Future Exhibitions

Still Time: Photographs by Sally Mann
6 April - 30 May 1999

A selection of photographs made by Sally Mann over the last 25 years will be seen in a special touring exhibition that will be on view next spring. These distinctive works present the development of her widely acclaimed visual language and demonstrate the breadth of her vision. Mann has traditionally photographed with a century-old 8 x10 -inch view camera, working in and around the Arcadian landscape of her hometown of Lexington, Virginia.

Although her subject matter has ranged from the general to the particular, her essential commitment to the spiritual local pervades each series. In the 1971 Dream Sequence, Mann investigated the psychology of personal relationships, especially those of women and girls. A few years later, she moved away from the figure and on to the depiction of landscape, creating evocative views of Virginia's lush Shenandoah Valley.

It was with the series At Twelve that Mann melded her diverse iconographic interests and formal styles in a group of arresting images that are among the best known of her works. Photographs from At Twelve flow together using one or more of the following elements: the dense richness of the local landscape and climate, a southern iconography, penetration of the subject's personality, and narrative exploration, as well as qualities of light, tonal control, and elegance of composition. Between 1984 and 1991, Mann undertook the study she calls Immediate Family which documents the complexities of familial intimacy and includes some of her most compelling and controversial images of her children, who often appear nude.

Still Time comprises 65 photographs. A catalogue published by Aperture accompanies the exhibition, which has been organized and circulated by the artist.

New Work at Mount Holyoke
29 January - 10 March 1999

New: 1. Not existing before, 2. being made or brought into existence for the first time, 3. of a novel kind, 4. fresh. All of these definitions will surely apply to a show opening in January at the Art Museum which will focus on recent work by Mount Holyoke's own studio art faculty.

A classics major at Stanford, Marion Miller later studied painting at the Skowhegan School and Indiana University. The figure, still life, landscape, and most recently horses and their riders have come under her intense gaze, and Miller's investigations into portraiture have brought critical acclaim and international commissions. British painter Lawrence Gowing described these works as "having a fidelity and impulsive good humor which suggests that she is . . . one of the best portraitists alive."

The prints of Nancy Campbell, a faculty member since 1981, were among those featured in A Graphic Muse, the 1987 exhibition which originated at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and traveled to five venues across the country. Throughout her career, Campbell has concentrated on printmaking, inspired in part by Japanese imagery that she has studied both in America and Japan. National Gallery curator Ruth Fine wrote of her work: "Campbell imbues her paintings on paper and her prints with a sense of structure held in tension with an erratic calligraphic movement . . . We see a quest for unity between the logical and measured, the intuitive and spontaneous."

A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Joseph Smith came to Mount Holyoke in 1996. His recent sculpture is characterized by its elegance, subtlety, and poise. Using a range of materials including glass, wire, and wood, he juxtaposes stability with precariousness, solidity with fragility, opaqueness with transparency. New York Times critic Michael Brenson has described Smith's sculpture as "quietly, whimsically, seriously perverse" and "filled with a kind of elegantly excruciating irresolution probably first defined by Giacometti's Suspended Ball. "

Carleen Sheehan, the newest addition to the studio faculty, comes to Mount Holyoke from the School of Visual Arts in New York. The broad array of courses she has taught-in painting, color theory, drawing, and printmaking-reflects her own varied interests. Recently she has been investigating alternative photographic processes and computer imagery in work which explores the visual dialogue between artifice and nature.

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