Saint Joseph College Art Gallery Summer Exhibition: Beyond Words Opens on Tuesday, July 7
Beyond Words features prints that embody a deep engagement in cultural and social issues. Sister Mary Corita Kent, who belonged to the Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, began exhibiting her screen prints in the early 1950s. Drawing inspiration from advertising and media, she re-contextualized everyday phrases and images in colorful prints on such issues as poverty, social injustice, and war. In the late 1960s her work began to focus on lettering as the major design element in her prints, using texts from song lyrics, fragments of poetry, or contemporary slogans. The Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of female artists, was founded in 1985 in response to an exhibition at MoMA in which only 17 out of 165 artists were women. Since then they have made posters, staged public actions, and issued books using humor to state bluntly the facts of discrimination. Their posters on view in Beyond Words address injustice in art, culture and politics.
The installation has been timed to coincide with Saint Joseph College's 2009 Arts Integration and Multiple Intelligences Project (AIMI) summer programs for children grades 3-8. The theme for Session II (July 13 -July 29) with Jacques d'Amboise and a team from the National Dance Institute is A Celebration of John Lennon, which will culminate in a performance weaving vignettes of Lennon's life together with original choreography set to his music.
In addition to Beyond Words, the summer exhibition of works from the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery's permanent collection will feature such highlights as paintings by Milton Avery, Georgia O'Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, and other twentieth-century American masters.
The Saint Joseph College Art Gallery is located in The Bruyette Athenaeum, part of The Carol Autorino Center for the Arts and Humanities. The Art Gallery presents regular exhibitions drawn from its permanent collections as well as loan exhibitions of historic art or of contemporary work by artists of national and international prominence.
