John Beardsley of Harvard and Dumbarton Oaks to Talk about "Art in the Environment" Oct. 17

CHESTERTOWN, MD—John Beardsley, Director of Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks and adjunct professor of landscape architecture at Harvard University, will speak on “Art in the Environment: Sketches from the Field,” Wednesday, October 17 at Washington College. The illustrated talk, which is free and open to the public, will begin at 5 p.m. in Decker Theater, Gibson Center for the Arts, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Beardsley holds a PhD from the University of Virginia and has authored numerous books on contemporary art and design. Two of his most recent works on landscape art and architecture are Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape (fourth edition, 2006) and Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists (1995). In addition, he edited Landscapebody dwelling: Charles Simonds at Dumbarton Oaks (2012), and the proceedings from the 2010 symposium “Designing Wildlife Habitats.”

Trained as an art historian, Beardsley has organized exhibitions for numerous museums, including the Hirshhorn and the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., and Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. In 1997, he was curator of the visual arts project “Human Nature: Art and Landscape in Charleston and the Low Country” for the Spoleto Festival U.S.A.

Dumbarton Oaks, a historic estate house and gardens in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood is home to Harvard’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Established in 1969, the Garden and Landscape Studies program there supports advanced scholarship in garden history, landscape architecture, and the study of significant landscapes around the world.

 In his role as director, Beardsley oversees summer internships, a lecture series, a publications program, an annual symposium, and a fellowship program. He also conceives and manages a series of installations of contemporary art in the institution’s historic gardens.

His visit to Washington College is sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and the Center for Environment & Society. For more information contact Rachel Field rfield2@washcoll.edu or 410-810-7162. Click here to read an interview with Beardsley in the Chestertown Spy.

Kohl Gallery to Host Extraordinary Exhibit on Golden Age of Bird Illustration, Opening Oct. 9

CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Kohl Gallery of Art at Washington College will soon exhibit an exquisite collection of rare volumes and prints with illustrations by some of the finest artists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “In Pursuit of Beauty: John J. Audubon and the Golden Age of Bird Illustration” opens Tuesday, October 9, with a reception in the gallery from 5 to 7 p.m., and continues through Friday, November 30. View photos from the opening.

         The 20 books and 19 prints in the exhibit, on loan from private collections, showcase works by Audubon and other great but lesser-known naturalists—William Beebe, Charles Lucien Bonaparte, Daniel Giraud Elliot, John Gould, and Alexander Wilson. Highlights include an original Audubon watercolor of a pheasant that has rarely, if ever, been displayed, and a 17th-century book with a decree by King James granting his subjects the right to hunt birds on Sundays.

         According to exhibit curator Alex Castro, who is Architect, Exhibition and Book Designer in Residence at the College, the gallery will be filled with the sound of bird songs and calls. It also will feature video and photographs taken during the bird-banding project underway nearby at the Foreman’s Branch Bird Observatory, part of the Center for Environment & Society at Washington College.

         The video will add to what Castro calls “this bird spirit” that will embrace gallery visitors. “To see birds being released, taking wing—it’s the most wonderful thing,” he says.  “And at the center of it all, these beautiful still images of birds from the past.”

Daniel Giraud Elliot's peacocks. 

         Robert McCracken Peck, Curator of Art and Senior Fellow of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, has been consulting with Castro on the exhibit. A renowned author, naturalist and historian, Peck says the upcoming Kohl exhibit is remarkable for the quality of prints and illustrations being shown.  “This exhibition includes representative examples of some of the most beautiful, popular, and/or influential books about birds to be published in Great Britain and the United States over the last two hundred years,” he writes in an introduction to the exhibition. 

         “Whether the artists have household names, like America’s Audubon or Britain’s Gould, or are less well-known figures, the quality of their work is consistently high,” he adds. “Many of these works of art were created as illustrations to accompany scientific texts, but the artists went beyond mere technical expertise to capture the birds and their environments in extraordinary ways.” 

          Located on the ground floor of the Gibson Center for the Arts on the Washington College campus, 300 Washington Avenue, the Kohl Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday from 1 to 6 p.m. and closed Monday and Tuesday. For more information on the gallery, visit http://kohlgallery.washcoll.edu/.

 William Beebe's portrait of Chinese ring-necked pheasants.

Kohl Gallery Exhibit Features Multi-Media Work by New Studio-Art Faculty at the College

A still from a Benjamin Bellas landscape video. 

Heather Harvey's "Stretched Membrane," 2012, in plaster, fiberglass,  and acrylic.

CHESTERTOWN, MD—The Kohl Gallery at Washington College showcases the work of two new studio-art professors in an exhibition opening Friday, August 24.  “What Comes Later,” featuring multimedia works by Heather Harvey and Benjamin Bellas, will run through September 16. A reception with the artists, both members of the Art and Art History Department, will be held Friday, August 31, from 5 to 7 p.m. Both the exhibition and the reception are free and open to the public.

            Bellas works in photography, video, sculpture and performance and has exhibited his work around the globe, from Istanbul and Hong Kong to Los Angeles and Chicago. He earned a degree in studio arts from the University of Pittsburgh and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he has also taught as a member of the faculty in the Contemporary Practices Department.

            Bellas, who begins teaching this fall, says he is “honored and excited” to be joining the faculty at Washington College.  “The exhibition will be, first and foremost, an opportunity for the community to familiarize themselves with the work of Professor Harvey and myself,” he adds. “My hope is that it may also facilitate a dialogue within the community regarding the state of the visual arts at Washington College and beyond, past, present, and future.”

            Harvey, who finished her first year of teaching at the College with the Spring 2012 semester, says she was drawn to the opportunity of being in a small art department where she could have a big impact. She adds that she is energized by the atmosphere on a liberal arts campus.  

            “Artists work with science, philosophy, poetry, music, psychology, politics, and the natural world,” she explains.  “So, an interdisciplinary approach is the natural state for most artists, and certainly for me.  Interactions with colleagues, students, and visiting scholars are one of the primary pleasures of being part of an academic community.”

            Harvey, who received her MFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007, began her career with paintings, drawings, and some digital work and has since moved towards a hybrid form of two-dimensional art and sculpture. This past January, Harvey's work was included in the group show “Re-Generation” at The Painting Center in New York.

             “We are very pleased to feature our two new studio-art faculty in the exhibit,” says Patrice DiQuinzio, associate provost and director of the Kohl Gallery.  “Their work is very thought provoking, and I’m sure the community will really enjoy it.”

         The Kohl Gallery is open Wednesday through Sunday, 1 to 6 p.m. and closed Monday and Tuesday. For more information, visit http://kohlgallery.washcoll.edu/.

Art History Professor Aileen Tsui Gives Invited Lectures on Whistler's Art in Tokyo and Beijing

Whistler's "Caprice in Purple and Gold: The Golden Screen," from
 the Freer Gallery of Art, was among the works Professor Tsui explored
 in her lecture at Sophia University.

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Professor Aileen Tsui was recently a guest lecturer at two prestigious universities in Asia, sharing her expertise on the works of American artist James McNeill Whistler.

Tsui, an associate professor of art history at Washington College, delivered a lecture at Sophia University in Tokyo titled “Whistler’s Golds: Classicism, Japanism and Modernist Authority.” Her lecture explored Whistler’s fascination with the color, material and metaphorical resonance of gold. From there she examined the artist’s participation in modernist challenges to traditional Western standards for judging the quality and value of art. She also addressed the broader issue of how Whistler’s paintings were affected by his fascination with, and admiration for, Japanese and Chinese art. 

At Peking University’s School of Art in Beijing, China, her lecture was titled “Chinese Porcelain and Modern Painting in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Case of James McNeill Whistler's Art."

Tsui joined the Washington College faculty in 2004. A graduate of Yale University who earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, she focuses much of her research and teaching in the areas of British, French and American art of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In addition to delving into Whistler’s career, her specialties include exoticism in visual culture, modernist painting, feminist theories in the visual arts, and the relationship between image and text.

Expert to Discuss Eastern Influences On Renaissance Art, April 27 at WC

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Meredith J. Gill, associate professor of art history at the University of Maryland, College Park, will lecture on “Turks, Scribes, and Magic Carpets: Looking East in the Renaissance” on Friday, April 27, at Washington College. The talk will begin at 4 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center, on the College campus, 300 Washington Avenue.

Gill’s research revolves around Italian art and architecture from the late medieval period through the sixteenth century, concentrating on theological and philosophical influences. She is the author of Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo (Cambridge University Press) and is currently writing a second book, Flight of Angels: The Order of Heaven in Medieval and Renaissance Italy.

She also has contributed to many other Renaissance art publications. A recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Gill has led two sessions of the NEH’s Summer 2010 Seminar, “Re-Mapping the Renaissance: Exchange between Early Modern Islam and Europe” (Center for Renaissance and Baroque Studies, University of Maryland).

“Turks, Scribes, and Magic Carpets” is sponsored by the Friends of Miller Library, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Department of History and is free and open to the public.

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Lecturer Fatma Ismail Explores Foreign Influences on the Art of Ancient Egypt

CHESTERTOWN, MD—Visiting lecturer Fatma Ismail will talk about how ancient Egyptian art affected the rest of the world and was, in turn, affected by other cultures when she presents “Continuity and Transformation: Late Period Egypt,” on Wednesday, April 18 at Washington College. Her talk will take place at 4:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall, John S. Toll Science Center, on the College campus.

During the time period from about 712 to 332 B.C., Egyptian artistic influences, Egyptian gods and their sanctuaries were widely attested to over the whole range of the Mediterranean world. Through a succession of conquests by Kushites, Assyrians, Persians, and Greeks, the Egyptians and their art were, in turn, changed by close contact with foreign cultures. Examining this rich period of ancient Egyptian history, Ismail will illustrate how Egyptian art exhibited both unique qualities and evidence of cross-cultural influences.

Ismail received her Ph.D. from the Near Eastern Department of the Johns Hopkins University in 2009 after completing her undergraduate studies and a preliminary master’s degree in Egyptology at Helwan University in Egypt. She shares her broad knowledge of the ancient Eastern Mediterranean world up to medieval Islam as a visiting lecturer in Art and Art History at Washington College. She curated the exhibition “For Now and Forever: Funerary Artifacts from Ancient Egypt” in the Kohl Gallery last fall.

The April 18 lecture is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the William James Forum, the Department of Art and Art History, and the Department of Philosophy and Religion. For more information, visit http://art.washcoll.edu/.