Tag: The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA

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Arts

Matthew McLendon wants more at The Fralin

New director and curator Matthew McLendon is assessing the role that UVA’s Fralin Museum will play beyond Grounds. “What I can say is that I want The Fralin to be a positive space where all feel welcome, heard and appreciated,” he says. “I want The Fralin to be a part of many communities. This is what I’m thinking about and this is what I’m working toward.” Photo by Amy Jackson

In January, The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia welcomed a director and chief curator, Matthew McLendon, formerly with Tate Britain in London, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College and The Ringling Museum of Art, the state art museum of Florida.

While McLendon worked at The Ringling, the art blogazine Hyperallergic named his show “R. Luke DuBois—Now” one of the top 15 exhibitions in the United States. “For me, the most successful exhibitions are ones that pose questions and possibilities for further thought, that leave me wanting more,” McLendon writes in an email. “There is only so much visual information any of us can process in a concentrated setting.”

McLendon’s appreciation of the dynamic relationship between artwork and viewer also informs his vision for The Fralin in its community.

“One of the things I’ve realized is that a lot of people outside of UVA think of us as only the university’s museum. Our mission certainly is to serve the students, faculty and staff of UVA, but we are Charlottesville’s art museum, too,” he says. “I’m excited about a collaboration starting this month with the Violet Crown Cinema—The Fralin Downtown Film Series. We’ll be showing six documentaries on art, architecture and artists in the fall and spring, starting on September 12.”

Even as the museum expands its offerings beyond Grounds, McLendon grapples with the influence and import of recent violence on The Fralin’s future.

“I believe in the museum as steward of histories and cultures so that we understand the best, and also the worst, that we are capable of as people,” he says.

“Museums can and should provide the historical and human contexts that are woefully absent in most public discourse today. I believe that museums, even with their contested histories, can and should be places of civil discourse. We certainly have not been perfect in the past, but this ideal should be our constant goal.”

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Arts

Fralin exhibition tells a story beyond the gallery walls

The “Collect, Care, Conserve, Curate: The Life of the Art Object” exhibition offers a behind-the-scenes look into what it takes to maintain a museum collection. Pictured above are the pre- and post-restoration images of Louis Mathieu Didier Guillaume’s “Maximilian Schele De Vere.” Photography courtesy of Fine Art Conservation of Virginia, Scott W. Nolley, Chief Conservator. Courtesy of The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.

When Maximilian Schele De Vere arrived in Scott Nolley’s art conservation studio in Richmond, he was in rough shape.

Covered in years’ worth of dust, tobacco residue and coal-fire furnace soot, Schele De Vere—or rather his portrait, rendered in oil paint on canvas by Louis Mathieu Didier Guillaume circa 1887—had fallen against a trash can and suffered a large, jagged tear and significant structural damage from exposure to uncontrolled temperature and humidity in a University of Virginia pavilion basement. The painting, which had once hung on a pavilion wall, sat untouched in UVA’s collection for years.

“Collect, Care, Conserve, Curate: The Life of the Art Object”

The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia

Through July 23

“To the uneducated eye, it looked like a total loss,” says Nolley, who has been an art conservator for more than 35 years and has done conservation work for UVA and its Fralin Museum of Art, as well as for Monticello, Colonial Williamsburg and the Commonwealth of Virginia.

“When something comes to that level of damage, it’s a bit of a tipping point,” Nolley says. “The decision is made whether it’s worth the attention or if they’re just going to let it go.”

Guillaume, regarded by many as one of the best portrait artists working in the U.S. at the time of the Civil War, was based mostly in Washington, D.C., and Richmond, so Nolley has seen a fair number of Guillaume paintings come through his studio. The artist was known for his “tiny, delicate, draftsmanship-like brushstrokes” and “deftly modulated, incredibly sensitive” colors, says Nolley. When you get up close to a Guillaume painting, details such as the highlights on jewelry, buttons or individually rendered whiskers on a mustache are rather breathtaking. “His skills are unchallenged in my world,” says Nolley, so seeing this portrait of Schele De Vere in storage and “in this condition was just heartbreaking.” 

Not only is Guillaume a significant painter in American art history, the subject, Schele De Vere, is an important figure in UVA history—hired in 1844, the Swedish-born professor taught modern language classes at the university for more than 50 years.

After 110 hours of technical work that required extensive knowledge of chemistry and art history, “Maximillian Schele De Vere” is back on display at the University of Virginia, this time in The Fralin Museum of Art, as part of the “Collect, Care, Conserve, Curate: The Life of the Art Object” exhibit currently on display through July 23.

The details of his journey back include: adhering the painting to a supporting canvas, cleaning off layers of soot, grime and stains using a custom-designed, water-based cleaning system, filling losses to the paint layers and in-painting with pigments dispersed in acrylic resin.

In most fine art museums, pieces come out of storage, go up on the wall or in a case, and then are returned to storage once the exhibit is over. This is certainly true at The Fralin, which has nearly 14,000 objects in its permanent collection, says Jean Lancaster, The Fralin collections manager who curated the exhibit.

Lancaster is constantly in conversation about The Fralin’s collection with curators, scholars, appraisers, digital imaging specialists and conservators like Nolley. Together they decide, among other things, what to conserve, when to conserve it and how—“The Life of the Art Object” exhibit brings some of those conversations into the public sphere to show how and why some of these decisions are made.

What were they to do about the portrait of a young man that had been attributed to 17th-century Dutch master Rembrandt but demonstrated qualities of 20th-century portraiture? An X-ray fluorescence scanner of the painting showed that titanium white pigment—a pigment not used in oil paint until the 1910s—was used for the young man’s lace collar, confirming the suspicion that the painting wasn’t a Rembrandt…but the question of what it was remained.

What about the late 19th-/early 20th-century Chinese export plate that had been repaired with staples by a European china mender? Leave the staples in to show the history of china repair or make it look like new?

The exhibit also afforded Lancaster the opportunity to send some neglected pieces out for conservation, and display ones that had never been on view in the museum—like the oldest textile in the collection, a Peruvian feathered tabard (tunic) covered in brilliant yellow and turquoise parrot and macaw feathers.

Each object has “its own story, its own needs, its own preservation priorities,” says Lancaster. “Art has a life beyond the gallery walls.”

Labels in the exhibit describe the preservation stories, enhancing the viewer’s appreciation, bringing us closer, not just to the artists, but to other viewers, to the people who prayed in front of the “Seven Saints in Adoration” altarpiece from 14th century Siena and to the person who centuries ago brought a brownware ocarina to his lips and blew a soft melody.

“The truth resides in these objects,” says Nolley. “People can rewrite history all they want, [but] they’re not making any more material from these periods; it’s just an impossibility. So returning to and referencing and studying this material is one of the few ways you can directly engage a time period,” he says of the act of viewing these objects. “It’s a very valuable asset to us as a species and a culture,” and it must be preserved.

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Arts

Kevin Everson looks to the night sky for comment on history

Kevin Everson’s “Rough and Unequal” is on exhibit at The Fralin Museum of Art through April 16. His work is also featured in the Whitney Biennial 2017 that begins on March 17. Image courtesy of the artist

It’s a busy, blustery Tuesday on Grounds. Outside The Fralin Museum of Art, UVA students rush by in droves, pulling overcoats tight against the wind. Inside, I stand in darkness staring at craters on the moon. The air is hot and loud, filled by the whir and clank of unsteady projectors shining on gallery walls. Two films, shot on 16mm, broadcast two different sides of the moon.

In one, darkness moves slowly across lumps and pockmarks on a surface the color of aged newspaper. Shadows appear as the moon rotates slowly; when the craters vanish, I feel lost in space. In another, the moon looks like black-and-white fuzz, a dim shadowscape making slow, creeping passage. I’d believe you if you told me the inarticulate surface was a tree trunk or dimpled thigh. Like slow-moving paintings, these films manage to simultaneously abstract the meaning of a simple subject while bridging a gap of 238,900 miles.

That’s the magic of celebrated filmmaker and UVA professor Kevin Everson. He’s known for making experimental films, many of which are shot on single rolls of 16mm film, and most of which depict working-class African-Americans in everyday situations.

As the artist’s website explains, “The subject matter is the gestures or tasks caused by certain conditions in the lives of working-class African-Americans and other people of African descent.” Those inciting conditions, the website continues, are “usually physical, social-economic circumstances or weather.”

Everson captures real life—unsung, unvarnished, mostly unscripted—and extrapolates it through the tactile trappings of film.

“You know, I’m a trained photographer, sculptor, printmaker and all that kind of stuff,” Everson says. “I like the materialities of art-making.” He explains that his average point of departure is “something that will last 11 minutes”—the length of a 400′ magazine of 16mm film. Then he abstracts his subjects. “It’s the whole idea of these things becoming two dimensional, like paintings, and changing every second the way films change—slowly.”

With eight feature-length films and more than 120 shorts to his name, Everson’s award-winning work has earned him Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, a place at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Sundance Film Festival, the International Film Festival Rotterdam and elsewhere. Everson rarely exhibits his work in Charlottesville outside the annual Virginia Film Festival. But in the fall of 2015, The Fralin commissioned Everson to create something new.

“I didn’t want to put African-Americans up on the wall,” he says. “I wanted to use what the university had to make a film with. So the film could only be made with an object that was on campus. And thinking about the history of [this place], I basically wanted to turn my back on the university. And just look up.”

Inspired by a former student, Everson decided to use UVA’s McCormick Observatory telescope and film the moon. He built a specific camera for the task, spending many long nights staring at the stars. The process itself took more than a year, accounting for weather, humidity and the fact that he only shot during quarter- and half-moon phases. The title of the resulting exhibition, “Rough and Unequal,” comes from Galileo’s description of the moon, he says, “which is probably the description of the university’s relationship to people of color since its inception.”

As a formalist, he says, he keeps his film concepts simple, emphasizing instead how art is made. Because “I like taking a view of things we don’t see,” Everson says. “Seeing the moon is amazing. Seeing it up close is an experience I want people to have. Like, we are not alone.” He laughs. “As Americans we are very self-centered,” he says. “And there are tons of hierarchies: culture, race, religion and class.”

“Rough and Unequal” reminds us that we are just individual blips in the universe. “We see the moon every night, but once you get close to it, you’re like, ‘Man, that’s the real deal,” he says.