Newsletter - Spring 2000
Current Exhibitions

Summit: Vittorio Sella, Mountaineer and Photographer,
The Years 1879-1909
29 January - 10 March 2000

In 1882, the 23-year-old Italian mountain climber Vittorio Sella wrote to an English camera maker: "I beg you to undertake immediately the camera for the 30 x 40 centimeter plates described in my letter; I beg you to make it in the best mahogany, with every care possible, as I will use it for taking views in the high Alps. . . . Here we have splendid weather, and I burn with impatience to start photographic excursions." From his home in the northern Piedmont, not far from the peaks of Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa, Vittorio Sella set out on the mountaineering and photographic adventures that were to consume him for the next several decades. His travels took him on expeditions to the Caucasus in 1889, 1890, and 1896, to the Saint Elias range in Alaska in 1897, to Sikkim and Nepal in 1899, to the Ruwenzori in Africa in 1906, and to the Karakoram and Western Himalayas in 1909.

The exhibition Summit has been organized by the museum's curator, Wendy Watson, and American mountaineer Paul Kallmes. It comprises 125 of Sella's spectacular vintage photographs and multi-plate panoramas borrowed from the Fondazione Sella in Biella, Italy. Although he is well-known among the mountaineering community worldwide, Vittorio Sella slipped into obscurity in the history of photography over the past century. The last major show of his work occurred in 1893 when the Appalachian Mountain Club toured a group of photographs to 75 cities across the nation. At that time, thousands turned out to view Sella's astonishing pictures of the Alps and the Caucasus; but his major expeditions with explorers Sir Douglas Freshfield and the Duke of Abruzzi still lay ahead of him. His extraordinary images of these faraway lands and their inhabitants were used to illustrate publications documenting the important scientific surveys carried out by these adventurous pioneers.

In 1946, Ansel Adams—one of Sella's greatest admirers—wrote a memorial tribute to him in the Sierra Club Bulletin: "The memory of Vittorio Sella is closely embraced by the moods of the world's great mountains, many of which are known to us chiefly through the beautiful imagery of his lens. Mighty K2, shrouded in gray plumes of the Monsoon, the thundering avalanches of Mount St. Elias, remote Ruwenzori glittering over the hot plains of Africa, and the noble crag of Ushba towering above the ancient Caucasian lands-these are revealed in all their sheer majesty in Sella's masterful photographs."

The book accompanying the show, co-authored by Watson and Kallmes and published by Aperture, was recently awarded a prize at the Banff Mountain Book and Film Festival. After leaving Mount Holyoke, the exhibition will travel to New York City and Banff, Canada.

Chromaform:
Color in Contemporary Sculpture
7 April - 28 May 2000

Works by fifteen emerging, midcareer, and established artists from the United States and Mexico are featured in this vibrant exhibition that explores the use of color in contemporary sculpture. Frances Colpitt, the exhibition's curator, notes in her catalogue that color has recently reasserted itself in three-dimensional work with a force that has not been seen since the 1960s. Indeed, polychromy in sculpture has not been traditionally embraced by Anglo-European artists influenced by the imagined "purity" of Greek and Roman marbles--despite the fact that these antiquities were frequently brightly painted. As Colpitt writes: "From Joachim Winckelmann to Clement Greenberg, theorists have demanded that each art form be true to its essential nature, with the implication that color belongs to painting and is superfluous in sculpture." This exhibition aims to explode that notion.

Included in the Chromaform show are Chris Finley, Caren Furbeyre, David Grant, George Stoll, and Carlos Mollura, all working in Los Angeles; New Yorkers Polly Apfelbaum, Lillian Ball, Peter Boynton, Jessica Stockholder, and Daniel Wiener; Melanie Smith and Thomas Glassford, both from Mexico City; Hills Snyder of San Antonio; John McCracken of Medanales, New Mexico; and Richard Rezac of Chicago. The exhibition's curator selected the artists based on their innovative contributions to the expanded idiom of sculpture and their bold use of color.

Following Donn Judd's view that color is "like material" and that it is "what art is made from," John McCracken commented that in his own work he creates "real, physical forms, but they're made out of color....I try to use color as if it were a material; I make sculpture out of say, 'red' or 'blue.'" McCracken, for whom color has been a primary factor in his work over more than 30 years, forms a link between the generation of the Minimalists and the younger artists included in Chromaform. A wide—and sometimes wild—variety of materials are used by these sculptors: plastics, found objects, crushed velvet, rubber, glass, wax, and other media are employed in works to explore concepts ranging from ideas of domesticity and consumerism to more purely formal concerns and the process of seeing itself.

The exhibition was organized by the Art Gallery at the University of Texas at San Antonio with support from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation.

Senior Art Majors' Exhibition
6 - 21 May 2000

This year, five students will take part in the Senior Art Majors' exhibition which represents the culmination of a final independent study course. The exhibition showcases the results of a very busy semester in which the students, focusing on individual development, work on their projects, meet with their advisors for discussion and critique, and coordinate with the museum to plan and organize the exhibition. Associate Professor Nancy Campbell notes that "the final process of selecting and preparing their work for display at the museum gives them a special opportunity to work closely with the museum staff and to understand the complexities and value of a professionally organized exhibition."