Current Exhibitions

Heavy Metal from the Skinner Museum
September - December 2001

In the library courtyard

Last May, Karen Jamroz ('02) was one of several students on the museum's Student Advisory Committee who participated in the annual reopening of "Mr. Skinner's Curiosity Cabinet," otherwise known as the Joseph Skinner Museum of Mount Holyoke College. The Skinner Museum, administered by the Art Museum staff, is a 20th-century wunderkammer, or museum of marvels. It contains thousands of objects ranging from the ordinary to the amazing. Among Mr. Skinner's acquisitions were two suits of armor, the sorts of things that a turn-of-the-century "grand seigneur" would have wanted to round out hiý collection of objects recalling the past. Karen was particularly interested in researching the armor, and the museum staff put her in touch with an expert on the subject, Dr. John Waldman, of Amherst. Together, the two examined the suits, with Dr. Waldman coaching his student on the fine points of the history and making of armor, the traditions of collecting it, and the more difficult questions of discerning the real from the reproduction.

As a result of their findings, the museum staff has installed another in the series of "microexhibitions" taking place in the college's library courtyard. The exhibition includes both of the helmets from the two suits along with a backplate. One of the hýlmets, and the suit with which it belongs, is completely decorated with ornament that is etched into its metal surface. Leaves and imaginary creatures cover the surface in a style of embellishment known as "grotesques." These came into fashion in the late 15th century, when curious artists and antiquarians began to explore the overgrown ruins of Rome and discovered ceiling frescoes and stuccoes with fantastic imaginary creatures, foliage, and festoons. These ornaments acquired the name "grottesche" from the place of their discovery, the "grottoes" of ancient Rome. Much more subdued in style are the second helmet and its articulated backplate which have engraved lines and bright rivets that embellish their polished surfaces.

The investigations revealed that one of the suits is genuine-although recomposed using original parts of different suits-and dates from the mid-16th century. The other is a creation of ca. 1900, made in response to the antiquarian tastes of the time.

The Dickinsons of Amherst: Photographs by Jerome Liebling
9 October - 16 December 2001

In the Art Museum lobby

Emily Dickinson came to Mount Holyoke to study in the fall of 1847. After one year, she returned home to Amherst. From then until her death in 1886, she maintained a hermetic existence in her Main Street house where she produced some of America's most cherished poetry. A new book, The Dickinsons of Amherst: A Lost World Brought to Light (to be released in October 2001) will feature photographs by Jerome Liebling, along with essays by Mount Holyoke's own Christopher Benfey, and Dickinson biographers Polly Longsworth and Barton Levi St. Armand. To celebrate that publication, the Art Museum is showing a selection of Liebling's large-format photographs in the newly renovated lobby.

Over the last 20 years, Liebling has chronicled aspects of the family's two remarkable houses-the Dickinson Homestead, and the Evergreens, where Emily's brother Austin and his wife lived next door. Liebling is, in a sense, a neighbor, having resided nearby in Amherst since he came to teach at Hampshire College in 1969. A New Yorker by birth, he has scrutinized the small-town lifý of the Dickinson family with a discriminating eye, capturing what Benfey has called "the invisible world . things hidden from the unaided human eye." Liebling's black and white photographs of the Homestead, made in the 1980s, are stripped-down depictions of Emily's orderly and ascetic but light-filled surroundings. By contrast, his color images of the Italianate Evergreens, made ten years later, emphasize the dilapidation and ghostliness of a residence that has remained virtually unchanged since the 1880s. Like the so-called "spirit photographs" of the 19th century in which ghosts were said to be portrayed, Liebling's photographs are evanescent vanitas images that reflect the lives and losses of the residents, their passions and their tragic flaws. In both series, Liebling's concern is with what Benfey describes as "the afterlife of things-the strange expressiveness of the dead or inanimate object"-here, Emily's white dress and the basket with which she lowered cookies to neighborhood children; there, the disintegrating toy horse of Austin's son Gib, whose room was sealed shut after his untimely death.

Though Emily almost entirely succeeded in eluding contemporary photographers, she has not escaped the insight revealed through Liebling's lens. These photographs and the essays by his collaborators are sure to provide a new view of the private world of the Dickinson family.

Mount Holyoke's Yukinobu Screen goes to Washington

At the National Museum of Women in the Arts until March 2001

National Museum of Women in the Arts curator Jordana Pomeroy visited the Art Museum not long ago on a mission to uncover little-known works by women artists of all cultures. She was particularly taken with one of Mount Holyoke's recent acquisitions, a pair of magnificent six-fold screens by the 17th-century painter Kiyohara Yukinobu, and asked if she could borrow it on long-term loan while our own museum was closed for construction. This loan exemplifies a number of felicitous opportunities that have allowed Mount Holyoke to share its stellar collection with other institutions over the past year.

Acquired in 1996, the screens depict a group of Taoist Immortals, set in a minimal landscape that is illuminated by a haze of gold leaf. Yukinobu was one of the rare women painters of the Kano school who achieved recognition in her day. As a professional artist, she was best known for her hanging scrolls and small album paintings, and the Mount Holyoke screens are the only extant examples of her work in this format.

Here, the artist takes on a Chinese theme, the group of legendary figures venerated in Taoism for their achievement of physical immortality. "Living as hermits in remote mountains, they cultivate oneness with nature, at the same time mastering the forces of nature," as faculty member Indira Peterson has noted. "Turning away from the gentle and varied natural landscape that surrounds them, these personages are absorbed in the cultivation of superhuman powers . The journeys the immortals embark upon are voyages in inner space."

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