We will be closed for the Thanksgiving Holiday from November 26−27. Our regular hours will resume on November 28.

November 7−December 13, 2009

A Room of Their Own:
The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections

Opening Reception: November 7, 5:30−7:00 pm

Curated by Nancy E. Green

Organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University

Organized to coincide with the 100-year anniversary of Bloomsbury’s beginnings, A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections will examine the American reception of the art produced between 1910 and the 1970s by the Bloomsbury artists and their associates and collaborators. The exhibition will include over 190 paintings, watercolors, drawings, books from the Hogarth Press, and decorative works from the Omega Workshops, and will focus on how this small group of artists made its imprint on the cultural thinking of their day.

“A hundred years after the Bloomsbury group was established,” says Nancy E. Green, the organizing curator and the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Johnson Museum, “their story still resonates and brings together a variety of interests across many artistic and intellectual pursuits.”

The name Bloomsbury conjures up an image of early twentieth-century Bohemia, where a core group of literary friends that included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster were joined by a host of other writers, including D. H. Lawrence; philosophers such as Bertrand Russell; economist John Maynard Keynes; and poets like T. S. Eliot. But Bloomsbury was much more richly patterned and complex than even this eminent list suggests. A group of fine artists, including Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, critic and painter Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey’s talented cousin Duncan Grant, and Dora Carrington, Strachey’s longtime companion, formed the nucleus of visual Bloomsbury.

Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current: international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women’s rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. The exhibition, by examining the group’s responses to these issues, provides a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today.

Two important works from the Mills College Art Museum are included in the exhibition. Self-Portrait, ca. 1926, by Vanessa Bell and Self-Portrait, by Duncan Grant are recent acquisitions generously bequeathed by Carolyn G. Heilbrun.

A Room of Their Own is accompanied by a complete exhibition catalogue, distributed by Cornell University Press, with essays by leading Bloomsbury scholars: Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography, Dartmouth College; Honorary Visiting Professor, University of Exeter in Devon, England; and author of Carrington: A Life; Benjamin Harvey, Assistant Professor of Art History, Mississippi State University; Mark Hussey, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies, Pace University; and Christopher Reed, Associate Professor of English and Visual Culture, The Pennsylvania State University, who co-edited the catalogue with curator and contributor Nancy Green.

The exhibition was presented at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina from December 18, 2008, to April 5, 2009 and Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York from July 18 to October 18, 2009. After Mills, it will travel to the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois (January 15–March 14, 2010); the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts (April 3–June 15, 2010); and the Palmer Museum at Penn State University (July 6–September 26, 2010). (Dates are subject to change.)

A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections was organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, in conjunction with the Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University. The exhibition was organized by Nancy E. Green, the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Johnson Museum and has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, promoting excellence in the humanities. The exhibition at Mills College has been supported by the Agnes Cowles Bourne Fund for Special Exhibitions.

Public Programs

November 10, 2009, 1:00 pm
Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building
Lecture by Peter Stansky, Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, Stanford University 

November 15, 2009, 3:00 pm
Danforth Lecture Hall, Art Building
Lecture by Nancy E. Green

November 17, 2009, 6:45 pm
Art Museum Courtyard
Feminism 9.0: Words and Threads, a collaborative two-act performance by Moira Roth's History of Performane Class

All are welcome to attend “Feminism 9.0: Words and Threads,” a collaborative two-act performance, with a Thread Bearer and two Mistresses of Ceremonies, created by members of Moira Roth’s History of Performance class: Tuesday, November 17, 2009, 6:45 p.m.-c. 8:30 p.m.. It will begin promptly at 6:45 p.m. with the audience gathering in the courtyard outside the Mills College Art Museum (currently showing “A Room of Their Own: The Bloomsbury Artists in American Collections” exhibition).

 The first Act, “Listening,” held inside the Mills Art Museum, will consist of short readings of texts by a wide range of women from Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and Harriet Jacobs to Virginia Woolf and Yoko Ono. Act 2, “Getting Our Bearings,” composed of five parts, will take place in and near the Haas Dance Pavilion (Studios 1 and 3) and will consist of various performances about consciousness- raising, a selection of historically important women, readings of 2009 manifestoes by class members, and the creation of a “Mother Tree,” etc.

December 3, 2009, 7:00 pm
Art Museum
Mills College Place for Writers Performance 

For more information visit A Room of Their Own Website.

Image: Vanessa Bell, British, 1879-1961. Virginia Woolf, ca. 1912. Oil on paperboard. Collection of the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts. Gift of Ann Safford Mandel, class of 1953.

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September 2−December 13, 2009

Cuba: Beauty and Decay
A Photographic Journey

Photographs by Vivian Stephenson
Texts by Carlota Caulfield

A Havana native and tireless traveler, Vivian Stephenson returned to Cuba in 1999 and 2002 after a long absence, writing, with her Nikon 80, a four hundred-year history of Cuba in pictures. In this exhibit Stephenson offers us a splendid series of photographs of the cities of Havana, Trinidad, and Sancti-Spíritus.

Founded early in the sixteenth century, among the first seven colonial towns ("villas") set up in Cuba by the Spanish, the architecture of these three cities is today not only a testament to centuries of history but is also part of our human heritage. What Stephenson has done in her photographs is precisely to document the most important architectural treasures of these three cities. Among her photos we can find forts, palaces, churches, plazas, civil buildings, and even a ruined sugar mill.

To view these photographs is like going back in time. As in Alejo Carpentier's short story, "Voyage to the Seed"—a tale told backwards, unexpected, full of subtle shadings and of great discoveries—these photos are a trip to the beginnings, a round-trip path seen through Stephenson's eyes. Past and present become two sides of a reality in which we take part. A trip inward, toward stone and wood, toward the wall, the sentry-box, the grille, the wrought-iron grating, the doors and gates, the star-shaped latticework and the lacy wood frames and ceilings, toward galleries of inner patios and balconies, toward columns, rounded arches and art-glass windows, all part of a rich mélange of materials, forms, and styles.

Hija de La Habana y viajera incansable, Vivian Stephenson, después de largos años de ausencia, regresa a Cuba en los años 1999 y 2002 y, con su Nikon80 escribe, en imágenes, más de cuatrocientos años de historia de Cuba. Stephenson nos regala en esta exposición una valiosa serie de fotografías de La Habana, Trinidad, y Sancti-Spíritus.

Fundadas en los albores del siglo dieciséis, entre las primeras siete villas establecidas por los españoles en Cuba, la arquitectura colonial de estas tres ciudades es hoy en día no sólo testimonio de siglos de historia sino también patrimonio de la humanidad. Es precisamente la documentación de los más importantes tesoros arquitectónicos de estas tres ciudades lo que Stephenson ha logrado en sus fotografías. Entre ellas encontramos fortalezas, palacios, iglesias, plazas, edificios cívicos, y hasta las ruinas de un ingenio de azúcar.

Mirar estas fotografías es como hacer un viaje en el tiempo. Como en el cuento de Alejo Carpentier "Viaje a la semilla"—un relato a la inversa, inesperado, lleno de pequeños matices y de grandes descubrimientos—estas fotos son un recorrido a los orígenes, un camino de ida y vuelta a través de la mirada de Stephenson. Pasado y presente se nos muestran como dos caras de la misma realidad de la que somos parte. Un viaje hacia adentro, hacia la piedra y la madera, hacia el muro, la garita, las rejas, las cancelas, las puertas y portones, las estrelladas celosías y los techos de alfarje y armadura, hacia galerías del patio interior y de balcones, y hacia las columnas, los arcos de mediopunto y los vitrales como parte de una riquísima mezcla de materiales, formas y estilos.

Image: Central Park View / Vista del Parque Central

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