoy our bird drawing workshop and other programs. If you missed any of them you can find recordings of all of them on our YouTube channel.

Secondly, we have taken this time of closure to work on making the museum a more anti-racist, inclusive and welcoming place. In February we started a fund solely dedicated to the acquisition of contemporary art by Black artists for the permanent collection. We are actively seeking financial contributions and donations of museum-quality artwork by Black artists. The goal is to raise $40,000 (which the museum will match with $20,000) by September. Fairfield University students in the fall 2021 African American Art History class will play an active role in helping the museum make its selections, and the first purchases will be made before December 2021. The museum wants to be transparent and accountable about the actions that we take to make anti-racist change happen in our small corner of the world. We believe this important step will make our collections and associated conversations richer, more diverse, more inclusive, and more representative of the communities we serve, live in, and aspire to build. We hope that we will have your support in this endeavor! If you want to help financially, please click here to donate. If you have museum-quality art by Black artists that you would like to donate, please contact me at cweber@fairfield.edu.

I hope you will join us in the months ahead to experience our exciting virtual exhibitions, and perhaps to participate in one of our upcoming lectures, Art in Focus, or Family Day programs. The museum is free and open to all, and you can register for all of our events on Eventbrite.

Thank you for your continued support of the Fairfield University Art Museum. Please be well, and I hope to see you online at one of our upcoming programs.

With warm regards, Carey

Carey Mack Weber Frank and Clara Meditz Executive Director

Captions: James Prosek, Wood Duck, 2014. Oil on canvas. Lent by the artist, courtesy of Waqas Wajahat. Lalla Essaydi, Harem Revisited #51. Chromogenic print mounted to aluminum with UV protective Laminate. ©Lalla Essaydi. Lent courtesy of the artist and Edwin Houk Gallery, New York.

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Museum Announces Fund for the Purchase of Contemporary Art by Black Artists, Seeks Donations of Artwork and Dollars

Black History is more than a month. In recognition of the greatness of Black people, the spirit of their resilience, professional accomplishments, and contributions to culture, and the promise of a history still in the making, historic moments created by Black people should be celebrated every day, not just during February.

As an art museum, we believe that there is no better way to celebrate the excellence of Black history and culture than through art. Museums often feature work by Black artists in their permanent collection on their social media accounts during Black History Month. At the end of January, when Fairfield the University Art Museum (FUAM) decided to do something similar, we came to recognize that our permanent collection does not contain one work by a Black artist. FUAM has included work by Black artists in our special exhibitions in the past.  We have two upcoming solo shows by Black artists (Carrie Mae Weems in fall 2021 and Adger Cowans in spring 2022).  However, the fact remains that our permanent collection – the artwork that is always accessible for the academic and public mission of our museum – has no Black art.

How is this possible? We discussed the reasons together as a staff. Our museum is relatively new, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Our permanent collection is small, with about 1,700 objects, and almost every artwork in the museum was originally received as a donation. Our acquisitions budget is virtually zero. While these institutional limitations exist, they are not acceptable excuses. We commit to proactively making a change for greater representation and recognition of diverse artists and artwork.

How can we do better? Starting this month, we are creating a fund dedicated solely to the acquisition of contemporary art by Black artists for the permanent collection. With this announcement, we actively seek financial contributions and donations of museum-quality artwork. The museum is seeding this fund with $10,000 and will add an additional $10,000 at the end of the fiscal year in June. This year’s goal is to raise $40,000 in additional funds. Fairfield University students in the Fall 2021 African American Art History class will play an active role in helping the museum make its selections. The first purchases will be made before December 2021.

We know the museum needs to be self-critical, and transparent about the actions that we take to make anti-racist change happen in our small corner of the world. We believe this important step will make our collections and associated conversations richer, more diverse, more inclusive, and more representative of the communities we serve, live in and aspire to build. Doing so aligns with Fairfield University’s commitments to social and racial justice as specified in its Diversity and Inclusive Excellence Mission Statement.  This effort reflects these institution-wide commitments and related initiatives.  

We hope that we will have your support in this endeavor. If you want to help  please click here to donate. If you have museum-quality art by Black artists that you would like to donate please contact the museum at museum@fairfield.edu.

Captions: Adger Cowans, Egg Nude, 1958, gelatin silver print, image 11 1/2 × 17 3/16 inches. Image courtesy of the artist. Carrie Mae Weems,  All the Boys (Blocked 1), 31 3/8 x 27 3/8 inches, archival pigment and silkscreened panel mounted on gesso board, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist.

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Direct from the Director Winter 2021

It is a time for new beginnings – it is a new year, we have a new president, and we have two new exhibitions at the museum. While COVID is still sadly with us, vaccinations for our most vulnerable citizens have begun and there is hope that we can finally slow down this pandemic.

While we still cannot welcome you to the museum (unless you are a student, faculty or university staff), we do have two beautiful exhibitions which you will soon be able to see virtually, and a robust schedule of programming which is easy to access live on thequicklive.com or recorded on our YouTube channel. We are proud to share that we had over 3500 participants in our programs in the fall, and we hope to top that this spring. For those of you who have attended our programs in the past, you know that we would only have been able to accommodate a fraction of that number in our various lecture spaces.

While we do not know when we will be able to welcome you back to the museum please rest assured that we will be ready to greet you when that time finally comes. In the meantime, we hope you will continue to enjoy our virtual offerings.

Birds of the Northeast: Gulls to Great Auks opened last week with an opening night talk by one of my co-curators Dr. Brian Walker. You can find the talk here. Programming for this exhibition includes talks on John James Audubon and Marsden Hartley as well as a “How to Draw a Bird” workshop with studio art professor Suzanne Chamlin. Drew Lanham will give a talk on “Birding While Black” and Douglas Tallamay will speak about “Nature’s Best Hope” and how important backyard conservation efforts can be.

Opening this Thursday evening is our exhibition By Design: Theater and Fashion in the Photography of Lalla Essaydi. Guest curator Dr. Cynthia Becker will speak about the works in the exhibition.

Our Art in Focus series with Curator of Education and Academic Engagement, Dr. Michelle DiMarzo is back with talks on works by Walton Ford, Lalla Essaydi, a medieval ivory diptych and an historic plaster cast depicting Augustus of Prima Porta.

We have 3 virtual Family Days planned for the spring – sign up to pick up your free art kit with video instructions and have fun creating art together. Learn more about this and all of our spring programs here.

I hope that you will join us in the months ahead to explore the world of birds and the fantastic photography of Lalla Essaydi. I look forward to seeing you in our virtual spaces in the months ahead!

Be safe! With warm regards, Carey

Captions: Marsden Hartley, Give Us This Day, 1938, oil on canvas. Lent by Art Bridges Lalla Essaydi, Harem Revisited #31, 2012. Chromogenic print mounted to aluminum with UV protective laminate. © Lalla Essaydi, courtesy of the artist and Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York