The Arizona State University Art Museum Presents Animal Prints From its Collection

Written by Dennis Hanneman Monday, 21 May 2012 22:31

Tempe, Arizona.- The Arizona State University Art Museum is pleased to present "Just Animals: Selections from the ASU Art Museum Print Collection" on view at the museum through January 21st 2012. The word animal evokes many impressions: everything from friendly pets, like dogs and cats, to wild creatures like bears and elephants. The word brings to mind images (fur, eyes, tails), sounds (purr, bark) and events (family zoo trip, pet adoption center visit). We all have memories that make recognizing animals in art easy. But sometimes artists will add something extra. Maybe it is a little humor, as in Walton Ford's reflection on Audubon's nature studies in his print "Nila", or a more serious commentary on our ecological destruction, as in Oscar's monoprint "Pooch". Or it can be the remarkable ability to capture a personality on paper, as Beth Van Hoesen does in "Puff".

The Arizona State University Art Museum is located on he university's main campus in Tempe, Arizona. The Art Museum has some 12,000 objects in its permanent collection and describes its primary focuses as contemporary art, including new media and "innovative methods of presentation"; crafts, with an emphasis on American ceramics; historic and contemporary prints; art from Arizona and the Southwestern United States, with an emphasis on Latino artists, and art of the Americas, with one historic American pieces and modernist and contemporary Latin American works. The art collection was established in 1950. The museum is located in two buildings. The main exhibition space is the Nelson Fine Arts Center, designed by architect Antoine Predock. A second museum facility, the Ceramics Research Center lies just to the north, in the Tempe Center. Admission to the museum is free.  In April 1989, the ASU Art Museum moved into the newly-completed Nelson Fine Arts Center, designed by architect Antoine Predock, where the museum remains today.


The Nelson Center is 49,700 square feet (4,620 m2) and includes five galleries as well as administrative offices and storage and processing areas. In 1992, Marilyn A. Zeitlin became the museum's director. Zeitlin was praised for expanding the museum's collections eightfold during her tenure. In March 2002, the Ceramics Research Center opened in the Tempe Center just to the north of the Nelson Center. The center was designed by Gabor Lorant Architects, Inc. and includes 7,500 square feet (700 m2) with two galleries, open storage stacks and a research library. Additional facilities at the library's two buildings include a lecture room, a print study room, and a "nymphaeum" (courtyard).

Works of contemporary art held by the museum include works by Hung Liu, Karel Appel, Derek Boshier, Deborah Butterfield, Sue Coe, Vernon Fisher, Jon Haddock, William Kentridge, Lynn M. Randolph, Frances Whitehead, and William T. Wiley. The focus of ASU Art Museum's Latin American art holdings is on Mexican art from the 20th century, Mexican ceramics and folk art; and contemporary Cuban art. The core of the Latin American collection was donated to the museum in 1950 and includes works by David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera, and Rufino Tamayo. Later acquisitions of pieces by Mexican artists include works by Carlos Mérida, Leonel Góngora, Rafael and Pedro Coronel; José Guadalupe Posada, Leopoldo Mendez, and other members of the Taller de Gráfica Popular; and the contemporary artists Alejandro Colunga, Lucio Muniain, and Nestor Quiñones. Works by Cuban artists in the museum collection include works by Yamilys Brito, Pedro Alvarez, Tonel (Antonio Eligio Fernández), Osvaldo Yero, Abel Barroso, René Francisco, Jacqueline Brito, Fernando Rodríguez, José A. Toirac, and Kcho. The museum has also acquired pieces by Brazilian artists Tiago Carneiro da Cunha, Efrain Almeida, and Oscar Oiwa. American works comprises one of the ASU Art Museum's smallest collections. ASU's holdings of American art began with the museum's original contributions from Oliver B. James. Earlier works in the collection include early American limner painters, while the most recent works are from 20th century modernists, including Charles Demuth, Yasuo Kuniyoshi and Stuart Davis. Among the holdings in the American collection are various 19th-century Romantic landscape paintings from the 19th century, Ash Can School works, and portraits, include Gilbert Stuart's Mrs Stephen Peabody (1809). The museum holds Georgia O'Keeffe's Horse's Skull on Blue (1930), a depiction of a sun-bleached skull that is the first in a series of skull paintings created by O'Keeffe after bones found in the desert around her ranch. The painting's blue background are a reference to the skies of New Mexico and the painting is in the memento mori tradition of still lifes. The museum also holds Edward Hopper's House by a Road (1942); and Albert Pinkham Ryder's The Canal (1915). The print collections at the ASU Art Museum include some 5,000 prints held in the Jules Heller Print Study Room. A focus of the museum's print collection is dealing with social and political issues; works include pieces by William Hogarth, Honoré Daumier, Francisco Goya, José Guadalupe Posada, Leopoldo Mendéz, and Francesc Torres. The collection includes some 50 prints and paper works by contemporary Cuban artists and 123 lithographs and intaglios by Sue Coe. The print collection also includes examples of Japanese ukiyo-e. The museum's ceramics collection includes some 3,500 pieces, of which half are displayed at any one time at the Ceramics Research Center. Visit the museum's website at ... http://asuartmuseum.asu.edu

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