Our rural area is pretty well served in terms of art museums. There’s the Rockwell in Corning, the Arnot in Elmira, the Yates County Arts Center in Penn Yan. Down in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, Gmeiner Art Center has a new exhibition each month, open hours seven days a week, and free admission every time. Make the trip to Rochester, and you can visit Memorial Art Gallery, enjoying the outdoor sculpture garden while you’re at it.
*Of course our area is also home to a great world university, and for our fortieth anniversary we visited Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art… as we’ve been saying we’re going to get around to doing, for exactly half of that time.
*In particular we wanted to take in a special exhibition that closes August 14, which is what got us out onto the country lanes of Tompkins and the hills of Ithaca in torrential downpours.
*This is “No Boundaries: Aboriginal Australian Contemporary Abstract Painting.” Nine painters were represented, including one whose family had no contact at all with the western world until he was about 25 years old. None of them have “academic” training in art, although several have been involved in community-based art programs.
*We’re not very familiar with Aboriginal art, but if we understand it correctly much of it is abstract or geometric. These artists (only one’s still living) continued in that tradition. The resulting paintings partake of traditional Aboriginal art, and also partake of modern western art — “no boundaries.”
*Several of the pieces would fit right in with the most hip gallery going. Others definitely maintain a sense of “other,” the voice of a different culture. Aboriginals maintaining their own culture… or at least drawing strongly from it… often need to function in the western culture as well. Native peoples in the Americas often face a similar challenge.
*We looked very closely at most of them, and we were interested to see that the painters used few or no brush strokes. Instead, the paintings were mostly formed by close-set dots, echoing the dot motif in Aboriginal body art. It shares something with pointillism, but it’s another “movement” altogether.
*It’s overwhelming to look at a five-foot painting, completely covered with “op art” irregular swirls, and see that every single “line” is actually a line of dots.
*From what we understand, some of the painters indulged in a color palette far more varied and exuberant than those colors available traditionally. Some of them are excitingly eye-catching.
*As a museum professional myself, I know the challenge of creating labels that are at once informative and short. The labels really helped us in understanding something of these artists, and of individual pieces.
*But some labels communicated little more than the artist’s identity and a title in one of the Aboriginal tongues. Since the paintings are abstract, I would have found it worthwhile to know whether the title referred to a person… a place… an object… a concept… or what. For all know they all said “Up against the wall, whitey,” which would certainly have been appropriate.
*This piece is a little late, given that the show closes on the 14th. But we found it was really worth the trip, and worth the look. And we haven’t even mentioned the rest of the museum, which will be a topic for a future blog.