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Monday, June 22, 2020

News from the Princeton University Art Museum


Late Thursdays
For the Birds: Representing Nature from Saint Francis to Pope Francis
Thursday, June 18, 5:30 p.m.

Using Laudato Si’, Pope Francis’s recent encyclical on the environment, as a point of departure, this talk explores the changing representation of the pope’s namesake, Saint Francis, from the thirteenth to the twenty-first century, examining how evolving ideas about the human-nature relationship are expressed in images of the patron saint of ecology. Presented by Karl Kusserow, John Wilmerding Curator of American Art. Details and free registration here.

Art for Families–Anytime, Anywhere
El Anatsui

Kids home? Missing the Museum? Today on our website, learn about El Anatsui. An artist from Ghana who lives and works in Nigeria, El Anatsui is known for creating art out of found materials such as wood, clay, paper, and bottle tops. Download our online activity guide to learn about his works and make your own El Anatsui–inspired collage at home.

Save the Date
Xochipala: Salvaging a Looted Culture and Its Art
Thursday, June 25, 5:30 p.m.

Leveraging new scientific analyses, available (but limited) archaeological data, and unique historical records held at Princeton, this lecture provides a fresh consideration of the art style known as Xochipala. This material was looted from the region around a modern village of the same name in Guerrero, Mexico, beginning in the nineteenth century but with heightened intensity in the 1960s and later. The looting irreparably destroyed the objects’ original contexts, resulting in decades of speculative and imaginative interpretation. Bryan Just, Peter Jay Sharp Curator and Lecturer in the Art of the Ancient Americas, will provide new insights and a frank assessment of what has been lost through clandestine pillaging. Details and free registration here.

Art Making
Drawing: Mark-Making Variations
Thursday, June 18, 8 p.m.

The Art Museum is partnering with the Arts Council of Princeton to provide free weekly drawing classes taught live over Zoom, so participants can join from their home computers, using pen or pencil on paper. Lessons feature artworks from the Museum’s collections. This week we will learn how artists use a variety of mark-marking techniques, from smooth to expressive, sometimes altering the style to fit the subject. In addition, many artists use contour lines of varying thicknesses to show an object either projecting or retreating in space. In this session, we will explore these effects and practice using them. Details and free registration here.

 

Screening Room
Maya Lin: The Princeton Line

Last fall the Art Museum dedicated two new works of public art by Maya Lin. This new 90-second video takes viewers on an aerial tour of The Princeton Line, an undulating sculpted line of molded earth that travels a steep slope, and Einstein’s Table, a granite “water table.”

Members Event
Inside the Pages: The Making of the Catalogue Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings
Tuesday, June 23, 5:30 p.m.

Members are invited to join us for an exclusive event discussing how the Art Museum created the catalogue for the exhibition Cézanne: The Rock and Quarry Paintings. Learn about the process of researching, writing, and creating this scholarly volume. Speakers include Caroline Harris, Diane W. and James E. Burke Associate Director for Education; Janet Rauscher, project editor; and Annemarie Iker, catalogue contributor and PhD candidate in Art History, Princeton University. Not yet a member? Click here to enroll now at no charge. 


Collections Spotlight
Rauschenberg's Time Capsule

In 1970 the avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg produced Surface Series from Currents, eighteen large-scale screenprints that he considered “the most serious journalism I had ever attempted.” The resulting series is both a technical feat of modernist printmaking and a chance to peer inside Rauschenberg’s time capsule of world events and witness the cacophony of violence, warfare, and political backlash that defined the currents of the time.