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There are nearly 6,000 works of art in the permanent collection of the Weatherspoon Art Museum. It is a collection respected nationwide for its historically rigorous, imaginative and adventurous focus on American modern and contemporary art. The spirit that has shaped the collection since its inception in 1942, a spirit of supporting new and different directions in art since the turn of the twentieth century until now, continues to guide the substantive growth of the collection today.
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Magdalena Abakanowicz
(b. 1930)
DYBY
1993
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Polish sculptor Magdalena Abakanowicz is widely recognized for her headless and hollow human figures, some cast in bronze and others, like DYBY, in burlap. Alone or presented in a group, these figures suggest suffering and victimization—indeed, a "DYBY" is a type of torture device. Though DYBY may be understood as a general metaphor for pain and loss, it was shaped in part by the artist’s own life experiences growing up in wartime Europe.
Abakanowicz was born in Felenty, near Warsaw, into an aristocratic family. Her privileged life was disrupted by the Nazi invasion of Poland at the beginning of World War II. One night in 1943, she watched as Nazi soldiers barged into the family’s home and began firing, shooting off her mother’s right arm. Says the artist: "I was destined to live during times which were extraordinary for their various forms of collective hate and collective adulation. As a small girl I even envied those youngsters in brown shirts from the neighboring country who so worshipped their leader and so firmly believed in his ideals. When they marched in to kill us, everything turned to hate, until the killers themselves were defeated and killed . . . Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born our of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind."
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Jess
(b. 1923)
Goddess Because II
1956
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The work of Jess Collins, known professionally as Jess, stands apart from any particular movement in modern and contemporary art, though affinities with Surrealism, Action Painting, Pop Art and California Funk are sometimes evident in his work. Jess is best known for his paintings and collages that he calls "paste-ups." These combine fragments from magazine illustrations, engravings, comic strips and sometimes jigsaw puzzles. Goddess Because II is a 1956 paste-up within a frame customized by the artist. Using the collage technique to reconfigure pictures of lawnmowers, castles, animals, and other incongruous elements, Jess has transformed images of stiffly-posed, genteel women from magazine ads into domestic goddesses inhabiting strange and marvelous tableaux. Jess’s simple manipulation of existing material reveals the artist’s power to transform our experience of everyday reality. |
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Tom Friedman
(b. 1965)
Untitled
2003
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Tom Friedman has explored a variety of artistic media and styles, from geometric abstraction to text-based works, from representational sculpture and photography to purely conceptual exercises, all in an attempt to comprehend the complexities and possibilities of visual language. In his first mature works, Friedman subjected a range of available household materials to manual manipulation—folding, rolling and re-rolling, shredding, layering, etc. These early investigations were for him the first stages of understanding how to develop his own clear and concise logic out of the fundamentals of art making. Beginning in the mid 1990s, Friedman gradually shifted his investigation from simplicity to complexity. In many ways, this untitled work from 2003 is a compendium of Friedman’s career to date, as it comprises recognizable elements from scores of previous works by the artist. |
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Richard Misrach
(b. 1949)
Battleground #1
1999
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Richard Misrach has been creating remarkable images of the American West for more than thirty years. His Battleground Point series presents his most recent work, a series of photographs documenting the rare presence of water in the Nevada desert. Misrach recalls driving across the Mojave Desert—a seemingly desolate and foreboding place—as a child with his family. Returning to the desert many years later as an artist, he was awestruck by the severe beauty of the landscape. Misrach then began an expansive series of photographs entitled The Desert Cantos, simultaneously portraying the unique light, terrain, and inhabitants of the desert and addressing the controversial politics of this unique environment. This new series represents the twenty-fourth installment in the ongoing Desert Cantos project. |
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Leon Golub
(b. 1922)
Head I
1966
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Among those artists painting the figure in the 1960s, Leon Golub was one who used it most clearly in response to the political turmoil of the era. Golub responded to the war, as well as domestic chaos, by rendering large, heroic figures in thick, harsh lines to describe the violence inscribed on their bodies: he created a series of figures wounded by napalm, for example. In his paintings, it is not always clear who the victors or the vanquished are, but a sense of pain and struggle is conveyed. The artist reminds us that art may function as social commentary and that its contemplation may sway political opinion and be a powerful stimulus for political action. Well known as an active speaker and teacher, Golub taught at Rutgers for over twenty years, and he has had over sixty museum exhibitions. |
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Deborah Kass
(b. 1952)
Cindy Sherman
1995
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Beginning in the early 1990s, Deborah Kass undertook a critique of the work of one of the most famous and influential twentieth-century artists, Andy Warhol. From the outset, Kass used Warhol’s work to consider the construction of racial, ethnic and gender identities that, she felt, he glossed over. Her most complex works double up on the consideration of identity. Here, Kass portrays the photographer Cindy Sherman as Liza Minelli, one of Warhol’s celebrity subjects. Kass’s reinterpretation is particularly deft, as Sherman herself has built a reputation for photographs in which she impersonates real and fictional characters. Though similar in appearance, Kass’s works do not feature the universally recognized icons that Warhol favored. Rather, her work is a heartfelt celebration of women who have been important to her both personally and professionally. |
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