El Anatsui at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley - New Worlds

El Anatsui: New Worlds 

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley

21 January – 8 June 2014

The Mount Holyoke College Art Museum presents the exhibition El Anatsui: New Worlds. The exhibition, organized by museum director John Stomberg and Five College Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor of African Art and Architecture Amanda Gilvin, focuses on six of Anatsui’s large-scale sculptures—five of which are wall mounted and one that extends across the floor.

These works are all constructed in Anatsui’s signature technique of joining the bands and caps of liquor bottles into broad expanses of flexible sculpture. Brightly colored and richly textured, these works of art engage a host of issues—from consumer culture to environmental concerns—related to contemporary life in a globalizing world. The works build on the artist’s engagement with Africa’s global history. European traders introduced bottled liquor to the continent, and rum figured prominently in the triangle trade that brought so many enslaved Africans to the Americas. While humble, even seemingly inconsequential, these bits of detritus carry with them evidence of a painful legacy hundreds of years in the making. 

El Anatsui (Ghanaian, b. 1944) long enjoyed a well-deserved reputation for his sculpture in Africa, but he catapulted to international fame after his work was featured in the Venice Biennale of 2007. Since that time, his work has been the subject of countless one-person and group exhibitions, including two major travelling retrospectives, one of which continues today.

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE ART MUSEUM

50 College Street, South Hadley, Massachusetts 01075

mtholyoke.edu/artmuseum

Lorna Bieber: Of Echoes and Grace, Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley

Lorna Bieber: Of Echoes and Grace 

Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley 

30 August – 17 December 2013

This exhibition debuts three large-scale multi-paneled montages by New York artist Lorna Bieber. These are installed alongside several of her earlier photographic murals. The montages form a series that has consumed the artist’s attention for the past four years—exploring the spiritually evocative potential of imagery associated with traditional religious themes in the context of contemporary art. Included are "Baby Jesus: Flight Into Egypt", 2009-10, "Judgment/Exile", 2011-12, and the magisterial 26-foot-long "Eden", 2012-13. The murals are selected from two series—one focused on trees and the other on birds—that now, with hindsight, seem to prepare the way for the new montages. Together, the artworks in Lorna Bieber: Of Echoes and Grace demonstrate the artist’s arrival at the zenith of an artistic quest that began decades ago.

Lorna Bieber worked for many years as a photo editor at leading New York magazines. Though trained as a painter, she became transfixed by the power and effect of reworked photographic imagery. Before the advent of computer programs that streamline this process, Lorna Bieber mastered the use of a copy machine as her medium—a technique that she continues to use today. She reproduces, expands, crops, and alters images from books and magazines until they are just recognizable. These are then joined to form new compositions that evoke themes far beyond the subjects of the source material.

MOUNT HOLYOKE COLLEGE ART MUSEUM

50 College Street, South Hadley, Massachusetts 01075

mtholyoke.edu/artmuseum