Date: Thursday, January 28, 2021
Time: 4 – 5 pm
Online event on Zoom

REGISTER HERE

The monumental building known today as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art opened in 1933 owing to a set of marvelously serendipitous circumstances.

Kristie C. Wolferman, author of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A History, will tell us the story of the widowed, reclusive Mary Atkins who left funds to build an art museum, and of the newspaper publisher William Rockhill Nelson who bequeathed $11 million to purchase works of art. After several others close to Nelson provided funds for housing that collection, trustees of multiple estates were able to come together to erect a major museum where none had existed before.

Over the years, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art has grown in stature and holdings. It is now known not only for its outstanding American art, but for its Chinese and American Indian art collections and for photographs. Ms. Wolferman will virtually walk us through the museum’s history and introduce us to its dazzling 21st century renovations, including the new Bloch Building and the redesigned American Wing.

About the Author
Kristie C. Wolferman is author of The Osage in Missouri; The Indomitable Mary Easton Sibley: Pioneer of Women’s Education in Missouri; and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: Culture Comes to Kansas City, all three published by the University of Missouri Press. She lives in Kansas City, Missouri.

The new exhibit “Making Art for All/Our Time” showcases works by undergraduate students who created art from virtual windows into several campus collections. Over eight weeks, we gathered on Zoom to peer inside the galleries, shelves, and sidewalks of campus where objects of material culture are prudently managed for public interactions. Each class allowed students to explore facets of objects that resonated with their interests and experiences, though certainly in a different way than experiencing art in person. As a reflection of those experiences, we are pleased to present a digital exhibit of the Fall 2020 Honors Tutorial GN_HON 1050H “Get Real, Go Places! Let Objects Take You There” student works. The course introduces students to the practice of interpreting, inspecting, and writing about objects through regular use of a sketchbook journal and weekly syntheses shared with classmates. The course is taught by Dr. Sarah Buchanan of the iSchool at the University of Missouri (in the College of Education) and by gallery, library, archive, and museum professionals based on the Mizzou campus who contribute to the Material Culture Studies Group, established in 2014.

Our student showcase features art objects created by 13 undergraduate students, each based on the class encounter with a particular collection on the Columbia campus. Students created weekly syntheses reacting to themes presented by professional curators, and a culminating object analysis aligning with students’ future academic interests. View the treemap-inspired exhibit graphic here, and zoom in!

On display are a clay sculpture recreation of a political cartoon, a digital sketch mounted onto an imagined white cube space, a colored pencil response to works shown in the recent “Mooshu, Donkey, and the Floating Wor(l)ds: New Works by Sumire Skye Taniai” exhibition in the Bingham Art Gallery, a poem accompanying a winter woodcut, and an embroidered fiber art piece depicting the plants and native species of Missouri, among others. One digital artwork revisits the 1916 Golden Lane protest in St. Louis and reminds us that art persists and connects our communities to each other. For their contributions to the success of the course we gratefully thank: Catherine Armbrust, Cathy Callaway, Marie Concannon, Kelli Hansen, Nicole Johnston, Maggie Mayhan, Pete Millier, Candace Sall, Karlan Seville, and Joan Stack. The course will next be offered in Fall 2021 – join us!

Bingham Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Collective Voices: Persistent Narratives within Campus Collections.

Please mask up and come by to see this exciting new exhibition!

• Runs October 26-November 19
• Gallery open M-F 8am-5pm

Movements and stories appear and disappear throughout the human timeline, often transformed by subsequent generations. Many of these stories are shared through the lens and voices of underrepresented populations or their allies, in a multitude of forms preserved by archives and collections such as those at the University of Missouri.

Collective Voices includes art, archival, and textile objects from three campus collections—Missouri Historic Costume and Textile Collection, University Archives, and Special Collections—that reveal historically repeating narratives relevant to today: marginalized voices, Mizzou student activism, civil rights, political tensions, colonialism, LGBTQ+ issues, and climate & environmental concerns. These accounts, while simultaneously local, national and global, emerged as common themes shared across time.

This exhibition is a gathering of these persistent narratives and a reminder that so many voices still need representation and amplification within our campus collections and across cultural institutions. Highlighted are new acquisitions and previously underutilized materials from our collections, reflecting changes in the acquisition processes and guidelines. It is evidence of both progress made and the monumental work to be done.

The Collective Voices curators—Catherine Armbrust (Bingham Gallery), John Fifield-Perez (Special Collections), and Nicole Johnston (Missouri Historic Costume and Textile Collection) would like to thank Anselm Huelsbergen & Gary Cox at the University Archives for all their assistance gathering images to add depth to this project. And thanks to the gallery assistants for their help in manifesting the show.

The University Libraries Undergraduate Research Contest seeks to recognize and reward outstanding research conducted by undergraduate students at the University of Missouri.

This year the winner of the first place prize of a $500 scholarship is Abby West, a junior studying political science. Her paper, “Saratoga Spells British Defeat,” was written for Dr. Al Zuercher Reichardt’s constitutional democracy course. Reichart stated about Abby’s paper, “Really happy to hear she submitted it to the contest! She’s a fantastic student.”

The second place winner and recipient of a $250 scholarship is Devon Terry, a sophomore in anthropology and psychology. Her paper, “Arno Breker’s Wounded Man: Capturing the Essence of Totalitarianism,” was written for an upper-level German class taught by Dr. Seth Howes and Dr. Nicole Monnier. Dr. Howes said, “My co-professor and I both thought it was an excellent paper, and excellent project, and I am thrilled to hear the committee’s in agreement with us on that front.”

Special thanks to the Friends of the University of Missouri Libraries for their support of this award.