Krannert Art Museum to Show Five New Exhibitions This Fall

Written by Kevin O'Donnell Friday, 28 August 2009 21:29

CHAMPAIGN, IL.- Five new exhibitions presenting local, regional, and international artists kick off Krannert Art Museum’s fall season. A free public opening reception celebrates the openings. Highlighting faculty artists at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the School of Art + Design Faculty Exhibition
 (August 28–September 27, 2009) represents one of the most visible aspects of the rich collaborative relationship between KAM and the School of Art + Design. This ongoing annual exhibition provides the community with an opportunity to view new work by the school’s world-class artists and designers.

On-Screen: Global Intimacy (August 28, 2009–January 3, 2010) brings together ten artists from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the United States whose works investigate the transnational reach of globalization as a universalizing phenomenon. Their cultural outreach extends beyond the limitations of physical boundaries and is inclusive of transnational exchanges where goods, people, information, and knowledge migrate across diverse territories. These artists explore the various processes involved in identity formation and offer competing and contradictory perspectives about the homogenizing force of globalization.

Gestures in Space and Light (August 28, 2009–January 3, 2010) features the works of seven prominent American photographers selected from the museum’s extensive collection. All but two of the photographers represented were trained or taught at The New Bauhaus School of Design (descendent of the German Bauhaus design school and known later as the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology), founded by László Moholy-Nagy in Chicago in 1937. Together, these photographs epitomize the spirit of experimentation—of exploring the kinetic, sensorial, temporal, as well as visual properties of objects—which was the school’s pedagogic legacy.

Photographs and porcelain works produced by the contemporary Chinese artist Huang Yan (b. 1966) are displayed in Effacement: Huang Yan’s China in the 21st Century. Through these works, Huang examines the transnational art market and the perception of “Chineseness” in this environment. Huang’s engagement with commercialized culture may be identified with an aspect of Euro-American modernist art. Nonetheless, Huang’s photographs and porcelains have intrinsic local and specific meanings, which uncover the mutual implication of Asian modernity and Orientalist fantasies.

The popular summer exhibition Vivid Lines in Graphic Times (August 28, 2009–January 3, 2010) will remain on view through the fall. This selection of paintings and works on paper from the museum’s permanent collection explores how a diverse range of American artists engaged Pop Art elements—vibrant color, readymade images, graphic line—yet moved beyond the movement’s boundaries in form, material, and message. Whether appropriating images from consumerist culture, taking influence from comic books, or simply utilizing graphic techniques in the creative process, these works from the 1970s through the late 1990s specifically illustrate how meaning and feeling may be conveyed through various graphic methods.

Krannert Art Museum, located on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a unit within the College of Fine and Applied Arts, opened its doors in 1961, establishing a permanent home for the University's existing collection of fine art. Visit : http://www.kam.illinois.edu/

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