With a new school year comes new events, exhibitions, and people at the Miami University Art Museum. Not only are there three new exhibitions which took over the gallery space previously housing the Telling a People’s Story exhibition, but also new events beginning with the Student Lawn Party this Friday, and new interns eagerly anticipating their introductions! This semester allows various opportunities to experience the new unique exhibitions, each with their own personality.
This Friday, September 14, provides a great opportunity for everyone to come out and explore all the museum has to offer. The Miami University Art Museum is hosting a Student Lawn Party that is free and open to all Miami University students. There will be free food, drinks, t-shirts, prizes, and henna tattoos available. Enjoy some free snacks while perusing the various galleries and expansive Sculpture Park!
The three new exhibitions opened in late August just as students flooded back into Oxford, and will remain open up until the very end of the semester.
In the Douglas Gallery, or the first one you’ll come across upon entering the museum, is the Lonesome Traveler exhibition. This exhibition features work by Rockwell Kent, a revered twentieth-century modern artist whose ambitious representations of line, form, and color gained him notoriety. Kent’s work aimed to reconcile the traditionalist ideals he admired with the growing industrial world in which he lived. At the core of his work is the philosophical exploration of Transcendentalism.
In the second gallery, or the McKie Gallery, is the exhibition titled I’m in the Wrong Film. This exhibition features seventeen photographs from Hans Gindlesberger’s ongoing series that explores Middle America and the loss of identity that has become an epidemic due to economic and population decline. Gindlesberger’s works are meant to evoke the feeling of futility and alienation that come with living in a place that is losing its identity from within and its reputation as seen by the rest of the nation.
The last exhibition that sits in the third gallery, or Farmer Gallery, is titled Comfort Zones. This exhibition features paintings by Chicago-based artist Mary Phelan and south-central Virginia artist Eldridge Bagley. These artists’ work prompts the viewer to take a deeper look into the fabric of urban and local locales, and see how there is so much to be found that connects these distinct worlds, usually thought of as mutually exclusive of one another. Seeing their work together is ultimately a glimpse into personal definitions of a sense and place. 