Three exhibitions opening at UB Anderson Gallery

The UB Anderson Gallery is mounting three exhibitions this spring and summer of work from the university’s collections.

The exhibitions — “On the Road and in the Book,” “Ancestral Clay: Pueblo Ceramics from Cravens World” and “Calculated Abstractions: Hard-Edge Prints” — will open with a public reception from 6-8 p.m. April 26 in the gallery, One Martha Jackson Place off Englewood Avenue near Kenmore Avenue. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday.

For more information, call 716-829-3754 or visit the gallery’s website.

The exhibitions, which are free and open to the public, will run through Aug. 3.

On the Road and in the Book

Representatives of museums, galleries and auction houses, as well as art dealers, curators, scholars and writers from across the U.S., Europe and Asia regularly travel to Buffalo to study artwork in the Anderson Gallery’s collection or the Martha Jackson Gallery Archives, or ask to borrow a work of art, photograph, letter or exhibition catalog for an exhibition or publication.

Most recently, two early works by Antoni Tàpies were returned to the Anderson Gallery from the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where they were included in the fall 2013 comprehensive exhibition “Antoni Tàpies: From Object to Sculpture (1964-2009).”

“On the Road and In the Book” features works of art and archival material that have travelled around the world or been photographed for significant publications.

Artists with works of art in the exhibition include Tàpies and Karel Appel, Carl Chiarenza, Salvador Dali, Sam Francis, Michael Goldberg, Red Grooms, Grace Hartigan, Arnold Mesches, and Francisco Toledo.

The exhibition was co-curated by Sandra H. Olsen, director of the UB Art Galleries, and Robert Scalise, assistant director of collections and exhibitions.

Ancestral Clay: Pueblo Ceramics from Cravens World

Pueblo pottery is one of the oldest artisanal traditions in the Americas, representing a continuous range of cultural attributes, from prehistoric to the modern period. One of the strengths of the Pueblo tradition is the ability of more recent artisans to adopt and transform prehistoric decorative designs into contemporary works of art.

“Ancestral Clay” showcases a collection of Pueblo ceramics from the Annette Cravens collection that feature the works of famous pottery-making communities such as the Acoma, Laguna, Tewa and others.

The exhibition highlights the main decorative styles of Pueblo ceramics, such as geometric, animal representations and ritual, with an emphasis on the relationship between the artists and their ancestral communities — the Mimbres, Hohokam, Anasazi and others.

The exhibit is the culmination of work by students in the graduate museum management seminar, who spent a semester working with the Southwestern pottery collection in the Cravens World installation in the Anderson Gallery.

Eugen Ruzi, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, curated the exhibition with the students in the museum management seminar.

Calculated Abstractions: Hard-Edge Prints
 
“Calculated Abstractions” explores how artists use clean edges to produce precise geometry as a means to challenge how viewers perceive foreground, background and the space constructed around them. Each artist demonstrates how different techniques result in similar outcomes, while simultaneously attempting to eliminate traces of the artist’s hand.

Prints by Julian Stanczak, Josef Albers and Donald Judd challenge observers to view the represented imagery as both receding and protruding into space. Artists such as Frank Stella and Garo Antreasian experiment with two-dimensional space and its interaction with the printed surface.

Other artists with work featured in the exhibition include Allan D’Arcangelo, Eusebio Sempere, Hans Haacke, Gottfried Honegger and Hisao Domoto.

The exhibition was co-curated by Nick Ostness and Scalise.