Plan your visit to Iowa City's new Stanley Museum around these 9 pieces of art
The University of Iowa Stanley Museum of Art opens Friday, displaying some of the museum’s nearly 18,000-piece collection to the community after 14 years without a home.
The Stanley’s inaugural exhibit, “Homecoming,” features a series of related installations including “Generations,” “Fragments of the Canon” and “History is Always Now.”
The exhibit displays more than 600 works of art across the second floor of the museum.
“We have really done some very new, pioneering things with this exhibition that the museum has never done before,” Stanley director Lauren Lessing said.
“History is Always Now” will feature historic African and Asian objects and indigenous art alongside works by modern artists. It departs from the museum’s “conventions," and instead will present the African collection with "more of a global framework," Cory Gundlach, curator of African Art, said at a media open house Tuesday.
“Fragments of the Canon” features African art created by a Black collector, Meredith Saunders. “Generations” celebrates the university's "history of inclusive scholarship, creative research and community building," according to the Stanley Museum of Art.
“Art museums have changed in the past 14 years. The entire field has transformed. We are reaching and embracing audiences in new ways,” Lessing said. “And we are reaching a more diverse, wider audience than we ever have before. For these reasons, the representation of artists in our galleries is a much wider array than it was at the old museum of art.”
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At 3 p.m. Friday, the Stanley Museum of Art dedication ceremony begins with remarks from UI President Barbara Wilson and Lessing. At 4:30 p.m., visitors can explore the new museum. Live music and refreshments will be available throughout the evening. Grand opening celebrations continue into the weekend.
Here are nine pieces of art to check out at the Stanley Museum of Art, 160 W. Burlington St., Iowa City.
‘Mural’ by Jackson Pollock (plus one other portrait of his)
Perhaps the piece most associated with the Stanley Museum of Art, Jackson Pollock’s grand “Mural” incorporates swirls of yellow, pink, white and black.
“Mural” is about 8 feet by 19 feet. It was gifted to the university in 1951 by famed American art collector Peggy Guggenheim. In 2012, “Mural” traveled to the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles for needed conservation efforts.
What is less talked about is the Stanley Museum of Art’s other Jackson Pollock piece, “Portrait of H.M.,” painted in 1945.
This piece was also part of Guggenheim’s collection.
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‘Glory’ by Elizabeth Catlett
Renowned sculptor, printmaker and painter Elizabeth Catlett’s body of work often explores race, women and the working class.
She was rejected from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in the 1930s because she was African American. Catlett attended UI for graduate school, studied under Grant Wood, and made history as the first African American woman to receive a master’s of fine arts in 1940.
“Glory,” made in 1981, is of dancer, actress and educator Glory Van Scott, according to the Stanley Museum of Art’s website.
Van Scott and Catlett met in 1981, when Catlett subsequently decided to create “Glory.”
According to the Stanley Museum of Art’s website, Catlett’s motivation for “Glory” wasn’t inherently because of Van Scott, but rather her head.
“It was a culmination of old-fashioned and modern-sophisticated and the forms represent to me one kind of beauty in Black women,” Catlett said to Van Scott.
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‘Plaid Sweater’ by Grant Wood
Iowans don’t need an introduction to Grant Wood.
The painter responsible for “American Gothic” is also responsible for this Stanley Museum of Art acquisition some five decades after it was completed.
“Plaid Sweater” is a portrait of Mel Blumberg, 8 years old at the time, from Wood's painting in 1931, according to “Legacy of the University of Iowa Museum of Art: Building a Masterpiece” by Abigail Foerstner.
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‘Rouge kente et monde’ by Abdoulaye Konaté
Abdoulaye Konaté is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Mali.
The artist's body of work was the subject of an exhibition titled "The Master/Le Maitre" at the Dakar Biennial earlier this year. The Dakar Biennial is a contemporary arts exhibition and festival in Senegal.
“Rouge kente et monde” is French for red kente and the world.
“He’s putting the word 'world' right into his work because it actually draws upon global references, specifically kente,” Gundlach told the Press-Citizen.
Kente is a type of cloth, colorful with patterns, that originates from Ghana, according to NPR. The piece responds to kente while also incorporating it, Gundlach said. The kente can be seen in the center of the piece. The symbol seen near the top of the piece is drawn from hunters' tunics in Mali that incorporate "motifs that are like talismans," Gundlach said.
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‘Surrounding’ by Odili Donald Odita
Odili Donald Odita was born in Nigeria and lives and works in Philadelphia. He is an abstract painter “whose work explores color both in the figurative historical context, and in the sociopolitical sense,” according to the Stanley Museum of Art.
His color selection is largely based on personal memories and created by hand-mixing so that shades aren’t repeated, according to the museum.
In "Surrounding," shades of green, blue and orange make up the bright, geometric mural on the first floor of the Stanley Museum.
Odita’s Nigerian and Midwestern identities influence his work.
“His practice speaks to a contrast of cultures and a desire to create something new from a set of distinct parts,” according to the Stanley Museum.
The wall painting, completed in 2022, is 13½ feet by 27 feet. It’s the first installation in the museum’s ongoing public art series “Thresholds,” which features work by Iowa-associated artists, according to the Stanley Museum of Art.
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‘Guardian’ by Donté K. Hayes
Donté K. Hayes attended the University of Iowa for his master's in fine arts. He was a recipient of a 2017 University of Iowa Arts Fellowship.
"Artifacts are a tangible history which have the capacity to retain, transform, destroy, erase and evoke lost knowledge," Hayes stated on his website. "My artwork is informed by researching traditional African heirlooms and initiation rites of birth, adulthood, marriage, eldership and ancestry which are essential to all human growth and speaks to the greater African diaspora."
"Guardian" is a response to the Stanley Museum of Art's historical African pottery collection, Gundlach said.
The Atlanta, Georgia, artist credits Catlett as one of his "biggest heroes in the art world," Gundlach said.
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'Abstract Painting' by Ad Reinhardt
The abstract, all black painting is from painter Ad Reinhardt.
Though it may not appear so, Lessing said the piece is an "arrangement of geometric forms in different shades of black."
The Columbia University graduate was born in 1913, and three decades later accepted a position at Brooklyn College, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He later lectured at Yale University, the San Francisco Art Institute and more.
According to the MOMA, Reinhardt's "focused body of work" and "restrained and repeating compositions" make him "a progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual art."
"Abstract Painting" was completed between 1960 and 1961.
Pieces from the Lil Picard Collection
Lilli Elizabeth Benedict, known as Lil Picard, was an artist involved with painting, writing, film, collage and performance from Germany.
The journal the Brooklyn Rail wrote that Picard is someone who has been called “the muse of the American avant-garde,” and “the Grandma Moses of the Counterculture.”
Lessing called Picard "cutting-edge."
In the 1960s, Picard was making pieces that had an "autobiographical, feminist focus," according to the New York Times. In the subsequent years, Picard would become known for her interactive and one-person shows, including one interactive show filmed by Andy Warhol, according to the New York Times.
Picard gave her entire collection to the university, Lessing said.
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‘Karneval’ by Max Beckmann
The 1943 piece, which is oil on linen canvas, is by Max Beckmann.
Beckmann was a German artist who died in 1950.
His work intertwined “figuration and narrative, peppering his paintings with fragments of myths, Bible stories and opaque allegories” according to the Museum of Modern Art’s website.
Beckmann was dismissed from his teaching position at Frankfurt’s Städel Art School in 1933 at the time of Adolf Hitler's rise to power. He painted “Karneval” while in Amsterdam, according to “A Legacy for Iowa” highlights video.
Beckmann painted at least 10 triptychs, or a piece of art divided into three sections, and “Karneval” was his sixth, according to “A Legacy for Iowa.”
Paris Barraza covers entertainment, lifestyle and arts at the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Reach her at PBarraza@press-citizen.com or (319) 519-9731. Follow her on Twitter @ParisBarraza.
This article originally appeared on Iowa City Press-Citizen: Nine pieces of art to see at the Stanley Museum's grand opening Friday
