Artist unknown
The Pantheon, Rome, ca. 1855
Albumen print, 15 3/4 x 21 3/4"
Holiday: Nineteenth-Century Travel Photography and Popular Tourism
October 14, 2009-January 31, 2010
Holiday uses the University Art Museum’s photography collection, complemented by brochures, guidebooks, maps, personal accounts and stereograms from the UC Santa Barbara Davidson Library and Special Collections, to illustrate the nineteenth-century fascination with travel. This exhibition conjures the early, heady days of travel which occurred in lockstep with photography’s development. The objects in Holiday show glimpses of a long lost world which was newly opened due to transportation advances and a growing middle class eager to explore foreign lands for personal edification, religious fervor and a desire to see the exotic. An on-line overview of the exhibition is available at the following link. The overview will open on a seperate page: Holiday On-line. Reviews of Holiday: Nineteenth-Century Travel Photography and Popular Tourism may be viewed by selected the following link: Reviews of Holiday.
Jillian Mcdonald
Horror Make-Up, 2006
Video still, courtesy of Michael Rosenthal Gallery, San Francisco
Jillian Mcdonald: Horror Make-Up
October 14, 2009-January 31, 2010
Jillian Mcdonald is a multimedia artist who explores the romance and horror film genres in her multimedia work. Her performance-based video, Horror Make-Up, 2006, was filmed, unbeknownst to her fellow subway riders, while on a typical commute to work. Mcdonald filmed herself applying cosmetics during the ride, transforming her features into that of a zombie. This work takes its cues from the legion of women who perform beauty rituals on subways or buses and the cult of horror that looms large in popular culture. Locating the audience physically in the subway performance space positions them as both voyeurs of her transformation and potential victims of the zombie which she becomes.
Eugene Berman, Russian, 1899-1972
Siren in a Landscape [Lorelei in Oregon], 1941
Oil on canvas
After Life
October 14, 2009-January 31, 2010
After Life gathers an eclectic selection of images on death and dying. From intimate post-mortem photographs of the 19th century to Salvador Dali's surrealist interpretations of Dante's heaven and hell, the objects range from the actual to the imagined. Cultural customs of mourning and burial are captured not only in American daguerreotypes, but also in photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson's images of grieving Indians at Gandhi’s funeral and in an austere Egyptian mummy by Antonio Beato. Two contemporary photographs, taken within museums, by Richard Ross and Zoe Leonard remind that such observation of life and death is frequently addressed in museum display. A review of this exhibition may be viewed at the following link: Review of After Life.
Matt Mullican
Untitled [The Elements], 1985
Oilstick on canvas (diptych)
Forms and Symbols
October 14, 2009-January 31, 2010
Both abstract and evocative, the objects on view subtly reference familiar forms and functions. Robert Therrien’s wall-hung relief suggests an isolated keystone, suspended by its own force. Similarly Dane Goodman’s cylindrical object recalls a functional, if uncertain, implement. Matthew Mullican’s outsized canvas distills nature’s seasons into a lexicon of symbols like a lost language. Together these works hint at meaning and imply their messages.
John Vachon
Hub cap display on U.S. Highway 1, near Jersey City, N.J.
July 1947
City, Country, Industry, Agriculture: On the Road with Roy Stryker
November 1, 2009 - June 13, 2010
Between 1935 and 1950, one person helped compile a vast compendium of more than 340,000 highway images. He was not a photographer, but rather an economics professor named Roy Stryker. An innovative educator, Stryker employed documentary photography to bring a sociological edge to his classroom instruction. In 1935, Stryker left his post at Columbia University to “create a pictorial encyclopedia of American agriculture” under the auspices of the government’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration). For Stryker agriculture included images of the life around it. His archive, with pictures by such noted photographers as Dorthea Lange, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn, became a portrait of the nation during the Depression.
Seven years later, the political tide turned and New Deal programs waned, Stryker accepted a similar position with a very dissimilar entity: Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ). This corporate shift, occupied Stryker until 1950. At SONJ, Stryker was not content to serve as a public relations lens for the large corporation; he instructed his coterie of artists that they were, “photographing America” and “recording history.” Indeed, by the end of his seven year employment with Standard Oil, Stryker coordinated 70,000 documentary images that often only tangentially referenced the oil industry. Bus stops and bridges, tourist courts and diners joined images of filing stations and fresh asphalt. Together the images, by noted photographers such as Esther Bubley, Gordon Parks, and John Vachon, capture the culture of the road: the highway, a region described by Professor Ulrich Keller as, “neither city nor country, industry nor agriculture, but the conveyer belt between the two. “ (The Highway as Habitat, p. 39).
The images, which are part of UC Santa Barbara University Art Museum’s vast holdings of photography, are not installed in the UAM but in two locations: the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center (IHC) located in the Humanities & Social Sciences Building 6th floor and outside the offices of the College of Letters & Science (Cheadle Hall 2217). City, Country, Industry, Agriculture is presented by the University Art Museum in conjunction with the IHC’s year-long theme of Oil + Water.
