Williams Center Art Gallery
Fall 2009-Spring 2010
exhibition schedule subject to change

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From Scales to Feathers

extended to Jan. 16th

Grace Hartigan

The Allentown Art Museum, Lafayette College and Lehigh University will present New Visions: Black and White Photography in Contemporary Art.  The coordinated exhibition, the first time these three institutions have engaged in a joint project will be drawn from one of this region’s major collections of late modern photography.

The collection, formed by Arthur and Anne Goldstein, includes over 100 black and white works and contains many of the most important names in contemporary photography, each represented by carefully selected and often surprising works. Artists represented in the exhibition will include:  Diane Arbus; Richard Avedon; Lee Friedlander; Cindy Sherman; and Andy Warhol.  The exhibition will also contain younger stars and some exciting lesser known artists.

Each institution has taken one of the major themes in contemporary photography for exploration, and connections and distinctions among the three exhibitions will be emphasized as the themes are explored

“Memory” at Lafayette College
“Identity” at Lehigh University
“Imagination” at the Allentown Art Museum

The exhibition has been organized by the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, with venue exhibitions organized by the Allentown Art Museum.

Detailed schedule of actvities at all venues can be found here

Lafayette College

Allentown Art Museum

Lehigh University

press release

From Scales to Feathers:
The Evanescent Presence of Sculpted Wings

October 26-January 16, 2010

From Scales to Feathers: The Evanescent Presence of Sculpted Wings

In honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday and, on November 24, the 150th anniversary of the printing of On the Origin of Species in November, Lafayette College's Williams Center Gallery and the Shrewsbury Museum, Shropshire, England, present joint exhibitions of the works by environmental artist, Brandon Ballengée. An amateur biologist and activist Ballengée works to explore the boundaries between art and science. For more than a decade the artist has created works about ‘bio-indicator’ species such as amphibians, fish, and birds.

Check here for full exhibition description.

The complementary shows will be on exhibition at the Shrewsbury Museum from September 29 to November 15 and at the Williams Center Gallery from October 26 to December 12.

Quills, Spoons, and Spiders: An Outdoor Installation of Cultivated Chrysanthemums

The Williams Center Gallery and Lafayette’s Office of Plant Operations (Grounds) planted a sample of garden-hardy and exhibition chrysanthemums at the Williams Center. Modern ornamental mums are highly hybridized, and in this sense they are like the fancy pigeon breeds that Darwin studied. These flowering chrysanthemums have been created to exhibit a broad  range of physical characteristics, often reflecting the preferences and styles of the period.

Cuttings for some of the chrysanthemums were generously provided by the Hunterdon County chapter of the National Chrysanthemum Society.

Grace Hartigan’s long and productive career ended with her death in early 2009. Hartigan’s last works are among her finest. In these painting and watercolor drawings, she returned to a theme that had long occupied her: the recreation of Old Master art and popular culture figures through a modern sensibility.  Hartigan’s figures are taken from both Western and Asian history and theater. Created though a balance of incisive drawing and sensuous paint application, her figures confront us with moods ranging from forceful, to seductive, to melancholic. In each, Hartigan explores the meaning of being a modern individual with all the freedom and isolation that our age embodies, and each work is, of course, also a symbolic portrait of the artist.  The will be a joint exhibition with the Grossman Gallery, at lafayette's  Williams Visual Arts Building

Surveillance is one of the key social and political issues of our age. In the debate over surveillance, security for governments and other organizations is pitted against the right of privacy, a right guaranteed in America by the Fifth Amendment. In recent years, advances in technology in technology have made information gathering on an individual or group possible to a previously unimagined extent. A potentially thin borderline between observation and surveillance makes this issue particularly interesting to visual artists. Since the 1960s and with increasing frequency during the last several years, artists have designed installations, created performances, and used new technologies that explore the concept of surveillance. This exhibition will bring some of these projects together and demonstrate wide range of thoughtful questions about surveillance being asked by contemporary artists.

The Williams Center exhibition program is presented under provisions of the Frederick Knecht Detwiller endowment.

All exhibitions and related programs are free and open to the public.

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Williams Center Art Gallery