Jean Luc Mylayne
January 30 through April 5, 2009
Guest Curator: Terrie Sultan
This exhibition presented a ground-breaking look at the process of visual perception. Each of the images required several years of painstaking preparation to create and open a window into the interaction between the birds of Fort Davis, Texas and the nature that encompasses them. Mylayne meticulously composed each work by deliberately pinpointing a location, the ideal subject, and the appropriate scale. As a result, viewers entered environments that seem familiar yet were outside of the traditional nature of photography. Organized by the Blaffer Gallery, The Art Museum of the University of Houston.
The exhibition and publication were made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Lannan Foundation. Additional support is provided by The Eleanor and Frank Freed Foundation; the Texan-French Alliance for the Arts and its presenting partner, the Levant Foundation; the French Cultural Services; the Office of the Chancellor, U of I; and Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I. Image credit: Jean Luc Mylayne, No. 186, January February 2004, 2004, c-print, Courtesy of artist and Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York © Jean Luc Mylayne
Exhibition Programming
February 5–5:30 pm
Gallery Conversation
"Photography: Multiple Takes on Warhol's Portraits and Mylayne's Birds" with Jennifer Burns (Art History), Brigit Kelly (English), Ernesto Scott (Photography), and Terri Weissman (Art History)
March 5–5:30 pm
Gallery Conversation
"Birds in Art: Audubon Prints and Mylayne Photographs" with Jo Kibbee (curator), Jeffrey Brawn (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences), Richard Burkhardt (History), Gregory Lambeth (bird enthusiast), and Jennifer Monson (Dance)
Polaroids and Portraits:
A Photographic Legacy
of Andy Warhol
January 30 through May 24, 2009
Curator: Kathryn Koca
Polaroids and Portraits presented a
selection of the 152 photographs that
Krannert Art Museum graciously received
from the Andy Warhol Photographic
Legacy Program. Established in 2007 to
commemorate the Warhol Foundation’s
twentieth anniversary, the Legacy Program
gifted over 28,500 original photographs to
183 college and university museums and
galleries across the country with the hope
of enabling wider access to these more
seldom seen works. This exhibition displayed both Polaroid and silver gelatin portraits of celebrities, socialites, and unknowns, all photographed with varying degrees of wit, humor, and intimacy. These photographs complicate our notion of the artist’s persona as wholly immersed in this world of glamour, and presented Warhol as not only a prolific photographer, but a man grappling with his own identity as a famous artist.
Exhibition sponsored in part by Fox Development Corporation; Fred and Donna Giertz; Office of the Chancellor, U of I; Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I.Image credit: Andy Warhol, Martha Graham, May 1979, Polacolor Type 108 © 2008 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Exhibition Programming
February 5–5:30 pm
Gallery Conversation
"Birds in Art: Audubon Prints and Mylayne Photographs" with Jo Kibbee (curator), Jeffrey Brawn (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences), Richard Burkhardt (History), Gregory Lambeth (bird enthusiast), and Jennifer Monson (Dance)
Audubon at Illinois:
Selections from the
University Library's
Birds of America
January 30 through May 24, 2009
Curatorial Advisors: Greg Lambeth, Laura
Larkin, Dennis Sears, and Diane Schmidt
While there is little evidence that John
James Audubon (1785-1851) worked in
Illinois, his Birds of America (1827–1838)
includes many species that are permanent
residents of or migrate through our state. A
further connection lies with the University
Library, which owns one of only 120 existing
complete sets of the original four-volume
double-elephant folio, housed in the Rare
Book & Manuscript Library. The Library Friends funded an extensive restoration in 1988, after which the plates were not re-bound. This was the first time since the restoration that a selection of the prints had been publicly displayed.
Chosen from among the 435 hand-colored engravings that comprise Audubon’s masterpiece publication, the works in this exhibition highlighted the artist’s mastery of ornithological drawing and charted the story of birds in Illinois.
Sponsored in part by Jack and Kathy Chamblin; France@Illinois,Department of French; Office of the Chancellor, U of I; and the Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I. Image credit: John James Audubon, Anhinga (Black-bellied Darter), 1833–36, Hand-colored engraving, UIUC Rare Book & Manuscript Library
Exhibition Programming
February 5–5:30 pm
Gallery Conversation
"Birds in Art: Audubon Prints and Mylayne Photographs" with Jo Kibbee (curator), Jeffrey Brawn (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences), Richard Burkhardt (History), Gregory Lambeth (bird enthusiast), and Jennifer Monson (Dance)
April 2–5:30 pm
Public Workshop and Performance • "Navigation: An Investigation into Physical Intelligence" Based on her work on bird migration and navigation, choreographer Jennifer Monson led a public workshop on how our sensory experiences inform how we move through space, and included a site-specific performance with students from the department of Dance.
April 4–10 am
Audubon Tour and Bird Walk • Jo Kibbee, curator of Audubon at Illinois and Gregory Lambeth, bird enthusiast, led a tour of the exhibition and then a bird walk at Meadowbrook Park in Urbana.
WOWdesign: Marloes ten Bhömer
January 30 through May 31, 2009
Curators: Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox
The WOW exhibition highlighted London-based Dutch designer Marloes ten Bhömer (b. 1979 Duiven, The Netherlands). Ten Bhömer boldly challenges the existing typologies of women's shoes by experimenting with nontraditional technologies, construction techniques, and materials. Reinventing the manufacture of footwear, she offers new aesthetic and structural possibilities while critiquing the conventional status of women's shoes as cultural objects.
The exhibition featured two installations of shoes ten Bhömer created by using rotational molding. After Hours presented the step-by-step procedure for making Rotationalmouldedshoe, from materials development and experimentation to pouring, molding, and de-molding processes, culminating in the finished pair of shoes. On view as well was a sampling of tests and rejects. Construct showed the step-by-step procedure for creating Beigefoldedshoe. A functional object becomes wearable sculpture, altering our understanding and challenging our assumptions about a ubiquitous accessory that fills so many closets.
Sponsored in part by the Office of the Chancellor, U of I and Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I. Image credit: Installation view, 2009 © Marloes ten Bhömer
View information sheet and online checklist
Exhibition Programming
January 27–5:30 pm
Artist Talk
"Walking Machines," a talk by Marloes ten Bhömer, part of the DesignMatters series
New Installation of the Rosann Gelvin Noel Gallery
January 30 through May 1, 2009
Curator: Kathryn Koca
The installation of the newly named Rosann Gelvin Noel Gallery featured major Abstract Expressionist artists, including Jackson Pollock, Adolph Gottlieb, and David Smith. This selection of canvases, works on paper, and sculpture highlighted not only significant examples of mature Abstract Expressionism but also compositions that depict abstract representations of people, objects, and architecture.
Sponsored in part by the Office of the Chancellor, U of I and Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I. Image credit: David Smith, Untitled, 1952, egg ink and tempera on paper, Long-term loan/promised gift of Professor Robert B. Smith
Something That Happened Only Once
January 30 through March 29, 2009
Curator: Damon Baker
Something That Happened Only Once was an animated digital panoramic full wall projection with audio. Recorded in Mexico City, the work blended five narrative fragments in a slowly revolving and evolving double panorama that takes the form of a Mobius strip. The piece follows a female protagonist, a male counterpart, and other characters in a manner that suggests narrative but never becomes it. It is instead an expression of temperament or of consciousness—a searching, a longing, a loneliness.
Sponsored in part by the Office of the Chancellor, U of I and Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I
Exhibition Programming
February 16–5:30 pm
Artist Talk
"Something That Happened Only Once," a talk by Roderick Coover, exhibiting artist
Funded in part by the College of Fine and Applied Arts Lorado Taft Lectureship on Art Fund
Reflections of Black Girlhood: Necessary Truths
February 13 through 26, 2009
Guest Curators: Dr. Ruth Nicole Brown and Candy Taaffe
This exhibition highlighted the work of Saving Our Lives, Hear Our Thoughts (SOLHOT), an experience that aims to celebrate Black girlhood in all of its complexity. SOLHOT is not a mentoring program, it is a verb, it is political, it is not easy.
In SOLHOT we use what we have to create what we need. Because digital photography is accessible, many of the photographs presented in the exhibition reflected a "snapshot aesthetic." The process was valued over the product and the method's simplicity promoted inclusion. Although the work is artistically vaulable, the action of making photographs is our primary concern.
See us.
Grand Text Auto
April 14 through July 26, 2009
Curator: Damon Baker
Many blogs have spawned books over the last few years, but grandtextauto.org is the first to become an art exhibition. This blog about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms—including net.art, hypertext fiction, and computer games—is collaboratively written by Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin. In this exhibition, the bloggers put their ideas into practice by displaying a variety of cutting edge works of digital art of their own creation.
Sponsored in part by the Office of the Chancellor, U of I and Office of the Provost and Vice-Chancellor for Academic Affairs, U of I
School of Art + Design Master of Fine Arts Exhibition This annual exhibition represents the culmination of intense artistic development for graduate students in graphic design, industrial design, new media, painting, ceramics, metals, photography, and sculpture. The exhibition highlighted the artists’ exceptional intelligence, curiosity, and inventiveness, a meaningful step further into the art world. School of Art + Design Bachelor of Fine Arts Exhibition In this annual exhibition, BFA graduates displayed a range of art and design studio practices that illustrated new and established technologies in material and virtual realms. The exhibition gave a public form to an undergraduate curriculum committed to the arts as both a distinct and necessary approach to understanding, as well as a vibrant expression of diverse human experiences. Curator: Erin K. Donovan Since Johannes Gutenberg's first printing Confronting Identity Artists have consistently investigated the process of identification, whether we primarily associate ourselves with gender, culture, physical appearance, or through specific objects. Chiefly produced in the last two decades, these photographs, paintings, and works on paper not only directly address issues of identity but also invite the viewer to question the process of identifying one's self. The exhibition will include works by Robert Arneson, Lorna Simpson, and Carrie Mae Weems. Visions of our Nation: Art of the New Deal Era Curator: Kathryn Koca Polite Our current economic situation has been compared with the Great Depression in the 1930s, and similar to that period, the arts were not and could not be stifled. In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed the New Deal, a series of programs that sought recovery for the economic crisis by creating jobs and aiding the unemployed. The Works Progress Administration was the largest New Deal relief program that, among many areas, focused on the arts, and many of the works in this exhibition were created during that time. In addition to WPA prints and photographs taken by artists who were employed by the Farm Security Administration, this installation also includes examples of works by other WPA and Federal Arts Project artists from the museum's permanent collection.
Petals and Paintings
April 17 through 19, 2009
Curator: Rick Orr, member of the American Institute
of Floral Designers
Innovative floral arrangements inspired by works
from the museum's permanent collection were
created by award winning floral designers for this
outstanding annual exhibition.
Image credit: Installation view, 2009
April 24 through May 3, 2009
Image credit: Installation view, 2009
May 9 through May 17, 2009
Exhibition supported in part by John and Alice Pfeffer. Image credit: Installation view, 2009
Impressions in Ink:
European Early Modern Prints
June 5 to July 26, 2009
press ca. 1440, European artists
experimented with creating printed
images. Krannert Art Museum's collection
includes woodblock prints, engravings,
and etchings made from the fifteenth
through the seventeenth centuries. Prints,
sometimes enhanced with hand painted
color, not only illustrated texts, but also
stood on their own as works of art.
Selected works include observations of
botany, landscapes, and historical figures;
renderings of religious and literary narratives; and portrayals of allegorical figures. Featuring some of the period's great masters, such as Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Hans Sebald Beham, and Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, this exhibition demonstrates the artistic richness of the printed image.
Image credit: Bartolomeo Coriolano, after Guido Reni, Alliance of Peace and Abundance, 17th century, chiaroscuro woodcut, Art Acquisition Fund
June 5 to July 26, 2009
Curator: Kathryn Koca Polite 
Image credit: Kenneth Kerslake, Digital Mirror, 2001, waterless lithograph on glass plate and digital transfer, Gift of the artist
June 5 to July 26, 2009 
Image credit: Ida Abelman, My Father Reminisces, 1937, lithograph, Federal Works Agency