The Spencer Museum of Art Presents Splendor, Pageantry & Performance in Art

Written by Dean Kozlowski Wednesday, 08 June 2011 01:41

Lawrence, KS.- The Spencer Museum of Art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence presents "Pomp up the Jam: Splendor, Pageantry, and Performance in Art " from June 11th through September 4th. Pomp, pageantry, and splendor can have a broad range of socio-cultural meanings and take on many different forms. Rituals, processions, parades, and performances span nearly all cultures and these occasions tie the present to the legacies and traditions of the past, as well as to hopes and ambitions for the future. Artworks that record this pomp and performance through the eyes of both participants and spectators also serve to transform events, people and objects from the mundane into the splendid.

"Pomp up the Jam: Splendor, Pageantry, and Performance in Art" will explore the various ways that rituals, parades, and other displays of magnificence are visually constructed, the roles that artworks play in their enactment, and examine the way performances can inform the identities of groups and individuals. Pomp up the Jam gathers together an engaging variety of objects from the museum’s permanent collection, including historic prints, glittering parade armor, elaborate ceremonial vestments, video, photography, and vivid contemporary artworks. The exhibition organizers are the 2010-2011 Spencer Museum student interns: Denise Giannino, Jordan Jacobson, Chassica Kirchhoff, Meredith Moore, Ellen Raimond, Sarah C. Schroeder, Natalie Svacina, and Amanda Wright.

In 1917 Sallie Casey Thayer, a Kansas City art collector, offered her collection of nearly 7,500 art objects to the University of Kansas to form a museum "to encourage the study of fine arts in the Middle West." Her eclectic collection included paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings, furniture, rugs, textiles, metalwork, ceramics, glass, and other examples of decorative arts, primarily from Europe and Asia. Eventually the University of Kansas Museum of Art was established in 1928, based on this collection. Over the years the collection has grown substantially thanks to the generosity of many benefactors and the expertise of many curators. By the late 1960s the Museum had outgrown its quarters in Spooner Hall. Mrs. Helen Foresman Spencer, another Kansas City collector and patron of the arts, made a gift of $4.6 million that funded construction of a new museum. The building housing the Helen Foresman Spencer Museum of Art, the Kress Foundation Department of Art History, and the Murphy Library of Art and Architecture opened in 1978. The neo-classical structure, built from Indiana limestone, was designed by Kansas City architect Robert E. Jenks, a 1926 graduate of KU.


In 2007, the Spencer Museum grew again when approximately 9,500 ethnographic collection objects from the former University of Kansas Museum of Anthropology were transferred to the Spencer Museum of Art. The collection includes a wide variety of cultural materials from all around the world, with a particular emphasis on American Indian materials. The collection is still housed in historic Spooner Hall and the storage space has been upgraded to include specially designed cabinets to house and protect the collection. Seven galleries display selections from the permanent collection of more than 37,000 works of art. Special exhibitions drawn from the collection or touring from other museums are displayed in four additional galleries. Because the Museum serves as a resource for the teaching and study of art history, fine arts, and the humanities, the collection is comprehensive in nature. It spans the history of European, North American, and East Asian art. Areas of special strength include medieval art; European and American paintings, sculpture and prints; photography; Japanese Edo-period painting and prints; 20th-century Chinese painting; and KU’s ethnographic collection, which includes around 10,000 Native American, African, Latin American and Australian works. More than half of the Western paintings and sculpture are on permanent display. The numerous Western and Asian prints, drawings, photographs, and decorative arts, including the Spencer Museum's renowned quilt collection, are shown on a rotating basis in short-term, thematic exhibitions. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.spencerart.ku.edu

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