New Tang exhibitions showcase artist Ruby Sky Stiler, fiber craft, and science

by Michael Janairo

The Tang Teaching Museum and Arts Gallery reopens to the Skidmore community on Saturday, Jan. 29, and the general public beginning Thursday, Feb. 3, with two new exhibitions, “Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science” and “Opener 34: Ruby Sky Stiler — New Patterns.”
 
Together, the two new exhibitions and four continuing ones celebrate interdisciplinary creativity and collaborative learning, present “outsider” and “visionary” art that question and enlarge the art historical canon, and expand our understanding of what it means to be alive today, whether through stop-motion animation, sound art, or relief paintings influenced by a wealth of references, including Greco-Roman sculpture and iPhone photographs. Check out the museum website for more information. 

The museum isn’t the only place you can see work from the Tang. Work from the museum’s growing collection of more than 17,000 objects will hit the road and be on view in the Hudson Valley and at the Albany International Airport. (See below.)

Ruby Sky Stiler, “Father and Children,” 2021. (Photo: JSP Art Photography)

New Exhibitions at the Tang

• "Opener 34: Ruby Sky Stiler — New Patterns,” Jan. 29–May 15: Ruby Sky Stiler’s visual language spans time periods, art movements, and spatial dimensions. Her influences move between the art historical and deeply personal: from textbook images of Greco-Roman sculpture and Art Deco illustrations to contemporary textile patterns and iPhone photographs. The exhibition features Stiler’s new reliefs and a monumental site-specific installation, including a custom bench that spans the gallery.
• “Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science,” Jan. 29–June 12: The exhibition features work created by artists, scientists, and mathematicians alike at the intersection of fiber craft and the sciences. By foregrounding each work as fine art, process-driven craft, and scientific tool, the exhibition celebrates interdisciplinary creativity and collaborative learning. “Radical Fiber” also features a new artwork created by amateur and professional makers: the “Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef,” part of the worldwide “Crochet Coral Reef” project by Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring. 

Soft Monitor (Victoria Manganiello ’12 and Julian Goldman), “c o m p u t e r 1 . 0” (detail), 2018. (Photo: Kelly Vigil, courtesy Soft Monitor)

Continuing Exhibitions at the Tang

• "Hyde Cabinet #15: Doomsday,” through Feb. 27: In the student curatorial project space, Paige Meade ’22 explores the legacy of the Y2K bug through the Jan. 18, 1999, cover of Time magazine and Prince’s album “1999.”
• "Elevator Music 42: Laura Splan — Rhapsody for an Expanded Biotechnological Apparatus,” through April 10: The latest installation in the Tang’s elevator presents Laura Splan’s sound and sculptural work, re-envisioning the space as an organism’s cell and its visitors as proteins. Methodical instructions guide visitors to remove shoes and sit cross-legged on “Lumen,” a rug made from the wool of laboratory llamas and alpacas. These instructions choreograph visitors’ movements to embody the folding of proteins inside a cell’s lumen. In “Chaperone,” the buzzing of specialized laboratory equipment, chatter of scientists, and countless other unidentifiable, fragmented sounds coalesce and disperse, their arrangement following the structure of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
• “On Their Own Terms,” through April 10: The exhibition is the culminating project of the Scribner Seminar Outsiders? Folk and Self-Taught Artists in the United States, a class for first-year students taught by Assistant Professor of Art History Nancy Thebaut. The students researched and analyzed work by a selection of 19th- and 20th-century artists who have been categorized as “self-taught,” “outsider,” “folk,” or “visionary,” and questioned the ways curators, dealers, and scholars have exhibited, acquired, and sometimes overlooked this important work.
• “Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting,” through Sept. 10, 2023: In the fourth exhibition in a series that invites an artist to re-imagine what a community space in the museum can be, artist and curator Lauren Kelley reshapes the Tang Teaching Museum’s mezzanine by combining meditations on travel with snapshots of everyday life in her drawings, sculpture, and stop-motion animation videos. Using plasticine, toys, and souvenirs, Kelley’s videos conjure worlds that are malleable and unfixed, inhabited by robust protagonists whose quirks stem from efforts to correct the asymmetrical relationships they encounter.

Artist Lauren Kelley speaks with students from Oneida Middle School in her exhibition “Location Scouting.” (Photo: Megan Mumford)

Tang on the Road

• The School, Kinderhook, through April 30: The exhibition “This Tender, Fragile Thing” features work by contemporary artists alongside material from the Black Panther Archive in the Tang collection, including posters, flyers, and photographs by Allen Zak, Stephen Shames, and Francis Mitchell of historic figures such as Angela Davis, Bobby Seale, and Malcolm X. The School is located at 25 Broad St., Kinderhook, New York, and is open Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. 
• The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, March 5–July 31: The exhibition “Mastery and Merit: Selections from the Jack Shear Collection of Tibetan Art” is the first presentation of gift of Tibetan Buddhist art recently acquired by a collaboration of the Tang Teaching Museum, Williams College Museum of Art, and the Loeb Art Center through a gift from collector, photographer, and curator Jack Shear. The exhibition includes thangkas, or Tibetan Buddhist religious paintings, from the seventeenth through 19th centuries, as well as objects such as divination mirrors and shrines. The Loeb is located at 124 Raymond Ave. in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is open Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with late hours until 7 p.m. on Thursday. 
• Albany International Airport, through 2023: If traveling through the Albany airport, check out the new Tang Teaching Museum display. The presentation includes stunning photography from past exhibitions and events as well as objects that reflect the breadth of growing Tang collection of more than 17,000 objects, including a Maasai armband, a vinyl LP of composer Laurie Spiegel’s “Harmonices Mundi (blue),” cotton face masks by MASKS4PEOPLE that were commissioned by the Tang in the first year of the pandemic, and contemporary works by artists such as Ephraim Asili, Paula Hayes, Christian Marclay, and B. Wurtz. The Tang display is in the airport concourse, so only ticketed passengers can view it.  

Malloy Curator Rachel Seligman and Head of Installations Eric Kuhl prepare the Tang Teaching Museum display at the Albany International Airport. (Photo: Kathy Greenwood)