Allen Memorial Art Museum – The Oberlin Review

Art Rental Sets New Record, Sells Out by 10 a.m.

September 21, 2018

Many students were discouraged from participating in the annual Art Rental at the Allen Memorial Art Museum last Saturday when the sign-up list was posted several days earlier than usual. “I think it was annoying that it was put up so early, but the conventions around the whole system are so fuzzy. Since it’s so casually student-run, itdoesn’t surprise me that someone did this,” College junior Della Copes-Finke said. She and her roommate decided not to attend Art Rental this year after...

“FRONT International” Brings Site-Specific Art Exhibitions to Oberlin

September 14, 2018

FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art presented its first group of internationally acclaimed artists and their equally diverse art earlier this summer. From July 14 to Sept. 30, over 100 chosen artists will display their works at selected locations around Cleveland. Exhibition venues are not confined to spaces dedicated to the presentation of art alone, but rather transcend the traditional walls of galleries and museums into the streets of Cleveland and beyond. For instan...

New Technologies Foster Improved Sensory Experience at Museums

Katie Lucey, Staff Writer

September 8, 2017

Filed under ARTS, Visual Art

For thousands of years, museums have existed as the sole repositories of certain kinds of knowledge and culture. However, in this era of technological innovation and change, the sum of nearly all human knowledge, history, and widespread information can be accessed on the internet. Despite the leaps made by the likes of Google Images, technological innovations do not have to consign museums to obsolescence. New technology that makes art more widespread can raise fears that no one will want to go to physical museums anymore. But a great deal of the technology that raises these fears — such as technology that allows for the reliable, inexpensive replication of artworks — can also be integrated into museum exhibiti...

On the Record with Matthew Rarey, African Art Scholar

December 9, 2016

Assistant Professor of the Arts of Africa of the black Atlantic Matthew Rarey joined Oberlin’s art history department in fall 2015 and has since made strides toward building a comprehensive African art history curriculum for students. The first professor in his position at Oberlin, his background ranges from the study of Andean archaeology to the study of the ways in which African art developed during and after crossing the Atlantic with an emphasis on its presence in Brazil. His work has been pu...

AMAM’s “Conversations” Explores Asian Artistic Influence

Julia Peterson, Production Editor

October 28, 2016

Filed under ARTS, Features, Visual Art

The Allen’s newest exhibit, Conversations: Past and Present in Asia and America challenges the popular assumption that art embodies a strict chronological progression from past to present and influence to influenced. To Curator of Asian Art Kevin Greenwood, it is a much more active process of cultural exchange. The exhibit, comprised of Asian and Asian-style pieces, presents art as a global dialogue punctuated by temporal and geographical disjuncture. It is currently on display in the John N. Stern Gallery. “I really wanted to emphasize that these artists were not passive receptors of … cultural traditions, but they were very actively engaged in picking and choosing things,” Greenwood said. “They have their own...

Framing the Allen: Abstraction Shows Artist Evolution

September 23, 2016

The Allen Memorial Art Museum holds nearly 14,000 objects in its own collections. With the physical limits of its galleries, there is no way to exhibit all of this art. This is the first installation in a bimonthly column in which the Review will be bringing unseen favorites of the AMAM staff to the Arts section. Lending and borrowing artwork, according to Andria Derstine, John G. W. Cowles Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum, is a way for museums to bring greater richness and variety to ...

More than Matisse: Art Rental Continues to Broaden Arts Exposure

Rachel Mead

September 9, 2016

Filed under ARTS, Visual Art

The Art Rental Program at the Allen Memorial Art Museum has been active for over 75 years, allowing students to rent pieces of art from the museum’s collection every semester for only $5 each. Professor of Modern Art Ellen Johnson, OC ’33, founded the program based on her dedication to bringing people closer to art, according to AMAM Registrar Lucille Stiger. Johnson believed that “if people lived with art, they would develop a greater appreciation for it,” Stiger said. This rings true for Kevin Lin, OC ’17, who has participated in Art Rental every semester he’s been at Oberlin. “It’s a daily, constant reminder. You can pay as much attention to it as you want, but by having it in your day-to-day life,...

AMAM Highlights Disabled Artists in A Picture of Health

Julia Peterson, Production Editor

February 5, 2016

Filed under ARTS, Features, Visual Art

Since mid-January, visitors to the Allen Memorial Art Museum who climb the stairs to the Ripin Gallery have been able to peruse the exhibit A Picture of Health: Art and the Mechanisms of Healing. The exhibit includes everything from paintings and sculptures to amulets and an interactive rotorelief, all of which depict or were intended to be involved with health and treatment. Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art History Christina Neilson, who co-curated the exhibition with State University of New York Buffalo’s Associate Professor Frances Gage, said that the exhibit is unique because it allows viewers to make crosscultural connections between diverse healing objects. “It’s a different type of ...

Painting Exhibit Depicts Bodies, Human Agency

February 5, 2016

Judit Reigl’s Body of Music exhibit, the first retrospective of her work in the United States, is a visceral exploration of the forces that govern the human body and our autonomy. In an exhibit that opened Tuesday at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, her works embody our collective desire for freedom over our bodies and over the paths we walk in the world. Curated by Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Denise Birkhofer with assistance from Mallory Cohen, OC’15, the exhibit runs through May 29 i...

Outdoor Art

March 13, 2015

New Curator’s Exhibit Explores Artists’ Imagination

February 14, 2014

Anyone who’s taken a drawing class has likely heard the instruction, “Draw what you see.” But how does one draw what one can’t see? As an exploration of this topic, the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s Curator of European and American Art Andaleeb Banta has put together a collection of prints that depict various elements of the fantastic titled Between Fact and Fantasy. Banta joined the Allen this past July, after working at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., where ...

Nord Family Fund Ensures Education Outreach Remains Permanent

Nora Kipnis, Arts Editor

February 14, 2014

Filed under ARTS, Features

As college students, we are used to sitting in a classroom listening to lectures by someone one or two generations older than us. But at the Tuesday Teas at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, the situation is reversed; this past Tuesday, a small crowd of local adults, including many residents of Kendal at Oberlin, gathered in the East Gallery of the Allen to hear Sarah McLusky, OC ’13, discuss paintings and prints and how they demonstrate the rise of humanism during the Renaissance. The student docent program is a unique feature that makes the Allen stand out among college art museums; while others provide training in museum education for graduate students in art history, Oberlin’s program is one of the few that allows...