Join us Tuesday, January 28 at 5:30pm to hear Ian Berry speak on the early history of museums as a way to explore contemporary artists’ interdisciplinary interests in discovery and wonder, including the work of Demetrius Oliver.
Oliver’s sculpture Orrery was the centerpiece of the exhibition Affinity Atlas, mounted at Hamilton College and organized by guest curator Ian Berry. Berry’s curatorial framework drew inspiration from cabinets of curiosities and the pioneering work of art historian Aby Warburg. Forgoing the customary art historical narrative, Warburg used some 2,000 visuals from the Renaissance to the twentieth century to map out antiquity’s afterlife. He called the project a “picture atlas.” Guided by Warburg’s impulse to generate connections, Affinity Atlas sets up a series of montages and shifting perspectives using artworks from Hamilton’s holdings as well loans by a range of international contemporary artists.
One grouping probed the mysteries of the cosmos, juxtaposing nineteenth-century scientific prints of solar flares by Isaac Hollister Hall with Demetrius Oliver’s contemporary Orrery, an abstract, three-dimensional model of the solar system. Another grouping, which included a trompe l’oeil installation of a crumbling wall and disintegrating painting by Valerie Hegarty and a kaleidoscopic animated video by Chris Doyle, explored the natural world and referenced the work of nineteenth-century Hudson River School painters. Other works in the exhibition included paintings by Marsden Hartley and Charles Burchfield, prints by Jasper Johns and Kiki Smith, and new works by Terry Winters and Ruby Sky Stiler. Two large-scale photographs from Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s series “Pictures of Junk,” which were featured in the Academy Award–nominated documentary film Waste Land, were on view alongside London-based artist Hew Locke’s 18-foot-tall tapestry Chariots of the Gods and Sara VanDerBeek’s epic, four-part photographic response to Detroit.
About Ian Berry
A specialist in contemporary art and a leader in the field of college and university museums, Ian Berry joined Skidmore College as the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery’s founding curator in 2000 after serving as assistant curator at the Williams College Museum of Art. Graduating in 1995 from the University at Albany-SUNY with a B.A. in art history, he earned an M.A. in curatorial studies at Bard College in 1998.
The author of more than a dozen books and catalogues with imprints such as MIT Press, Prestel, and University of Washington Press, Berry has organized many of the most memorable shows in the Tang’s history. These include projects with a diverse group of artists, including Nayland Blake, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Joseph Grigely, Nancy Grossman, Paula Hayes, Nina Katchadourian, Los Carpinteros, Richard Pettibone, Tim Rollins and K.O.S., Alyson Shotz, Shahzia Sikander, Jessica Stockholder, Fred Tomaselli, and Kara Walker.
Berry pioneered the current practice at the Tang of working alongside faculty on large-scale interdisciplinary projects. This has become a national model for best practices in college museums. Among his faculty collaborations: The World According to the Newest and Most Exact Observations: Mapping Art and Science (2001) with Susan Bender, Bernie Possidente, and Richard Wilkinson; Staging the Indian (2002) with Jill Sweet; A Very Liquid Heaven with Margo Mensing and Mary Crone Odekon (2004); Lives of the Hudson (2010) with Tom Lewis; and the current collaborative project We the People with Beau Breslin and Rachel Seligman.