What is the role of our Museum in a changing world? How will we redouble our commitment to artists and their ideas? How do we best serve our students?
It is an honor and privilege to address these questions in my new role as Director and Chief Curator. Joined by our exceptional Museum team, I am pleased to share highlights from 2019—a year in which we built on existing successes and introduced new ideas.
On the exhibition front, we featured Nicole Cherubini’s elegant and powerful ceramic sculptures, photographer Carrie Schneider's meditative video portraits of women reading, and we presented ACE: art on sports, promise, and selfhood, which took an expansive look at sports and athletic culture through the eyes of 15 international contemporary artists. We also launched a new series of on-site projects in the Museum’s lobby featuring Louise Lawler’s seminal sound work, Birdcalls 1972/81.
Cherubini and Schneider’s exhibitions were accompanied by artist talks and our first-ever weekly reading group that explored Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race, and Class with University scholars, colleagues, and students.
ACE brought students, faculty, athletes, and artists into conversation around topics related to artistic and athletic achievement. We reached over 1,500 students, through artist talks, performances, roundtable discussions, workshops, class visits, and exhibition tours—proving once again the rich pedagogical potential of a single exhibition.
Other 2019 initiatives included a new Freshman Seminar, Why Museums Matter, and a series of two-day artist residencies that provided students across the disciplines with opportunities to engage directly with young artists who are addressing culturally relevant issues.
Please join us in 2020 for fresh perspectives on our collections and new exhibitions that that include contemporary art and ideas by the most engaged emerging and renowned artists and thinkers working today.
We are proud to offer free admission to all museum exhibitions and events. Whether you frequently attend our programs or follow them from afar, your financial contribution represents an investment in our work and helps make it available to everyone.
Corinna Ripps Schaming Director and Chief Curator
Darcie Abbatiello, registrar/collections manager Alana Akacki, office manager Gil Gentile, exhibition and publication designer Jeffrey Wright-Sedam, preparator
Berly Brown, education and public engagement coordinator Olga Dekalo, associate curator Naomi Lewis, exhibition and outreach coordinator Christine Snyder, museum assistant
Tzu-Yun Wei, Department of Art and Art History graduate student intern Kate West, communications intern
February 1 - April 6, 2019
Nicole Cherubini’s clay sculptures and mobile seating arrangements for viewing, reading and listening activated our first-floor gallery and provided multiple opportunities to experience unexpected materials and art historical references in a nuanced response to the design of Museum architect Edward Durrell Stone.
Carrie Schneider’s recent photography and film projects celebrate the cumulative power of reading and looking. In her four-hour film Reading Women (2012-14), the artist captures 100 friends silently reading favorite books by women authors. These same books were made available to visitors, inspiring them to carve out their own space for contemplation within the Museum.
Louise Lawler's seminal sound work greeted visitors in the Museum lobby, calling out the names of 27 famous male artists in response to her own frustration as a young artist confronted with skewed gender dynamics in the art world.
May 3 - 19, 2019
M.F.A. candidates completing the University at Albany Department of Art and Art History’s 60–credit-hour program of intensive training and study in fine art practices presented the core of their visual theses in a professional museum setting.
Björn Bauer, Tzu-Hsun Chang, Carolyn DiFiori Hopkins, Kristin Hutton, Krista Kubacka, Charlotte LaDuke, Drea LaRose, Janice Medina, Jaquelyn Mendez, and Lily I. Olin
Supported by the College of Arts and Sciences and the Ann C. Mataraso M.F.A. ’02 Endowment Fund in honor of Professor Emeritus Mark Greenwold.
June 28 - December 7, 2019
Drawing parallels between the physicality of sports and the active process of creating art, ACE: art on sports, promise, and selfhood sought fresh perspectives through which to explore our cultural moment.
Kevin Beasley, Petra Cortright, Darío Escobar, Radamés "Juni" Figueroa, Baseera Khan, Ari Marcopoulos, Catherine Opie, Sondra Perry, Paul Pfeiffer, Howardena Pindell, Cheryl Pope, Ronny Quevedo, Ashley Teamer, Hank Willis Thomas, and Wendy White.
Supported by UAlbany Strategic Allocation of Resources Fund (StAR), University Auxiliary Services (UAS) and generous support from John ’83 and Jennifer Troiano.
We kicked off 2019 with a round of artist-led tours by exhibiting artists Nicole Cherubini and Carrie Schneider followed by an artist talk by photographer Oliver Wasow about his recently published book of photographic portraits Friends, Enemies, and Strangers.
Inspired by Schneider’s Reading Women project, we formed our own community of readers exploring Angela Y. Davis’s Women, Race, and Class with University scholars and colleagues in the Museum’s first-ever weekly reading group and in a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon focused on the artists and authors featured in Schneider’s project.
ACE: art on sports, promise, and selfhood brought students, faculty, athletes, and artists into conversation around topics related to artistic and athletic achievement. Throughout the fall, the Museum furthered its role as an active site for participation and exchange, for sharing ideas and learning from each other. In a series of informal roundtable discussions — titled REACH: Aspiration/Opportunity; REBOUND: Struggle/Perseverance; and RISK: Change/Activism — artists, faculty, staff, and students from across disciplines gathered to share commonalities and challenges of their respective practices, focusing on topics of specific relevance to the university campus.
Other events included an artist talk by exhibiting artist Ronny Quevedo and two site-specific performances. Artist Tomm Roeschlein explored the connections between athletic movement and dance in Airball, an interactive dance lab in which he and audience participants choreographed moves throughout the Museum and exhibiting artist Baseera Khan created a monumental drawing as she traversed the Museum’s second floor arched wall in a durational climbing performance.
Art Lab, Saturday Yoga, and The Creative Life Conversation series continued to bring students and community together in a range of first-hand engagements with artists, thinkers, doers, and makers.
artist residencies, internships, a freshman seminar, a reading group, exhibition tours, workshops in the museum galleries
We offer students the opportunity to engage first-hand with contemporary art and artists of the highest level, to learn to think critically about visual culture, to gain the tools to interpret creative expression, and to participate in cross-disciplinary dialogues unlike those found in conventional classroom environments.
In collaboration with UAlbany’s First Year Experience program, the Museum hosted Why Museums Matter, a Freshman Seminar co-taught by Corinna Ripps Schaming, Chief Curator and Director, University Art Museum; Daniel Goodwin, Director of the Studio Art Program, Department of Art and Art History; and Edward Schwarzschild, Director of Creative Writing, Department of English. The seminar met weekly in the galleries to examine how museums have transformed—and continue to transform—our interpretation and construction of contemporary culture.
A series of two-day artist residencies with ACE artists Radamés "Juni" Figueroa, Baseera Khan, and Ashley Teamer provided students across the disciplines with an opportunity to engage directly with young artists who are addressing relevant issues that impact contemporary culture.
Our intern program offers students direct museum experience in conducting research, interacting with artists and the public, providing administrative and technical support, and learning about contemporary art. We seek talented and motivated students of all backgrounds who wish to gain valuable training, skills, and work experience in departments across the Museum.
Since its opening in 2018, over 400 students, faculty, scholars, artists, and community members have visited the University Art Museum’s Collections Study Space. Housing the University at Albany Fine Art Collections comprised of more than 3,000 late modern and contemporary artworks, primarily on paper, the Collections Study Space is a public site for discovery, observation, research, and introspection.
The University Art Museum is committed to the idea that firsthand encounters with works of art play an integral role in teaching and learning across the disciplines. Interns work with Museum staff to research, curate, and interpret works in the Collections. A range of registrarial functions are performed on-site, including cataloguing, photographing and conditioning works of art. A designated teaching area accommodates classes of up to 20 students or small community groups.
Students and visitors can access, discover, and view the Collections as part of their course of study during our open hours or by appointment.
Future plans include inviting artists, curators, writers, and scholars to develop innovative programs and original research linking the Museum’s exhibition program and the Fine Art Collections.
The Collections are comprised of donations from generous individuals like you. If you wish to donate a contemporary artwork, or to support the care and preservation of the Collections, please contact dabbatiello@albany.edu.
Through my graduate assistantship, I gained a significant understanding of researching and developing projects at the University Art Museum. I treasured the time that I spent working with the fantastic Museum team on student and community outreach, campus events, and upcoming exhibitions, as well as contributing research for the Museum’s collections database and caring for artwork in the Collections Study Space.
Celebrating the legacy of distinguished artist and Alumnus Dawn Clements ’89, our community of friends and supporters contributed to the acquisition of Diptych, 2010, a Sumi ink on paper drawing, by generously donating to UAlbany’s annual March Matchness challenge. The University Fine Art Collections have four exceptional examples of Clements's earlier work. Created from 1991-95, these artworks contain the hallmarks of Clements’s later work, including the seamless integration of drawing with personal notations, keenly observed and highly wrought surfaces, the artist’s encyclopedic knowledge of vintage film, and her panoramic approach to densely rendered spaces. This new acquisition more fully illustrates the arc of Clements’s extraordinary artistic career and will be available for public viewing in the Collections Study Space.
Dawn Clements (1958-2018) received a Master of Fine Arts from the Department of Art and Art History in 1989 and went on to have an important and deeply respected career as an internationally recognized artist.
Her work is in the collection of major museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs; the Saatchi Gallery, London; and the University at Albany Fine Art Collections. In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, her work was included in the 2010 Whitney Biennial and the 1993 Venice Biennale.
February 4 - April 4, 2020
Presenting a fresh look at our permanent collections through new affinities and narratives among contemporary and modern, vernacular and canonical figures in over two hundred artworks by fifty artists.
Vito Acconci, Olle Baertling, Romare Bearden, Xu Bing, Judith Braun, Isabel Bishop, Lee Bontecou, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Carroll Cloar, Dawn Clements, Richard Diebenkorn, Rachel Foullon, Elise Ferguson, Audrey Flack, Phil Frost, Juan Gonzalez, Gayle Johnson, Donald Judd, Hilda Katz, Jacob Lawrence, Mary Ellen Mark, Cameron Martin, Ibrahim Miranda, Dona Nelson, Louise Nevelson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Judy Pfaff, Katherine Porter, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Robert Rauschenberg, Yinka Shonibare, Selina Trieff, Stella Waitzkin, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, Jack White, and Michael Zwack, among others.
Visitors will be greeted in the Museum’s Lobby by the voice of influential performance, video, and installation artist Vito Acconci portraying the dual role of teacher and student as he riffs on the ideological underpinnings of American education and society in a series of short lessons.
Iconic drag performer Lady Bunny lip-syncs, dances, and delivers a reeling monologue on hot-button political issues in this wall-size video installation by pioneering film and video artist Charles Atlas.
May 1 – 17, 2020
A highly anticipated annual tradition, University at Albany Department of Art and Art History M.F.A. candidates present the core of their visual theses in a professional museum setting.
The following donors contributed to the University at Albany Art Museum between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019. These gifts include annual contributions, bequest intentions, and gifts-in-kind.
* Individuals whose employers generously matched their gifts
Friends like you make the University Art Museum an active site for new ideas, fresh perspectives, and creative exploration. Thank you for being part of our community.
For more information about ways to support the museum, please call Michael Boots at 518-225-1229.
You can invest in our future and help us achieve our goals by making a contribution here.
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