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MuseumGames: Reconsidered 2 Word Find

Locate the given words in the grid, running in one of eight possible directions horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. There may be an unused word or a message hidden another way to discover related to the puzzle.

ABSTRACTION
ARTWORK
BRONZE
CANVAS
CASEIN
COLLAGE
COLLECTION
COMPOSITION
CONTRAST
CURATE
FIGURES

FOREGROUND
GALLERY
HORIZON
MOVEMENT
OIL
PAINTING
PATTERN
PENCIL
PHOTOGRAPHY
PROPORTION
REALISM

RECONSIDERED
REFLECTIONS
RHINESTONES
SCULPTURE
STORAGE
STORIES
STYLIZE
WALNUT

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ARTstrology: Cancer

June 21-July 22

Protection, P J Rogers, (Rochester, New York, 1937 – 2014, Akron, Ohio), 2010, Inkjet print on paper, 20 in. x 15 in. (50.8 cm x 38.1 cm), Gift of the artist, 2011.51

Although your sign is a crab, fearsome Cancer, you’re anything but crabby. You are so compassionate that you would bend over backwards to protect loved ones. But remember to be careful with yourself, dear crustacean friend. Although you’ve got that hard Cancer crab shell, you’re actually a delicate flower. So don’t bend too far or you’ll break your stem!

Cáncer 21 junio – 22 julio

Aunque tu signo es un cangrejo, Cáncer temible, eres todo menos malhumorado. Eres tan compasivo que te partirías la espalda para proteger a tus seres queridos. Pero, acuérdate de tener cuidado contigo mismo, querido amigo de los crustáceos. Aunque tienes esa cáscara dura del cangrejo de Cáncer, eres en realidad una flor delicada. Entonces, no te dobles demasiado o te podrías romper el tallo.

ARTstrology is made possible with support the Henry V. and Frances W.  Christenson Foundation

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Ralph Albert Blakelock

In this moody night scene, or “nocturne,” Ralph Albert Blakelock captured the solitude and stillness of night, rendered through hazy shades of green, blue, and black.

Blakelock was known for his nocturnes, which his biographer characterized as representing “that strange, wonderful moment when night is about to assume full sway, when the light in the western sky lingers lovingly, glowingly, for a space, and the trees trace themselves in giant patterns of lace against the light.” These scenes illustrate Blakelock’s subjective responses to nature and confirm his reputation as a Romantic painter, captivated by humans’ emotional relationship with the natural world. He achieved the rich tones and patterned surface of this painting by layering semi-transparent oil glazes over white paint and blending the layers by rubbing them with a cloth, pressing them flat with a palette knife, or sanding them down with a pumice stone. The title of the painting was given to the work by an art dealer, as is often the case with older works. It refers to Diana, the ancient Roman goddess of the moon.

If you were to give an alternate title to this work, what would it be? The nighttime sky enthralled Blakelock so much that he painted it repeatedly. What aspect of nature fascinates you?

Blakelock didn’t always intend to pursue art as a career. As a young man, he followed in his father’s footsteps by studying medicine at the Free Academy of the City of New York, but dropped out after only three semesters. From there, he set out to explore the American West and Central America, venturing through Kansas, Wyoming, Colorado, California, Mexico, Panama, and Jamaica, returning to New York by 1871. He taught himself to paint and his subject matter often included views he had seen during his travels, such as Native American encampments and wilderness scenes.

Blakelock married in 1877 and had 9 children with his wife Cora Rebecca Bailey. From that point, his story took a tragic turn. Although he was a talented artist, he found it difficult to sell enough of his work to support his large family. As a result, he often gave up his paintings for much less than they were worth out of pure desperation. Following a series of depressive bouts, emotional breakdowns, and schizophrenic episodes, Blakelock entered a psychiatric hospital. Shortly thereafter, his works gained in popularity and sold for thousands of dollars, although Blakelock remained unaware of this success until only a few years before his death in 1919.

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Ansel Adams

Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico
Ansel Adams. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1942 (printed early 1970s). Gelatin silver print. Purchased with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John A. McAlonan Trust Fund 1975.1

When Ansel Adams saw this particular moonrise, he sprung into action. He grabbed his camera, jumped on top of his car and, when he couldn’t find his handheld light meter, calculated the necessary exposure time in his head. Before he could take a second shot, the twilight was gone.

Adams followed up on his speedy camerawork with painstaking, deliberate printing—trained as a pianist, he compared negatives to sheet music and prints to performances. He darkened the picture’s low tones to make the sky an inky black expanse, and he brightened the highlights to make the crosses in a church cemetery brilliantly white. After thirty years of tinkering, he finally felt that his prints matched what he had seen in New Mexico, and that he had perfected his performance.

What does it feel like to be outside at twilight, when you can see sunlight and moonlight at the same time? Have you ever photographed an outdoor scene, only to find that the light in your picture came out all wrong?

Like many artists and photographers, Adams was often inexact in the dating of his pictures and didn’t know quite when he had taken this one. However, because it became one of his most popular photographs, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico received special attention and an astronomer friend, Dr. David Elmore, finally came to Adams’ rescue. By studying astronomical data, Elmore determined that Moonrise had been taken between 4:00 and 4:05 P.M. on October 31, 1941. This date, combined with the stillness of Adams’ twilight scene, makes the photograph a powerful image of America on the verge of entering World War II, as the attack on Pearl Harbor came just over a month later.

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ARTstrology: Gemini

May 21-June 20

July’s bouquet with honey bee swarm, Paul Stankard, (Attleboro, Massachusetts, 1943 – ), c. 2006-2008, Glass, 8 3/4 in. x 8 3/4 in. x 8 3/4 in. (22.23 cm x 22.23 cm x 22.23 cm), Gift of Annie and Mike Belkin, 2010.282.64

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s a speedy Gemini! You have the ability to balance multiple interests at once, just like your celestial twin sign. You’ve got a ton of energy and are great at channeling it into your many creative endeavors and long-standing friendships. In short, just like these little buzzing buddies, you are one busy bee!

Géminis 21 mayo – 20 junio

¡Es un ave, es un avión, no, es un Géminis veloz! Tienes la habilidad de armonizar múltiples intereses a la vez, al igual que tu signo gemelo celestial. Tienes un montón de energía y eres excelente para canalizarlo en tus muchos esfuerzos creativos y amistades duraderas. En breve, al igual que los pequeños amigos zumbando por esta obra de arte, ¡eres una abeja muy ocupada!

ARTstrology is made possible with support the Henry V. and Frances W.  Christenson Foundation

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Virtual Tour

Totally Rad: Bold Color in the 1980s

By Jeff Katzin, Curatorial Fellow

This exhibition about the vibrant hues of the 1980s started with a simple question: “What’s that?” This is what I asked Steph Petcavage (the Museum’s collections manager) and Seema Rao (our deputy director) as the three of us walked past a spindly, multicolored, and unmistakably ‘80s-looking sculpture in our art storage area. I’d actually been meaning to ask about the piece ever since I’d noticed it a few weeks earlier—even in a big room that houses most of the Akron Art Museum’s collection, this bright and shiny work of art stood out. They told me that it was made by the artist Nancy Graves, and that it was waiting to go back to a private collector after an earlier plan to display it in our galleries fell through. My next question: “Do you think the owner would mind if we kept it a little longer and included it in a new project?”

[Nancy Graves image]

Nancy Graves. Trambulate, 1984. Bronze and steel with polyurethane paint and baked enamel. Private collection

I soon found myself searching through the Museum’s collection to build a show out of only the most vivid, the most energetic, and the most rad works from the 1980s. As I looked, I also researched the phenomenon of ‘80s color and was surprised at what I found. Though the decade is very well known for its distinctly bold colors, there is no grand unified theory or single source for why artists embraced flashy colors at this particular time. Affordable, brightly-hued acrylic paints had been widely used since the 1960s, so it is not as if artistic access to color suddenly expanded. Instead, most historians point to a broad mix of factors from television to music, music videos, video games, graffiti, fashion, the materialism brought on by an economic boom, and more. Ultimately, color made its way into all sorts of places in the ‘80s, and so different artists each found it in a different way.

Charles Clough. Muniment, 1988-1994. Enamel on fiberboard. Gift of The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services 2009.30.6

To start with an artist who enjoys color simply for the creative freedom that it affords, we need look no further than Charles Clough. In 1984, he attached a thick pad to the end of a pole and started using this tool to make his paintings, calling it the “Big Finger.” Eventually, he crafted several fingers: larger ones for large pictures and smaller ones too—but all were “Big” because they were bigger than the artist’s own finger. Clough found that these simple devices allowed him to loosen control over his work and discover spontaneous, exciting possibilities as he spread enamel paint into constellations of color. I enjoy Clough’s work because I find that he’s quite right about all of this. If I sit down and try to draw a nice picture, I’ll always end up falling back on my usual styles of line, proportion, and composition. But, if I use some strange and uncontrollable process, the materials can take on a new style all on their own. This can work in an abstract image like Muniment, or even in a realistic picture. Fittingly, Clough used odd, unfamiliar words like Muniment as titles to promote a sense of playful fantasy in his exuberant pictures.

Jack Goldstein approached color from almost the opposite perspective with a much more studious approach. He was interested in what makes an image appear convincing and true; in what provides the look of documentary evidence rather than personal expression. He investigated these qualities by bringing them into painting from outside sources, often starting with imagery that he found in science magazines or history textbooks. Though it conveys no particular information, this painting looks scientific and objective because it has all the features of a digital image produced by a weather radar or an infrared camera—pixelated details, random noise, and rings of increasingly intense colors. When I look at the painting, my instincts tell me that it represents some kind of significant data… but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe Goldstein is just playing a game with me, giving me a chance to reflect on why some images seem believable while others do not.

Hollis Sigler also used bright colors to help her art seem truthful. She started her career making extremely detailed photorealistic paintings , so she had all the skills necessary to produce highly polished pictures. However, she soon realized that she wanted to share deeply personal experiences. She started using brightly-colored crayons and oil pastels, shifting into an intentionally childlike style to make images drawn from her own life seem as direct and honest as possible. In She Wants What She Wants, Sigler depicts places and objects that hold special meaning for her: the beach, a candlelit table for two, an art studio. Her title implies that these are things she is unwilling to let go of, that bring her satisfaction, that she must have. However, the drawing’s dreamy appearance—heightened by hazy pinks and blues—suggests that she may not have all of them just yet. The doubled use of the word “She” also emphasizes that these desires come from a woman’s point of view—an important point for Sigler, an outspoken feminist. She Wants What She Wants shows that works of art can be colorful and rad, but also tender and sincere at the same time.

There’s no substitute for seeing all of these loud and lively works of art in person, but if you would like to feel some Totally Rad vibes from home, check out this playlist that I put together. It contains some of the music that I listened to while selecting works and doing research for this exhibition; songs that helped me feel more connected to the colorful side of the ‘80s.

And if you missed it, check out our earlier exhibition tour covering another aspect of the ‘80s through Totally Radical: Art and Politics in the 1980s.

Totally Rad: Bold Color in the 1980s is organized by the Akron Art Museum and supported by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, the John P. Murphy Foundation, Katie and Mark Smucker, and the Kenneth L. Calhoun Charitable Trust, KeyBank, Trustee.

Knight Foundation Logo
Ohio Arts Council

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Drawing Game

Drawing can be fun and games if you let it. Grab a pencil and some paper. This game can be played alone or in a group.

Alone:

Spin 10 times. Each time, do what the spinner tells you. Decide if you like your drawing. If not, spin 10 more times.

With Friends:

Decide on what you draw. Tell them if its animal, vegetable, or mineral.

Spin the wheel 5 times. Use the cues to determine the style of your drawings.

Once the drawing is done, have people guess what you drew. The person who gets it, wins a point and goes next.

The person with most points wins.

MuseumGames are made possible by PNC with additional support from Acme Fresh Market, the Kathy Moses Salem Philanthropic Fund of the Akron Community Foundation, The R.C. Musson and Katharine M. Musson Charitable Foundation, the Robert O. and Annamae Orr Family Foundation, and the Charles E. and Mabel M. Ritchie Foundation.

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George Segal

A girl sitting against a wall? Very normal. But what if her world is totally still, totally white, and ends abruptly in the middle of a gallery? Very unusual. In making his sculptures, George Segal thrived on this mix of everyday familiarity and unexpected strangeness.

Segal used living models to create his sculptures. He wrapped them in plaster-soaked bandages and let the materials harden. He then cut the plaster away from the models’ bodies and reassembled the hollow forms. The result: Segal’s white figures seem at once lifelike and eerily motionless. In Girl Sitting Against a Wall II, this stillness may suggest a moment of calm and quiet contemplation. While other artists often depict intense actions or emotions, Segal seems to imply that a restful occasion like this is also worthy of extended consideration.

Segal usually had his family and friends pose for his sculptures. If someone asked you to be covered from head to toe with wet plaster, would you do it? How do you think it would feel to be confronted with a life-sized replica of your own body?

In 1961, Segal was teaching an art class for adults. One of the students was married to an employee at Johnson & Johnson, and they gave Segal a supply of the company’s newly developed plaster bandages to see if he could use them for making art. The artist brought the supplies home and asked his wife to plaster the bandages around him while he sat in a chair. After the soggy materials dried and hardened, his wife kindly cut him out of his mummy-like encasement. The artist then put the pieces of plaster back together and placed the resulting figure amongst a chair, a table, and a window frame. This work, Man Sitting at a Table, proved to be a turning point in Segal’s career and the inspiration for many subsequent sculptures.

Segal’s working process was more laborious and creative than one might expect. “Originally, I thought casting would be fast and direct, like photography,” the artist explained, “but I found that I had to rework every square inch. I add or subtract detail, create a flow or break up an area by working with creases and angles. I’m shaping forms.” Thanks to this process, Segal’s earlier casts produced a lumpy external shape, as seen in Girl Sitting Against a Wall II. The year after this piece was made, Segal developed a new technique, casting a material called hydrostone (which is stronger than plaster) from the interior of the initial plaster shell to give a more refined surface and lifelike rendering.

Segal did not always work entirely in white; sometimes he added colorful found objects to his scenes or painted his plaster in striking tones. The first version of Girl Sitting Against a Wall, made in 1968, is in the collection of the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, Germany. Unlike Akron’s all-white piece, this earlier version has a red chair and black window panes, and the figure’s hands are placed differently. As a result, the window seems to look out onto a pitch-black night, while the chair looks like it might be made of wood. Both editions carry Segal’s trademark sense of strangeness, but the earlier rendition’s different colors are perhaps a bit more familiar and easy to understand than the second version’s surreal, all-encompassing whiteness.

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Virtual Tour

Totally Radical: Art and Politics in the 1980s

By Jeff Katzin, Curatorial Fellow

When I started to pull together a list of artworks from the Akron Art Museum’s permanent collection for a show about art and American politics in the 1980s, I was amazed at what I found. A wide variety of our objects are directly connected to some of the decade’s biggest issues—the AIDS crisis, the intensifying feminist movement, ongoing calls for racial justice, struggles between corporations and labor unions, environmental preservation, and the tense climax of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Working on this exhibition has left me grateful to the curators who came before me and gathered together such meaningful works of art.

The pictures in Totally Radical: Art and Politics in the 1980s are meaningful, first because they collectively capture the restless political energy of their decade. While artists have used their work to express political views for centuries, in the ‘80s they did so more frequently than ever before, and with a new intensity and immediacy. If the idea that “the personal is political” arose in the feminist movement of the ‘60s, it had gained even more momentum two decades later. The artists in Totally Radical did not consider politics through disconnected theories or vague ideas. Instead, they made art out of immediate concerns that they felt very deeply. Their work is also meaningful because, years later, we still face many of the same issues that they did. As art museums and American society as a whole seek broader conversations about justice and equity in the present, we can look back and learn from the ‘80s.

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ntoeucpuhrzyc0k/AACKgQTt3HYNmgxSlhHncMMla?dl=0

Guerrilla Girls. Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum? c. 1985-1989. Offset lithograph on paper. Museum Acquisition Fund 1990.17

The eye-catching prints of the Guerrilla Girls are some of the most impactful feminist artworks of all time. Seeking to prioritize issues over individual personalities, members of this all-female group wear gorilla masks during public appearances—the group’s name is a pun on gorilla (the animal) and guerrilla (a member of a small and unconventional military group). When they came together in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls channeled their fighting spirit by collecting statistics reflecting elitism and sexism in the art world, and then plastering them as posters around New York City. The group remains active and they have even made new versions of some of their ‘80s posters with updated numbers. Sadly (or better: infuriatingly), the stats aren’t much better now than they were years earlier, highlighting the ongoing need for museums, galleries, and audiences to reassess their collecting and viewing habits (to help us do just that, I’ve been working on a statistical analysis of the AAM collection in recent months). I also think that the Guerrilla Girls’ fantastic graphic design can sometimes go underappreciated. The images are wonderfully clear and bold, and they draw just as much attention today as they did in the ‘80s. The messages are powerful, and their artistic presentation is masterful.

Robert Rauschenberg. Soviet/American Array VII, 1988–1991. Photogravure. Knight Purchase Fund for Photographic Media 1993.6
Robert Rauschenberg. Soviet/American Array VII, 1988-91. Photogravure. Knight Purchase Fund for Photographic Media 1993.6

While the Guerrilla Girls joined forces as a group, Robert Rauschenberg decided to see how far one committed artist could take their political objectives. In the midst of his own successful career, Rauschenberg chose to spend much of his time from 1984 to 1991 on what he called the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (or ROCI, pronounced “Rocky” after his pet turtle). Paying his own way, the artist traveled to ten countries: Mexico, Chile, Venezuela, China, Tibet, Japan, Cuba, the Soviet Union, Germany, and Malaysia. At each stop he staged an exhibition and created new art inspired by local cultures, hoping to stimulate international dialogue and promote freedom of artistic expression. The Soviet/American Arrays featured in Totally Radical include photographs that he took in both the Soviet Union and the United States, highlighting contrasts and similarities between the opposing superpowers of the Cold War. Through ROCI, Rauschenberg hoped to demonstrate the potential for an individual to act outside of government and promote international communication.

Ken Heyman. Man on Scaffolding, AIDS Project, NYC, 1984. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Soraya Betterton 2010.220

Ken Heyman. Man on Scaffolding, AIDS Project, NYC, 1984. Gelatin silver print. Gift of Soraya Better-ton 2010.220

Ken Heyman gave himself a truly difficult photographic challenge in taking up a dire but often invisible subject: acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS. By the time he made a series of portraits of men coping with AIDS in 1984, the epidemic had taken the lives of thousands of people. The disease remained shrouded in mystery, fear, and stigma. Politicians and news outlets often avoided mentioning it because it primarily afflicted gay men, who faced an additional layer of prejudice. Through his empathetic portraits, Heyman hoped to give some of these men a voice through a book tentatively titled What I Want to Tell You Before I Die of AIDS. Though the book was never finished, the pictures and a number of interviews remain. One of them in particular speaks to the strength and perseverance that links many of the works in this exhibition:

“I don’t live to die. I don’t sit and wait for something bad. I do try to work, the little I can, for my head—to keep me thinking—keep my motor running. I try to enjoy whatever I can even though I may be doing it alone. I don’t want to sit and mope. I know that when that happens to you, you fall off the fence on the wrong side. I would like to stay alive as much as possible.”

Together, the works of art in this exhibition create a space for political reflection and inspiration, and it’s wonderful to see them all together in a gallery. But, if you’d like to get into a Totally Radical mood from home, check out this playlist that I put together. It contains some of the music that I listened to while selecting works and doing research for this exhibition; songs that helped me feel more connected to the socially-conscious side of the ‘80s.

And stay tuned for our next exhibition tour covering another aspect of the ‘80s through Totally Rad: Bold Color in the 1980s.

Totally Radical: Art and Politics in the 1980s is organized by the Akron Art Museum and supported by funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Ohio Arts Council, the John P. Murphy Foundation, Katie and Mark Smucker, and the Kenneth L. Calhoun Charitable Trust, KeyBank, Trustee.

Knight Foundation Logo
Ohio Arts Council

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Virginia W. Gore

Virginia W. Gore. Untitled (Raphael Gleitsmann in studio full of women), 1953. Ink on paper. Gift of Louise Faysash, 2007.7

A mustachioed man enters this scene from a shadowy door in the background. A puzzled look comes across his face as he realizes he is the only man in the room.

The man is Raphael Gleitsmann, one of Akron’s most beloved artists. Gleitsmann is shown here in a drawing by his close friend and fellow artist Virginia W. Gore. Through quick linework and sketchy washes of ink, Gore suggests an environment of commotion in Gleitsmann’s studio, with the painter looking on helplessly as the women scrutinize his works and handle his brushes. Each woman’s face is uniquely detailed, suggesting that they are either portraits of actual people or caricatures of specific social types. As viewers, we can’t help but feel sympathy for Gleitsmann who is likely wondering what the women think of his work.

Does it make you anxious to have someone analyze or critique your work? Why do you think the artist chose to draw only women in Gleitsmann’s studio?

Virginia W. Gore was known for the liveliness of her drawings, a quality that is certainly on display in this work. She studied art education at the University of Akron from 1929–30 and several years later graduated from the Cleveland School of Art, now known as the Cleveland Institute of Art. Gore worked as a fashion artist at the M. O’Neil Company, a regional department store based in Akron, and exhibited her work at the Akron Art Institute (now the Akron Art Museum).

Gleitsmann was born in Dayton, OH but moved to Akron at a young age when his father received a job at Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company. Gleitsmann’s early paintings and watercolors are typical of the broader Regionalist movement, given their focus on typical Midwestern scenes of farmhouses, factories, and landscapes. After he served in World War II, however, Gleitsmann’s subject matter and style changed drastically. He created all of his post-war paintings based on his memories and sketches of the destruction he saw throughout Western Europe. These later works are somber in tone and expressionistic in their brushwork, conveying a heavy-hearted sense of loss. Although he continued to paint for nearly 10 years after the war, Gleitsmann gave up painting altogether in 1954 claiming he “really had nothing to say anymore.” The Akron Art Museum holds the largest number of Gleitsmann’s works, with over 35 of his paintings, drawings, and photographs in its collection.

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