In Fall 2019, the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery will present an exhibition that looks at imagery from different eras, cultures, and disciplines—through the lens of the symbols and archetypes that they share. Read more

Visionary Aponte: Art & Black Freedom takes as its point of departure an extraordinary—and now lost—historical artifact: a “Book of Paintings” created by José Antonio Aponte. Aponte was a free black carpenter, artist, and former soldier who was also the leader of an ambitious antislavery movement in Cuba during the Age of Revolution. Read more

The Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery is pleased to present Look, Hear!: Ali Smith and Michael Alec Rose, a collaboration between California-based painter Ali Smith and Blair School of Music professor of composition Michael Rose. Read more

Nearly a millennium after its origination in fifth-century Chinese textiles, the woodcut became a popular medium in Europe, thanks to the prevalence of paper manufacturing in late-fourteenth-century France and Germany. The medium has continued to resonate in print practices globally, with artists still creating woodcuts today. Then & Now: Five Centuries of Woodcuts spotlights prints from Vanderbilt’s collections, surveying the wide range of woodcuts created over 500 years and across many cultures. Read More

In spring 2018, nine students in the History of Art seminar, “Exhibiting Historical Art: Digital Approaches to Ancient Greek Ceramics,” studied a selection of ancient Mediterranean antiquities in the collection of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, and curated this exhibition. The objects range in date from the 6th century BCE to the 1st century CE and include Greek and Etruscan vases, a Greek coin, and a Greco-Roman marble sculptural head. In addition to exploring each object’s historical context and significance, the students learned photogrammetry, a process for generating digital models of 3D objects through photography. By creating and printing these digital 3D models, students sought insight into how new, digital approaches might facilitate research into, and engagement with, ancient material and visual culture. Read More

Featuring a selection of recent work by American photographer William Wylie, Pompeii Archive, explores the famous archeological site of a volcanic eruption in 79 C.E. with highly evocative images, shot with analog black and white film on a large format camera. Alongside his contemporary photographs are several by Giorgio Sommer (1834–1914), who was involved in excavation of the site in the nineteenth century. Read More

Joyce Tenneson—Botanical Beauty presents work drawn from two portfolios by the artist, both of which feature atmospheric, poetic photographs of flowers in high contrast with a black background. The first series, Flower Portraits, presents sepia-toned images of flowers in decay. Tenneson has adeptly captured movement, wonder, and vibrancy in them, as well as a sublime beauty. Intimacy, the second portfolio, features a wide variety of flowers, photographed in color in a sensuous, almost ethereal, manner. These two series together encourage viewers to study the unique shapes, textures, and marks of individual flowers and, in so doing, to celebrate biodiversity and the life cycle of plants. Read More

It hardly needs saying that 1968 was a year that forever changed the global social, cultural, and political landscape. The world over, the historically marginalized and disenfranchised spoke out against what they perceived as the criminal indifference of those in power. In France, these protests consisted of strikes, occupations, and demonstrations against the de Gaulle administration that became collectively known as Mai 68. Read More

For nearly two thousand years, Christians across the Middle East and Asia have shared a common heritage through Syriac language and culture. Many of these communities face the threat of extinction today. In response, this exhibit showcases the enduring presence of Syriac culture around the globe. The exhibit features historical reproductions as well as items from the family collection of Rev. Dr. P.K. Geevarghese, priest of the first Indian Orthodox parish in Tennessee. Read More

Everett Raymond Kinstler, now 91 years old, is America’s foremost portrait painter. In his career, he has rendered portraits of more than 2,000 individuals—leaders in almost every professional field, including eight United States presidents. Read More

From its inception, Black Mountain College was an incubator for experimentation, placing the importance of an integrated liberal arts education at its center. This innovative school, founded in 1933 in North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, valued equally the visual arts and the so-called applied arts, along with poetry, music, and dance. Read More

From 1970 to 1987, Andy Warhol took scores of Polaroid and black-and-white photographs, the vast majority of which were never seen by the public. These images often served as the basis for his commissioned portraits, silk-screen paintings, drawings, and prints. Read More

The photographic portrait, with its roots in early nineteenth-century France, has continually challenged how we view ourselves. The actual practice has become increasingly fluid over time and almost as difficult to grasp as the nature of identity itself. Read More

In a historical sense, the Grand Tour was a seventeenth- to eighteenth-century phenomenon in which the young, usually male and aristocratic, members of English and Northern European families visited great cities and societies of the European continent. Read More

Morris Davidson’s career as a painter spanned the decades in which American artists experimented with a wide variety of artistic expression, from social realism to abstraction. Davidson followed these trends in his own work as he studied art in Baltimore, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with painters in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and eventually in Paris. Read More

Dada was an international multimedia artistic and literary movement founded in Zurich in 1916 to reimagine and, in fact, tear down prevailing forms of art that had dominated the Western tradition. As early as 1915, while proto-dadaists such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray worked in New York forming their anti-establishment philosophy of art, Zurich Dada was beginning to develop independently in the shadow of the First World War. Read More

This exhibition is presented in honor of Marilyn Murphy, who will retire in 2017 after 37 years of teaching in the Department of Art at Vanderbilt University. Marilyn Murphy—Realism Subverted will feature paintings and drawings in which reality is turned upside down in dreamlike scenes with gravity-defying objects and figures diligently focused on a task. Read More