Sarah FitzSimons’ “Water Book” is filled with water from the Atlantic Ocean and the Rabiusa River.
Playwright and author George Bernard Shaw is best known for the scathing bon mot: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” It’s too bad the Irishman isn’t alive to visit Faculty Exhibition 2020.
To celebrate the museum’s 50th anniversary, Chazen Museum of Art director Amy Gilman decided to broaden the idea of what constitutes art and who makes it. The museum opened up the invitation to some 4,000 faculty members across all UW campus disciplines. The call for submissions netted 32 independent pieces and, in some cases, room-sized installations from 26 faculty members representing 10 different schools. The result is an impressive display running through May 10.
The curators were open to any form of expression, Gilman says, as long as the piece paired with an existing museum artwork or even the building’s architecture itself. The exhibition fills the Chazen’s Pleasant T. Rowland Gallery, then spreads to upper and lower floors both in the Chazen and Elvehjem buildings to reintroduce viewers to everything the museum has to offer, viewed through a refreshed lens.
“Art-making today is multidisciplinary, and I wanted to encourage artists of all stripes to engage with the museum and its collection,” Gilman says. “The participating artists have given us an incredible gift, a vehicle for experimenting with new ways of working and seeing that will likely influence the process of rethinking the collection installation.”
The entire exhibit is marked by innovation, starting with “Books of Water (Selected Volumes),” a series of book-shaped vessels labeled and filled with water from various bodies, from the Pacific Ocean to Lake Michigan, by Sarah FitzSimons, an associate professor in art education. FitzSimons’ books are paired with Renate Aller’s photo “Oceanscapes — One View — Ten Years,” with the bookshelf aligned to match the photo’s horizon.
“I Am Standing in a Museum,” an audio work by Caroline Niziolek, assistant professor of communication sciences and disorders, measures the impact of sound as it reverberates in four different rooms. The same words, spoken softly, are recorded in each room, then each recording is re-recorded nine times, with subsequent iterations becoming less distinct until they fade completely into dissonance.
Among the most innovative, yet simple works is a series of four “Peripheral Paintings” by Derrick Buisch, an education professor. Buisch’s abstracts are long and narrow, designed to fit in forgotten and inconvenient places, such as over doorways and alongside elevators. They bring a splash of color to walls that otherwise wouldn’t support art. It’s one of the few collections that interacts with the architecture itself.
Some of the most impressive works are large and what may best be described as “gallery takeovers.”
Emily Arthur, an associate professor in art education and an artist of Cherokee descent, offers “Final Determinations Resulting from Indirect Take,” two sculptures and two paintings that respond to the Chazen’s “Songbird” by Allison Saar. Arthur’s art, which utilizes songbird imagery and statuary, was created in response to “Cherokee by Blood,” interviews with more than 125,000 Cherokee descendants filed with the U.S. Court of Claims seeking redress for the tribe’s homeland displacement. “Using the image of songbird, rather than an owl or raven, implies voice, story and maybe even a warning to those who are listening,” Arthur says. “In this series of cast bronzes the songbirds have their beaks tied shut. The song is silenced within a power structure of who owns the cage.”
Nature also plays a role in “The Museum of Everything,” a room-sized installation by Jennifer Angus, a design professor with the School of Human Ecology. The bright green room is filled with curio cabinets, vitrine display cases on tall pedestals, and thousands of mounted insects, including an army of blue-winged cicadas creating large swirls and frames around the pictures on the wall. It’s an homage to Martha Glowacki whose “My Arcadia” curio cabinet served as Angus’ inspiration and to which her entire installation is linked.
“During the Renaissance, the word ‘cabinet’ referred to an entire room, not just a piece of furniture,” Angus says. “I thought it would be fun to use this to create an immersive experience.”
The variations in the Canadian artist’s “museum” are endless; pieces of it have been exhibited around the world. Her three curio cabinets have a total of 372 drawers, each of which contains a different vignette with other mounted insects. Some of the drawers are pulled out for viewing, while others are not. But the artist plans to visit throughout the show’s run, closing some drawers while opening others to provide something new for repeat visitors.
Angus has been slowly collecting insects for more than 20 years. Some were farm-raised in Madagascar or Papua, New Guinea, or harvested in the wild by indigenous people as a means of earning income. The cicadas, of which there are some 1,500, were shipped from Thailand.
“To me this is a work about moments of wonder in an age where we’ve become jaded by technology,” Angus adds. “But it also supports the notion that insects are key to our planet’s survival.
“Experts have said that without insects we’d have about five weeks left on this planet,” she adds. “The Earth could get along nicely without human beings, but not without insects.”
