Object Lessons: Upcoming Exhibits

The Hypogean Tip features new work by sculptor Rachel Owens in the Burt Chernow Galleries

Opening Reception: February 6, 2020 from 5:30 to 7:30pm

Installation Photos

The Hypogean Tip Opening Reception

The Roots of Abstraction a virtual exhibition

Masters of Op Art

Photorealism: Fixing the Fleeting Moment

In A Dark Wood, Wandering
Opening Reception

A Survey Exhibition of Sculptures by Joe Saccio

Opening Reception: Thursday, Nov. 7th from 5:30PM-7:00PM

Photos by Tom Brenner.

Close to the Line

Opening September 5, 2019 At Housatonic Museum of Art

The Housatonic Museum is pleased to present Close to the Line: Mari Rantanen and Kirsten Reynolds, an investigation of geometric abstraction through a performative lens. Curated by Barbara O’Brien, the exhibition will be on view in the Burt Chernow Galleries at the Housatonic Museum Art September 5 – October 12, 2019. A reception with the artists and curator will be held on Thursday, September 5 from 6-7:30 p.m. This event is free, and the public is cordially invited to attend.

According to curator O’Brien, “Close to the Line will reconsider the history of 20th century geometric abstraction, its evolution and place in the 21st century. The expression and intention of the artist will be in active dialogue with the experience of the viewer. Large-scale works will tread lightly between painting, sculpture, architecture and the performative.”

For the exhibit “Close to the Line” Reynolds will exhibit two new architectural installations. In the main gallery, viewers can walk through “Switchback,” 2019, a tall cluster of trestle-style architectural frames connected to large fragments of decorative arcs. The arcs seem to spin or fall around a brightly painted platform, creating a theatrical “stage” of frozen movement that playfully frames the viewers’ physical engagement with the space. In the second gallery, “post” 2019 is an arrangement of faux architectural forms that interchangeably suggests an ordinary structural support, remnant of an unknown intention or an ambiguous point in a narrative of construction and demolition.

Poised between perpetual creation and imminent collapse, Reynold’s large-scale, site-specific architectural installations activate the agency of uncertainty. Her work explores the inter-relationships between language, architecture and the body as theoretical constructions that become fluid and emergent through humor, curiosity and wonder. Colorful printed patterns and faux wood grain used throughout the installations present a surface façade that complicates materiality, rendering her architectural constructions as unstable and performative. Reynold’s absurd tableaus create a space between fact and fiction that the viewer can enter, becoming a participant in an irresolvable narrative.

Reynolds has exhibited widely, most recently at the Boston Sculptors Gallery, the McIninch Gallery at Southern New Hampshire University; the Museum of Art, University of New Hampshire; the Blue Star Contemporary Museum, San Antonio, Texas; the Currier Museum, Manchester New Hampshire, and the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln Massachusetts. She holds a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from Maine College of Art. Reynolds is the recipient of numerous awards including the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, New Hampshire State Council for the Arts Artist Grant. She lives and works in Newmarket, New Hampshire with her husband and two children.

Born in Espoo, Finland, Mari Rantanen has had a distinguished, international career including a professorship at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts from 1996-2005. Commissions to design large-scale architectural public art works include the Niittykumpu Subway Station in Espoo, Finland and the Citybanan Odenplan Metro Station in Stockholm Sweden, both 2017. For more than 20 years, Rantanen has maintained a studio practice in Stockholm, Sweden, Tammela, Finland, and New York City. She studied at the School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in Helsinki, Finland. As a Fulbright Scholar, she studied at Pratt Institute in New York City. In the past few years alone, Rantanen has had solo exhibitions in France, Finland, Sweden, Germany and the United States.

For "Close to the Line," Rantanen will premiere a large-scale triptych which will create an enveloping experience of vivid color and glowing light. A few paintings from the 2017 series "There is a Crack in Everything. That is How the Light Comes In" - will also be shown. The series title is borrowed from the song "Anthem" by Leonard Cohen. The sets of paintings, mural-like in scale, will fill the peripheral vision of the viewer and create an evolving experience as the visitor moves through the gallery, suggesting looking at an idea or subject matter from different points of departure.

Rantanen’s signature palette of glowing, bright oranges, reds, pinks and greens create a near op-art experience of vibrating geometric forms. The palette is given a classical counterpoint with the addition of gold and silver created from German pigments mixed with acrylic. A marvelous, light filled space is created through the placement of side-by-side geometric forms; ovoid, triangles, stripes, dots, and hatch marks. In her paintings, color bears the emotional quality and feelings, while the geometric forms bring a narrative quality.

“My work,” says Rantanen, “reflects life via culture. I am especially interested in architecture and painting - places people have made. The history and presence of visual culture, the different systems and patterns that make life visible both as it is seen in the everyday life as well as in the high culture are of great importance to me. I want to combine element of different cultures through my own experiences as well as interpret the experiences of others as I them understand. With my work I hope to make good places and spaces for emotions.

Barbara O’Brien is an independent curator and critic based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was Executive Director of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri from 2012-2017, after serving as chief curator and director of exhibitions since 2009. O’Brien is an elected member of AICA-USA, International Association of Art Critics. “I am delighted to be working with the Housatonic Museum and director Robbin Zella. I am grateful for the opportunity to bring together the art of Mari Rantanen and Kirsten Reynolds to create a dialogue around the art and artists of our time.”

Prior to her time at the Kemper Museum, O’Brien was an assistant professor in the Art & Music department at Simmons College in Boston (2006-08), editor-in-chief of Art New England magazine (2003-06) and Director of the Gallery and Visiting Artist Program at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA (1990-2001). O’Brien earned an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and in 2006 was awarded the RISD national alumni award for professional achievement.

About the Reception

A reception with the artists and curator will be held on Thursday, September 5 from 5:30PM - 7:30PM. Musician Joe Mennonna will be performing.

Joe Mennonna is a freelance musician with a wide-ranging musical career spanning liturgical and educational, as well as studio and live performing in jazz, rock, folk and classical genres. He is currently a multi-instrumentalist for actor Kevin Bacon’s band The Bacon Brothers, and is an associate organist for The Church of St. Mary in Greenwich, CT. He has toured with folk legends Tom Rush, Don McLean, Al Stewart and Janis Ian. He has scored numerous features, documentaries as well as multi-media corporate presentations for IBM, Ford, Colgate-Palmolive and other large and small companies, and appears as a keyboard or saxophone soloist on recordings with Vanessa Williams, Melba Moore, Gillan and Glover of Deep Purple, Tom Rush and Richie Havens. He is a Grammy nominee (2009, Best Musical Album for Children), and continues in record production, artist development and music instruction.

Mari Rantanen, "There is a crack in everything, that is how the light comes in #11", 2017, 72" x 44"

Kirsten Reynolds, architectural model for "post", wood and paint, 2019

A portrait!

What could be more simple and more complex, more obvious and more profound.  Charles Baudelaire

Telling Portraits

Portraits were once the exclusive province of monarchs and nobles, symbols of privilege and prosperity. With the development of the daguerreotype in 1839, working class people soon had a means of capturing their own likeness inexpensively and, by 1901, cameras like Kodak’s Brownie became so affordable, anyone could take pictures!

Andy Warhol, one of the most influential artists of the 20^th century, comes closest to the notion of the valet de chambre or court painter. He, himself, was famous as a chronicler of the rich and famous, though his monumental paintings began as the humble Polaroids on view here. Similarly, photographer Hans Neleman records not only the likeness of his subject, but also the rich tradition of tattooing known as ta moko, a practice that signals one’s status within Maori society. In contrast, Sean Kernan’s subjects are kept separate and apart from society. Locked behind the walls of maximum security prisons, we are offered only fractured features reflected in a mirror, the very inverse of celebrity and rank.

Taking pictures of people as they move about their day, unaware they are being observed, is at the very heart of candid photography.  Renowned street photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, conveys a bit of humor with his “portrait” of a small child laboring to carry a portrait as large as herself. Larry Silver takes unplanned photos of people and situations as well. As a little boy gazes off into the distance unaware of Silver’s presence, his puppy stares directly into the camera lens. With over one hundred Rolling Stone covers to his credit, the celebrated portrait photographer, Mark Seliger, caught this young girl contributing her teddy bear to one of the many memorials that materialized in New York City after 9/11. These photographs are not meant to document a particular person, but rather, to capture “decisive moments” as they unfold.

Material, motion and mood are employed by Robert Klein, Kenda North and Deborah Dancy to reveal, instead of a likeness, the personality of their subjects. A woman, fully clothed replete with red shoes, is seated at the bottom of a pool; another woman dances with her mother’s wedding dress while an “empty suit” leans against a lamp post. Sensitive and poetic or social and political, image by image, these photographs create portraits that both show and tell.

On View

The HMA displays works from the permanent collection and long-term loans throughout the college including offices, atriums and lounges.

Currently on view is Object Lessons which includes over twenty thematic installations including:

• A Fine Line which focuses on the use of line in etchings, drawings, paintings and sculpture;
• Telling Portraits featuring photographs by Andy Warhol, Hans Neleman, Larry Silver, Kenda North, Sean Kernan, Deborah Dancy and Larry Silver;
• Torn, Ripped and Cut: The Art of Collage; Circuses, Carnivals and Fairs; Word/Play and Artist as Activist, to name a few.

The BURT CHERNOW Galleries are currently closed for renovation.

Exhibit Archive

Please browse our list of exhibitions below. They are organized by year from 1998 through the current year. To go to a particular year, please click on the corresponding link.

2020 |2019 |2018 |2017 |2016 |2015 |2014 |2013 |2012 |2011 |2010 |2009 |2008 |2007 |2006 |2005 |2004 |2003 |2002 |2001 |2000 |1999 |1998

2020

• The Hypogean Tip

2019

• In A Dark Wood, Wandering
• Close To The Line
• Telling Portraits

2018

• Object Lessons: 2017-2019
• Faculty Art Exhibit
• The HCC Student Exhibit
• Regional High School Art Show
• Pattern, Power, Chaos and Quiet
• When Caged Birds Sing by Ann Weiner

2017

• Joe Zucker: SCROLLS
• Sherri Wolfgang: SOLO
• Crossing Borders
• Prints That Work
• Steve McCurry: India

2016

• Rendezvous in Black
• Body and Soul
• Student Art Show
• Faculty Art Show
• Mary Giehl: Rice is Life and Kim Waale: Simulacratopia (again)

2015

• LARRY SILVER: THEN AND NOW
• 50 Years / 50 Objects
• Remythologies: New Inventions of Old Stories
• Rick Shaefer: Drawing the Line

2014

• David Hayes: Modern Master of American Abstraction
• Delightful, Delicious, Disgusting: Paintings by Mia Brownell 2003-2013
• Anna Held Audette: Requiem for the Industrial Age
• POP!
• Pins and Needles

2013

• Chuck Close and His Turnaround Arts Kids
• Our Fragile Earth
• Jonathan Taylor Arms
• Eye of the Storm
• Up All Night

2012

• The Art of Business: Collector's Press Lithographs
• Reimaging the Distaff Toolkit
• Paper Trail: 15th Anniversary Celebration of the Burt Chernow Galleries
• NEW YORK SCULPTORS GUILD
• GROUND TRUTH: Mapping the Senses/Charting Experience

2011

• Richard Buswell: Traces/Montana’s Frontier Re-Visited
• Stanley Learner: A is for Alphabet
• Polaridad Complementaria: Recent Works from Cuba
• Splash!
• "It's for you," Conceptual Art and the Telephone
• The Shepard Cycle

2010

• In the Company of... Andy Warhol
• Remembering Stanley Boxer

2009

• water, algae, ice
• Post Apocalyptic Tattoo
• PostSecret
• HCC Student Art Show
• HCC Faculty Show
• Ann Chernow - Picasso Project

2008

• Art/Place 25th Anniversary
• Why Not?!
• Illustrating Connecticut

2007

• Lineal Investigations
• Rembrandt: The Consummate Etcher and Other 17th Century Printmakers
• Annual Opened Juried Show
• LOOKING FORWARD / LOOKING BACK

2006

• Sculptural Installation by German sculptor Matthias Alfen
• Standing On One Foot
• Plastic Princess: BARBIE^® as ART
• Visions from the Heart
• Rebecca Thompson: SOLO and Hip-Hop Files: Martha Cooper

2005

• AGENT ORANGE: Collateral Damage, ICONS FOR A NEW CENTURY
• Weir Farm
• First Annual Open Juried Art Show
• Annual Faculty Show & Annual Student Show
• The New York Society of Etchers

2004

• INTERFACE: JENNY HOLZER AND MEDIA ART
• 2004 Faculty Art Show
• 2004 Student Art Show
• Izzy and Places of the Spirit Exhibitions
• Charles Peterson: Touch Me I'm Sick
• Rock My Religion a video by Dan Graham
• MICHAEL HAFFTKA A RETROSPECTIVE: LARGE OILS 1985-2003

2003

• Genesis by Lois Goglia & Grain by Janet Passehl
• FREEDOM: A History of US
• Weir Farm 2003 Visiting Artists
• Behind the Scenes of a Museum: Renovation of the HMA Storage Space

2002

• LEST WE FORGET IMAGES OF THE BLACK CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
• AMY BARTELL and THE MURAL PROJECT
• WEIR FARM: VISITING ARTISTS 2001
• OUT OF A CLEAR BLUE SKY Documentary Photographic Images: New York September 11
• ALBERTA CIFOLELLI

2001

•  ANSEL ADAMS: C L A S S I C I M A G E S
• ECCE HOMO, Paintings by Chawky Frenn
• Innocence of Vision A 25 year retrospective of Kathy Jakobsen, American folk artist,
• FLUIDITY AND FANTASY Paintings by Susan Sharp

2000

• PAST IMPERFECT: New Work by Deborah Muirhead
• JONATHAN TALBOT / COLLAGE PAINTINGS / 1980-2000
• BUILDING ON A LEGACY: RECENT GIFTS 1997 - 2000
• PRILLA SMITH BRACKET: Remnants: Ancient Forests & City Trees 2000/2001

1999

• Edgar and Toby Buonagurio: Opulence Against The Grain
• THOMAS ROSE
• Producing Histories: African Art in the Housatonic Museum of Art Collection
• Personal Affects: The Wishbone Project / The Pillow Project

1998

• Forms Derived from a Cube: Sol LeWitt 1998

Object Lessons: 2020-2022

Recent Acquisitions and Highlights of the Permanent Collection

TEN new thematic installations showcasing paintings, drawings and sculpture from the permanent collection are displayed throughout the campus

Current Exhibit Images

Images will go here.