GORDON PARKS
CROSSROADS

August 29 - October 18, 2008

Opening Reception: Friday, August 29: 5-7 p.m

The Trout Gallery is proud to host a retrospective exhibition of the photographs of Gordon Parks (1912-2006), one of the nation’s most important chroniclers of the twentieth century. Photographer, poet, novelist, composer, musician, and filmmaker, Parks spent a lifetime shattering barriers in the pursuit of truth, beauty, social justice, and artistic expression.

Parks became the first black photographer to join the Farm Security Administration (FSA), shortly after which he made his signature image American Gothic. In 1949, he became the first black staff photographer at Life magazine, where he continued to work on assignment for the next quarter of the century. He documented the gang wars of Harlem and the nascent Black Muslim movement, worked in fashion and commercial as well as fine art photography. He helped found Essence magazine and directed the film Shaft. He received numerous awards including the Jackie Robinson Lifetime Achievement Award, the NAACP Hall of Fame Award, the National Medal of the Arts, as well as an honorary doctorate from Dickinson College. All photographs courtesy of the Gordon Parks Foundation and the Howard Greenberg Gallery. Organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

IMAGE: American Gothic, Gelatin silver print, 1942

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Joyce Kozloff

Co+Ordinates

October 31 - January 10, 2009

Opening Reception: Friday, October 31: 5-7 p.m

In this selection of works by Joyce Kozloff, she considers relationships of power and global politics through the imagery of maps and cartography. Her paintings, some of which cover spherical surfaces and globes, often resemble maps from antiquity as well as from the age of exploration dotted with contemporary references to examine issues of territorial conquest, identity, and the topography of power. Although her works trace physical boundaries and recognizable geographic borders, such territorial references act as metaphors for people, culture, body, and mind.

Kozloff has been active in the women artists’ movement since the 1970s, is a peace activist and is a member of the New York based collective Artists Against the War and a founding member of the Heresies publishing collective. Her awards include the Jules Guerin Fellowship and the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. She has works in the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jewish Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Fogg Art Museum, Yale University Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, among many others. She shows widely in the United States and Europe, most recently at the Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice.

IMAGE: Targets, Acrylic on canvas with wood frame, 108 in. dia.

Joyce Kozloff: Co+Ordinates With essays by Nancy Princenthal and Phillip Earenfight and interview with the artist (The Trout Gallery: Carlisle, PA and D.A.P., Distributed Art Publishers, New York, NY, 2008). $45. Available November 1: ISBN 978-0-9768488-8-2. Catalogue.

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THROUGH THE LENS:
Studies in Photography

March 4 - March 28

Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 4, 5-7 pm

Through a series of significant donations, The Trout Gallery has been building an important collection of photographs. This exhibition presents more than 50 photographs from the collection and is curated by Dickinson College senior art history majors: Tess Arntsen, Kristin Beach, Jennings Culver, Kendall Friedman, Elizabeth Grazioli, Flannery Peterson, Madelyn Priest, Sarah Quin, Kristen Rudy, Casey Schaffer, Lucy Stirn and Hana Thomson, under the direction of Phillip Earenfight.

Image:
Jenny Lynn, Two Faces, 1988, gelatin silver print
Gift of Mark. Connelly, 2005.5.21

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LIMINAL.

Exhibition I: April 10 - April 25
Exhibition II: May 1-June 13

Opening Receptions:
Friday, April 10, 5-7 p.m.
Friday, May 1, 5-7 p.m.

The annual Senior Studio Art Majors Exhibitions mark the culmination of a student's artistic career at Dickinson College. These exhibitions feature works by Molly Blann, Clare Cooper, Maxie Etess, Parry Grimm, Melissa Haimowitz, Tawi Hidaka, Navajeet KC, Judith Lopez, Flannery Peterson, Joshua Salim, Kristan Saloky, and Rachel Warren, under the direction of Todd Arsenault, with Andrew Bale, Anthony Cervino, Ward Davenny, and Barbara Diduk.

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Brochure for Molly Blann and Josh Salim.

The world became a smaller place in the middle of the 1800s as two emerging technologies changed everyday life in unimaginable ways. The invention of photography made it possible to record people, places and events, creating images that defied time and documented the reality of what had been. Likewise, the steam locomotive opened new possibilities for travel; where previous forms of transportation such as horse and cart or walking restricted how far one could travel in a day, the train changed the way we understood and dealt with the land we live on.

Trains are a source of mythic fascination. As children we are taken to the tracks to wait in anticipation for the train to storm by. We counted the cars as we sat at the train crossings and lay in bed, listening to the blowing whistles in the distance, longing to watch the boxcar chain. We built model railroads, recreating the sights and sounds that have drawn us to the tracks. The nostalgia of trains is used in many tourist areas as a means to provide a scenic trip through wilderness or to hard to reach towns. And behind all of the dreams, charm and enthrallment that trains evoke, the railroad continues to be a reliable and permanent way to move things and people around the world.

This exhibition features more than 50 photographs taken from the nearly 500,000 in the George Eastman House photograph collection. Together, this selection provides a survey, not only of the history of photography, from daguerreotype to digital, but also of a broad cultural history of technological advances, changing notions of landscape, and the ideas we have held in the last two hundred years. Tracks: The Railroad in Photographs from the George Eastman House Collection includes works by William Henry Jackson, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Lewis W. Hine, Arron Siskind, William Rau, Richard Misrach, David Levinthal, Lori Nix, and Paul Fusco.

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25th Anniversary Celebration
of Gifts to The Trout Gallery

January 23 - July 11

Opening Reception: Friday, January 23, 5-7 pm

This exhibition features a number of gifts of art that have been made to The Trout Gallery during the course of its 25 years. Thanks to all the donors for their generosity and for joining in the celebration and strengthening the collections at The Trout Gallery.

Image:
Thomas Sully, Powhatan Ellis, 1853, oil on canvas
Gift of Samuel Rose and Julie Walters, 2008.9

An Enduring Impression
SELECTIONS FROM THE LINN PRINT COLLECTION

September 4 - September 26, 2009

Opening Reception: September 4, 5-7 pm

In 1951 and 1959, Mrs. Josephine Linn made a gift of her collection of "contemporary" prints to what was then "The Dickinson College Art Gallery" as a memorial to her late husband, the Honorable William Bomberger Linn, an Associate Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The collection features a remarkable selection of works by American printmakers who were active during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many of the prints are well known to visitors of The Trout Gallery from their inclusion in a variety of thematic exhibitions including Inked Impressions: Ellen Day Hale and the Painter-Etcher Movement (2007), 20th Century American Women Artists (1999), Trials and Triumphs: American Prints from the 1930s and 1940s (1991), and An American View: From the Country to the City (1988). Indeed, several generations of Dickinson art and art history graduates have worked with this important artistic resource. However, it is only when one surveys the entire gift of nearly 150 prints in the collection that one gains a fuller appreciation for Mr. and Mrs. Linn's astute taste for American - notably women - printmakers. An Enduring Impression provides an introduction to the Linn Print Collection and pays homage to the foresight and generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Linn.

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VOICES

Contemporary Ceramic Art from Sweden

September 4 - October 31, 2009

Opening Reception: September 4, 5-7 pm

The ten artists featured in Voices are the leading exponents of the dynamism and originality of contemporary ceramic art in Sweden. Their work redefines ceramics as an art form used for freedom of expression, no longer as objects designed primarily for function. The artists, chosen by curator Inger Molin, represent different generations, each with a vastly different style and point of view, creating an exhibition that reflects not only change but the diversity of Swedish ceramics created today. From the white color and smooth clean lines used by artists Anna Sofia Maag and Kennet Williamsson that echo characteristics of the traditional Swedish Grace style, to Frida Fjellman and Marten Medbo whose works depart from tradition with color-saturated volcanoes, hares, and indefinable creatures, the artists use a wide array of media to create such dynamic works, including clay, glass, rope, glaze, and metal. However, no longer is the material of utmost importance, but instead the point of view of the ceramic artist. The artists in the exhibition work sculpturally and conceptually, addressing existential issues with humor or abstraction.

Voices: Contemporary Ceramic Art from Sweden was developed by the Swedish Institute and organized for tour by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC.

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Prints and Politics
in Weimar Germany

November 13 - February 6

Opening Reception: Friday, November 13, 5-7 p.m.

The period between the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in November 1918 and Adolf Hitler's seizure of power in January 1933 was one of great creative ferment in Germany. Expressionism, which had dominated the German avant-garde before World War I, survived into the early 1920s, merging with various newer trends. The Dada movement, founded in 1916 by a group of expatriate artists disgusted with the war effort, brought its free-form iconoclasm to bear on the postwar German society. Identifying themselves with the proletariat and taking their cue from the recently founded Russian socialist state, artists felt a duty to offer guidance and inspiration to the masses. Many participated in the flurry of activity preceding the first general election, scheduled for January 1919, which officially established the new republic's Constituent Assembly in the city of Weimar. Three major artists' coalitions were formed during this period with the purpose of shaping future cultural policy.

Unfortunately, the faith artists had placed in the infant republic soon proved to be hopelessly idealistic, as did their goal of rousing the masses through revolutionary art. The masses did not understand avant-garde art, and those who hoped that the new regime would provide more artistic freedom than its predecessor were quickly disappointed. Dire social and economic circumstances seemed to demand a more pragmatic and realistic aesthetic, and by 1925 the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) was widely hailed as the principal mode of the decade. Though not united by a single style, German artists in the 1920s did share a willingness to confront political issues and an overriding concern with humanitarian themes. Today, when contemporary artists are again turning to overtly political subjects, a look back at Weimar Germany offers a useful object lesson about the capabilities and limitations of socially motivated art.

This exhibition features lithographs and etchings by a number of the leading artists in post-World War I Germany, including Otto Dix, George Grosz, Lea Grundig, John Heartfield, and Käthe Kollwitz, as well as a number of political posters made during the years between the wars.

Organized by Galerie St. Etienne, New York.

Image:
Käthe Kollwitz, The Agitator, 1926, Lithograph on white wove paper

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A Revolutionary Image

Thomas Sully's Portrait of Benjamin Rush

October 9, 2009 - February 20, 2010

Opening Reception: Friday, October 9, 5 - 7 p.m.

This exhibition celebrates The Trout Gallery's recent acquisition of Thomas Sully's brilliant portrait of the co-founder of Dickinson College. Painted for Benjamin Rush during the final years of his life, the canvas represents the Revolutionary figure seated before a study, amid books, documents, and a distant view of the Pennsylvania Hospital where he served on the medical staff from 1783 until the time of
his death in 1813. The portrait is one of Sully's finest works and reveals the artist's fluid brushwork and command of the leading trends in European portraiture. The work boasts an incomparable
provenance, having passed from the hands of the artist to Benjamin Rush and remaining in the Rush family until its acquisition this year by The Trout Gallery. The portrait is the centerpiece of an exhibition that features artifacts associated with Benjamin Rush and the founding of Dickinson College.

Curatorial assistance by Emma Bennett '10

Thomas Sully, Benjamin Rush, c. 1813, oil on canvas. 2009.8
Acquired through gifts from Lockwood and Jacklyn Rush, the Ruth Trout Endowment, the Helen E. Trout Memorial Fund, and the Friends of The Trout Gallery.

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