Tang announces spring exhibitions

The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College continues its fifteenth anniversary year with a Spring Opening Celebration on Saturday, Feb. 6, featuring new exhibitions, a dialogue about the artist Alma Thomas, and a reception. All events are free and open to the public.

The evening begins at 5 p.m. with a Dunkerley Dialogue on the career and legacy of artist Alma Thomas, whose career retrospective is one of the new exhibitions. The dialogue includes exhibition co-curators Lauren Haynes, associate curator, Permanent Collection at the Studio Museum; and Ian Berry, the Tang’s Dayton Director; and artists Saya Woolfalk, Leslie Wayne, and more to be announced. A public reception follows at 6 p.m. Dunkerley Dialogues are generously funded by Michele Dunkerley, Skidmore College Class of 1980.

In addition to Alma Thomas, the new exhibitions opening Feb. 6 are Borrowed Light: Selections from the Jack Shear Collection and Elevator Music 30: Critter & Guitari. Also going on view is artwork by Nayland Blake that will be featured in the latest iteration of the ongoing Plinth Guest Artist Project that is part Liz Collins' longterm lounge/installation Energy Field.

Alma Thomas           

Feb. 6 though June 5, 2016

Alma Thomas, an exhibition organized by the Tang Teaching Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem, features artwork spanning the career of Alma Thomas (1891-1978), which she focused on after retiring as a school teacher at age 69.

She charted her own course as an African-American woman within Washington, D.C.’s artistic community, largely dominated by white men in the mid-twentieth century. Her own highly personal style defied traditional Abstract Expressionist or Washington Color School practices, and developed through experimentation with abstraction, color, line, and pattern.

Among her many career highlights, she was the first female African-American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum. More recently, her artwork has been displayed prominently in the Obama White House.

Alma Thomas features rarely exhibited early works as well as her mature canvases drawn from a variety of private and public collections. 

Borrowed Light: Selections from the Jack Shear Gift

Feb. 6 through Aug. 14, 2016

Borrowed Light celebrates a transformative gift of over 500 photographs to the Tang Teaching Museum from photographer, curator, and collector Jack Shear. The exhibition features a selection of works chosen by Dayton Director Ian Berry in collaboration with Shear.

Borrowed Light presents a visual history of photography from its inception in the 1840s to the present day, chronicling various photographic processes, techniques, and artistic approaches—from an early half-plate ambrotype of Niagara Falls, to a Polaroid self-portrait by a young Robert Mapplethorpe. Tracing the evolution of the medium, the exhibition will feature historic works by photographic pioneers such as Berenice Abbott, Diane Arbus, Eugène Atget, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston as well as works by notable contemporary photographers such as Tina Barney, Katy Grannan, Malerie Marder, and Sally Mann.

The exhibition is a presentation of works that hold significant personal meaning for Shear, and are a reflection of his collecting philosophy and aesthetic as a photographer. In addition to a traditional, chronological display will be a densely hung gallery of works spanning all genres and subjects. This salon-style presentation will also include one wall that will change over the course of the exhibition. Skidmore art history students will be invited to re-hang this wall after researching and studying the collection.

Elevator Music 30: Critter & Guitari

Feb. 6 through June 5, 2016

In the 30th iteration of the Tang’s ongoing Elevator Music series, in which the museum’s elevator is used as a gallery space, visitors are invited to play unique musical instruments designed by the Brooklyn-based artists Critter & Guitari.

Critter & Guitari was founded by two Skidmore College graduates: Owen Osborn and Chris Kucinski. They began making music together in college and their fascination with sound, technology, materials, and design has led them down different creative avenues: producing interactive sculptures, developing commercial electronics kits, and designing museum exhibitions. They now manufacture and sell their own instruments which are fun, intuitive, and provide a platform for musical and creative exploration.

Instruments like the Pocket Piano synthesizer, the Bolsa Bass bass synthesizer, and the Kaleidoloop sound collector are designed to encourage experimentation with different ways of making sounds.

Brooklyn Magazine says, "Critter & Guitari makes synthesizers that look more like toys or minimalist sculptures than serious equipment." At the Tang, you get to experiment with this serious equipment.

Liz Collins — Energy Field

Through October 2017

Plinth Guest Artist Project featuring Nayland Blake

Feb. 6 through May 31, 2016

Energy Field is an ongoing installation that has transformed the Tang's mezzanine into a lounge and community space for the many visitors to the museum. Since opening in October 2015, Energy Field has hosted dialogues, the Tang Student Advisory Council meetings, an improvisational dance performance, a Creation Myth Story Circle, and numerous museum guests who can sit back and become re-energized.

The artist and designer Liz Collins created the space to include a plinth that acts as an installation within the installation and features a rotating roster of work by other artists. Collins herself curated the first iteration of the Plinth Guest Artist Project with a selection of printed matter and videos by writers and artists important to her.

On Feb. 6, the second iteration of the Plinth Guest Artist Project opens and features work by the Brooklyn-based artist Nayland Blake, including sock puppets, photography, and video.

"The Plinth, to me, is an inclusive work; I want it to hold the energy and ideas of some of the many people I like, love, respect, admire” said Liz Collins.  “Nayland t is part of my initial spark of connection to the Tang in that 'everything is connected' magical way that happens at the Tang. It is a great honor to have him occupy my space like this.”

Blake is an internationally acclaimed interdisciplinary artist and educator. His work was featured in a 2003 solo show at the Tang called Opener 3: Nayland Blake: Some Kind of Love — Performance Video, 1989-2002, and his work is included in the Tang Teaching Museum collection, as well as the collections of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the University Art Museum, Berkeley. He is the chair of the The ICP-Bard MFA program, and is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery in New York City.