See Strawberry Hill

Ring in Halloween with “gloomth” – Mike Gocksch –Yale Daily News October 30, 2009

A recent front-page article in the News informs us that the Yale Center for British Art suffers from a lack of visibility: Many undergraduates, apparently, do not know it exists. There will be some who turn their nose up at the very idea of pre-twentieth century British art, dismissing it as derivative, dull, second-rate. That said, I encourage everyone, teeming undergraduate masses, skeptics and veterans of the British Art Center alike, to investigate “Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill,” a new exhibition that will be running in New Haven through Jan. 3; it may or may not make you a regular visitor to the museum, but it should leave you with a renewed appreciation for the eccentricities of our cousins across the pond.

-Tanya

The Museum at the Heart of the Academy

The Museum at the Heart of the Academy – October 29, 2009 – Inside Higher Ed – James Christen Steward

Like libraries that often also find themselves embattled in times of budget cuts (since typically neither museums nor libraries directly generate tuition streams), great university art museums are a “public good,” offering value and possibility to the whole of our university communities as well as to users from outside the walls of the ivory tower. That all university museums do not achieve this centrality of purpose — often, I suspect, for lack of adequate resourcing by their parent institutions in the perpetual fight against the perception that art represents a “luxury” in the logo-and data-centric university — is to be regretted. Without question much work remains to be done to make our museums central to the academic experience.

-Tanya

Most undergraduates don’t know the BAC

British Art Center seeks more undergraduate visitors Alison Greenberg – October 28, 2009 –Yale Daily News

The survey found that undergraduates comprised just 2 percent of visitors to the [British Arts] center. Attendance at gallery events, such as screenings, lectures and concerts, is composed primarily of New Haven residents, visitors and graduate students, with much lower numbers of undergraduates, Meyers said. This means that approximately 2,000 Yale undergraduates visit the center annually, according to the center’s spokesman, Ricardo Sandoval ’06.

-Tanya

A Shower of Tiny Petals

A Shower of Tiny Petals in a Marriage of Art and Botany – KAREN ROSENBERG – New York Times – October 22, 2009

The fascinating “Mrs. Delany and Her Circle,” at the Yale Center for British Art, celebrates this exemplary woman’s contributions to botany, the decorative arts and English court society. All of these fields had something to do with order, structure and design (in the divine, as well as the human, sense).

-Tanya

Yale moves to drop museum suits

Yale moves to drop museum suits Nora Caplan-Bricker – Yale Daily News – October 27, 2009

The University filed one motion Oct. 5 to dismiss Pierre Konowaloff’s claim to ownership of “The Night Café,” a painting by Vincent Van Gogh housed in the permanent collection of the Yale University Art Gallery, and another on Oct. 16 to dismiss the Republic of Peru’s suit for the return of Inca artifacts housed in the Peabody Museum of Natural History.

-Tanya

Throwing away the Green House

Chase: Throwing away the Green House and sustainability Thomas Chase – Yale Daily News October 27, 2009

Given my work as an ecologist and environmentalist studying environmental impacts and the built environment, that the school’s gallery was hosting “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture” should have warmed my heart. However, on a routine salvage visit to the loading dock behind Paul Rudolph Hall, I was surprised to find the entire exhibit, eight-foot-tall stands, display boards, tables and all, in a dumpster awaiting its one-way trip to the landfill. So much reusable material was being discarded that an extra dumpster, in addition to the one normally present, was on-site to receive it.

-Tanya

Walpole’s Strawberry Hill @ BAC

‘Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill’ At Yale Center for British Art October 15, 2009 Hartford Courant

It’s a miracle that the original home, Strawberry Hill, still exists, though it was listed as one of the planet’s most endangered heritage sites by the World Monuments Fund. It is being renovated, however, for a reopening to the public scheduled next fall. In the meantime, the home’s holdings, along with those from the Walpole Library and collections across the globe, make up the surprising exhibit opening today at the Yale Center for British Art.

-Tanya

NY Times review of “The Green House”

Buildings Easy on the Earth, and the Eyes FRED A. BERNSTEIN September 18, 2009 New York Times

Building a green house is about as easy as unfrying an egg. One goal is to reduce “indoor air pollution” — fumes from paints and other possibly hazardous materials. Another is to minimize energy expended on heating and cooling. The first goal requires that the house have lots of ventilation; the second requires it to be tightly sealed.

“It’s a conundrum,” said Alanna Stang, a writer who helped create “The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design,” an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture.

-Tanya

The Green House: upcoming exhibit

Yale University: Yale School of Architecture Announces Exhibitions for Fall Term of Academic Year
New Haven, Conn., Aug 11, 2009 (M2 PRESSWIRE via COMTEX) –[found @ Zibb]

Exhibitions showcasing the latest innovations in green residential architecture and the groundbreaking Las Vegas Studio of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in addition to the work of their firm will be on view at the gallery of the newly renovated Paul Rudolph Hall, 180 York St., during the first term of the coming academic year.

The first exhibition, ‘The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture,’ opens on August 24. A traveling exhibition that originated at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. it draws on designs of internationally celebrated architects and features new trends, materials and technology in sustainable construction to raise awareness that a healthy and environmentally friendly home can be aesthetically dynamic and physically comfortable too, say the show’s organizers.

-Tanya

Social Commentary on Canvas: Dickensian Take on the Real World

Royal Holloway, University of London

Disdained, derided and dismissed by Modernist art critics from Roger Fry to Clement Greenberg, Victorian painting staged a comeback in the Postmodern era.

Though often sappy and moralistic, at its best late-19th-century British painting still delivers a rich mix of visual imagination, narrative intrigue and social commentary. An excellent exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art proves the point. Drawn from a collection created in the early 1880s for students at Royal Holloway College, then just for women, “Paintings From the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London” offers pictures that can make you wish painting today were as tuned in to the real world.

Social Commentary on Canvas: Dickensian Take on the Real World Ken Johnson NYT 6/18/09

“Paintings From the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London” continues through July 26 at the Yale Center for British Art, 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven

-Chris

Holloway collection

Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London
7 MAY — 26 JULY, 2009
Yale Center for British Art

Yale CBA exhibit and festival choir share common home and heritage Judy Birke New Haven Register June 21, 2009

First and foremost, it is a rare opportunity to see a great number of works from a remarkable and thoughtfully considered collection, all under one roof. The tremendous size of many of the works, the extensive range of subject matter, the sheer visual appeal of the paintings and the incredible frames that surround them, as well as the opportunity to consider not only the aesthetics but the ethos of a period, and not the least, the opportunity to contemplate the selection process of a man of good taste, all contribute to what can best be described as that “wow” factor.

-Tanya

YUAG buys 2 Hopper prep drawings

Yale Acquires Important Edward Hopper Drawings 6/16/09 Antiques and the Arts

The Yale University Art Gallery has purchased important preparatory drawings by American artist Edward Hopper for two of his celebrated paintings, “Rooms by the Sea,” 1951, and “Western Motel,” 1957, both in the gallery’s collection. The drawings related to “Rooms by the Sea” are rendered on two sides of a single sheet of paper, while the sheet related to “Western Motel” contains a single sketch. Each of the drawings provides rare insight into the evolution of the related painting.

-Tanya

Dalou’s Portraits of Womanhood

Yale Shows Rare Collection By French Sculptor Jules Dalou
By Roger Catlin | Hartford Courant June 11, 2009

France is often seen as the place artists go to find freedom. But in that era, Dalou had to flee the country because of his association with the leftist Paris Commune. He escaped to an unsung country for artistic (and political) freedom — England, where, not knowing the language, he stayed mostly to himself and his French expat hosts and produced a remarkable series of sculptures, largely of seated women.

The Yale Center for British Art has organized a rare collection of five of those sculptures, which opens today. It is titled “Dalou in England: Portraits of Womanhood, 1871-1879.”

-Tanya

Does “Night Cafe” belong to Russia?

Attorney: Yale turned blind eye when acquiring art
By JOHN CHRISTOFFERSEN – Jun 3, 2009 A.P.

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — Yale University’s acquisition of a Vincent Van Gogh painting that Russia once claimed as its own amounted to acceptance of stolen property and “art laundering,” a descendant of an earlier owner alleges.

Pierre Konowaloff of France argues in recent court papers that Russian authorities in the 1917 revolution unlawfully confiscated the painting owned by Konowaloff’s ancestor and that the United States deemed the theft a violation of international law.

“Yale’s continued and wrongful detention of the unlawfully confiscated ‘The Night Cafe’ is prohibited by customary and international treaty law,” Konowaloff’s attorneys wrote in the filings.

-Tanya

More Yale Student Art Exhibits

Two more archived Yale MFA exhibitions up…still waiting for Photography.

2009 Painting Thesis 2

2009 Graphic Design

And here’s 2009 Undergraduate I (I assume there’s at least one more undergraduate one coming…)

-Tanya