Some Light Reading (A Summer Exhibition)

Opened May 4

In this exhibition, artworks by five artists and poetic texts by four writers address the magical, life-making qualities of light. Referenced here are the sun and moon, the stars, an oil lamp, and an electric chandelier. But visual art and literature can be sources of illumination as well. The writer and activist Audre Lorde, writing about “poetry as illumination,” once noted that, “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.” The artists and writers include Vija Celmins, Emily Dickinson, Rockne Krebs, Audre Lorde, Virgil Marti, Eileen Myles, Eileen Neff, Virginia Woolf, and Bahar Yürükoğlu.

Image: Eileen Neff, Moon Night (detail), 2016, Archival UV pigment on dibond, 40 x 57 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

On View at the Greenfield Library: Two Art Books–Louise Bourgeois and Fischli/Weiss

Through September 8, 2024

This exhibition presents two small, zine-like art books, each featuring a single body of work. Though different in temperament and focus, both ask fundamental questions about the meaning of life and our place in the social or natural order.

Les Fleurs (The Flowers) includes reproductions of 28 gouache paintings created by the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois in 2009–10, a year before she died at the age of 97. Flowers typically symbolize growth, fecundity, and rejuvenation. Here the flat, silhouetted images–laid out in a regulated sequence–call to mind leafy specimens pressed under glass gathered for future study. In structure, they also evoke human anatomy; in hue and translucency, the paint looks like fresh blood. Bourgeois herself has verbally made this connection between the natural world and the human body, saying, “It seems rather evident to me that our own body is a figuration that appears in Mother Earth.”

Ordnung and Reinlichkeit (Order and Cleanliness) by the Swiss artist duo Fischli/Weiss, contains 15 black and white drawings by the artists from 1981. (The zine on view here is from 2016.) As if extracted from a corporate report–or a textbook, each drawing is labeled as a figure (fig. no. 1, etc.), supporting a text that is nowhere to be found. The diagrams tackle such topics as the will to power, love, anxiety, and the constitution of an organism. One of them intertwines big timeless questions (e.g., “Is the galaxy still growing?”) with small ones (“Is the bus still running?”). The tone seems earnest, but the small scale and humorous insertions suggest otherwise. Fischli/Weiss are poking fun at the high expectations we have of them.

Information about the exhibitions can be found here

Thank You to our Funders

The Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Art Museum’s (/m) programs are made possible through the generous support of the Maryland State Arts Council, Arts Council of Anne Arundel County, CovingtonAlsina, PNC Bank, and Chesapeake Medical Imaging. Additional support provided by Richard Groenendyke, Joshua Rogers, Ruth Mitchell, John and Hilda Moore Fund, Joy Chambers and Peter Bungay, Laura Ricciardelli and David Watt, Lillian Vanous Nutt, Anna Greenberg, Norman J. Fisher and Doris Fisher Foundation, Mitchell Art Museum Board of Advisors, and our other loyal members and patrons.