Below are the supplemental materials for the booklet Crafting the “People of Nature”
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About Place: Quilts from Vermont Museums
Burlington, VT — The Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont presents About Place: Quilts from Vermont Museums, on view from September 10 through December 7, 2024.
About Place brings together a compelling array of historical and contemporary quilts from the Fleming’s collections, along with loans from the Shelburne Museum and Middlebury College Museum of Art. From Bertha E. Ames’ dazzling One-Patch Diamond Quilt to the Women of UVM’s collaborative UVM Bicentennial Quilt, each work shows how fabric and stitches can be used to engage with a sense of place. For example, living connection to place and community find expression in Peggie L. Hartwell’s exquisite narrative quilt Story Teller, and in the bold and distinctive patterns of an Appliqué and Pieced Star Quilt made by an artist from the Grand Traverse Tribe of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians.
Another exhibition highlight is from Anna Von Mertens’ series As the Stars Go By, which maps the position of stars over sites and moments of American history. Von Mertens’ quilt December 29, 1890, Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota, the Seven Stars of the Big Dipper in the Final Hour before Dawn offers a time-elapsed view of the celestial sphere before the massacre at Wounded Knee, inviting viewers to reflect on this shared history and consider the perspective of the stars who witnessed it.
This exhibition was organized in complement to Handstitched Worlds: A Cartography of Quilts, also on view this fall, by Kristan M. Hanson, PhD, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, for the Fleming Museum of Art.
Fleming Museum of Art
The University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art has brought world-class art to UVM and the heart of Burlington since 1931. With over 24,000 works (and growing) within its collections, the Museum serves as an extension of the classroom that centers interdisciplinary inquiry and study. Each year, thousands of students, faculty, and visitors from across the globe explore the galleries, engage with new exhibitions, and enjoy a range of community events. Learn more at uvm.edu/fleming.
For media inquiries, reach out to Rachel Lynne Moreau | 802.656.8582 | rachel.moreau@uvm.edu
Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts
Burlington, VT — The Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont presents Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts, on view from September 10 through December 7, 2024.
Like many objects rooted in the everyday, quilts have the capacity to communicate stories about the context in which they were made and used. They represent maps of the quilters’ lives—living records of cultural traditions, rites of passage, relationships, political and spiritual beliefs, landmark events, and future aspirations. In the same way, a map is a pocket-sized abstraction of the world beyond what can be seen; in a quilt, a maker’s choice of fabric and design reveals insights into the topography of their world and place within it.
Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts invites viewers to read quilts as maps, tracing the paths of individual stories and experiences that illuminate larger historic events and cultural trends. Spanning the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, the exhibition brings together 18 quilts from the collection of the American Folk Art Museum, New York, representing a range of materials, motifs, and techniques—from traditional early American quilts to more contemporary sculptural assemblage. The quilts in Handstitched Worlds show us how this too-often overlooked medium balances creativity with tradition, individuality with collective zeitgeist.
Handstitched Worlds: The Cartography of Quilts was organized by the American Folk Art Museum, New York and is toured by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC. This exhibition was organized for the Fleming Museum by Kristan M. Hanson, PhD, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, and generously supported by the Kalkin Family Exhibitions Fund.
American Folk Art Museum
Since 1961, the American Folk Art Museum has been the leading institution shaping the understanding of art by the self-taught through its exhibitions, publications, and educational programs. As a center of scholarship, it showcases the creativity of individuals whose singular talents have been refined through personal experience rather than formal artistic training. Its collection includes works of art from four centuries and nearly every continent—from compelling portraits and dazzling quilts to powerful works by living artists in a variety of mediums.
International Arts & Artists
International Arts & Artists in Washington, DC, is a non-profit arts service organization dedicated to increasing cross-cultural understanding and exposure to the arts internationally, through exhibitions, programs and services to artists, arts institutions and the public. Visit www.artsandartists.org.
Media Contact: International Arts & Artists: 202.338.0680 | info@artsandartists.org
Fleming Museum of Art
The University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art has brought world-class art to UVM and the heart of Burlington since 1931. With over 24,000 works and growing within its collections, the Museum serves as an extension of the classroom that centers interdisciplinary inquiry and study. Each year, thousands of students, faculty, and visitors from across the globe explore the galleries, engage with new exhibitions, and enjoy a range of community events. Learn more at uvm.edu/fleming.
For media inquiries, reach out to Rachel Lynne Moreau | 802.656.8582 | rachel.moreau@uvm.edu
Let the Fabric Speak!
Burlington, VT — The Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, in partnership with the Howard Center Arts Collective, presents the exhibition Let the Fabric Speak! on view from September 3, 2024, through May 17, 2025.
“This tapestry holds pieces of fabric and fibers, from my life and from my friends,” reads Eryn Sheehan’s artist statement for her quilt-inspired work Rubber and Ribbons. Repurposed materials and their metaphorical associations are woven throughout Sheehan’s work and the exhibition itself. In the early stages of the project, members of the Arts Collective held a community fabric swap during which materials and stories changed hands. Drawing from varied patterns and textures, each artist transformed pieces of pajamas and T-shirts into original works that urge viewers to listen with their eyes.
Let the Fabric Speak! begins with A Symphony of Us: a collaborative, site-specific work featuring repurposed compact discs. The exhibition continues with sixteen additional works, in which artists explore the significance of ephemeral materials, and the memories they evoke in us. Profoundly personal and universal, the exhibit showcases the human desire for our stories to be heard, held, and carried on in community.
This exhibition is the product of an ongoing relationship between members of the Fleming Museum staff and the Howard Center Arts Collective. Prior collaboration includes Call and Response: Personal Reflections on the Fleming Collection, an exhibition from 2022 in which members of the Arts Collective created work inspired by a piece from the museum collections.
Generous support for this project was provided by the Kalkin Family Exhibitions Fund and the Burlington City Arts (BCA) Community Fund.
Howard Center Arts Collective
Members of the Arts Collective work together to ensure that there are opportunities for artists who have experience with mental health and/or substance use challenges to connect, create, and exhibit work. We strive to create a supportive, non-hierarchical community that fosters mutuality, creative expression, and empowerment.
The Arts Collective values the transformative power of the creative process on a personal, social, and systemic level, and acknowledges that we are stronger when everyone has a voice.
Fleming Museum of Art
The University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art has brought world-class art to UVM and the heart of Burlington since 1931. With over 24,000 works (and growing) within its collections, the Museum serves as an extension of the classroom that centers interdisciplinary inquiry and study. Each year, thousands of students, faculty, and visitors from across the globe explore the galleries, engage with new exhibitions, and enjoy a range of community events. Learn more at uvm.edu/fleming.
For media inquiries, reach out to Rachel Lynne Moreau for the Fleming Museum of Art, 802.656.8582 | rachel.moreau@uvm.edu or Kara Greenblott for the Howard Center Arts Collective, 802 598 7420
Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections
February 6 – May 18, 2024
On a desk within the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, an old stuffed parrot guards a small library and a vast, yet obsolete ornithology collection. An excited young scientist reads a story on the origins of the desiccated animal to entertain a group of visitors: it may have been the last “speaker” of a dead Indigenous language from colonial Venezuela or a German prince’s precious gift to the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt. There is no clear understanding which of these versions, if any, might be true.
Curated by David Ayala-Alfonso, Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections is a traveling exhibition that reflects on the birth of modern collections, the art institutions that sustain them, and their contingent origin stories to reveal a universe of erasures, violence, and fortuity. Considering how institutional collections organize our lives, Never Spoken Again brings together artists whose works open up a critique of material culture, iconography, and political ecologies.
In turn, each of the works sheds light on myths, simulations, fake currencies, war games, and the slow violence of systematic racism that historically underpin collecting practices. Together, they invite inquiry into how our collective histories are presented, curated, fabricated, or all of the above. With wit, curiosity, and compassion, Never Spoken Again asks the question most museum visitors dare not: How did these objects and artworks get to a gallery in Vermont anyway? And why?
In complement to Never Spoken Again, the Fleming Museum of Art’s Curator of Collections and Exhibitions, Kristan M. Hanson, has incorporated commissioned, loaned, and existing works from the Museum’s collections. From a panel of stone carved in relief which once decorated the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II’s (r. 883–859 BCE) palace to a newly printed 3-D Copy of the Bust of Nefertiti (2023), the exhibition further expands and enriches the Fleming’s ongoing efforts to interrogate its collecting histories and implement impactful changes in museum practice.
Visitors will have several opportunities to delve deeper into the exhibition, including two hour-long screening events featuring video artworks from Never Spoken Again as well as a public tour guided by Hanson and the Fleming’s Manager of Collections and Exhibitions, Margaret Tamulonis.
Top Image | Michael Rakowitz, The invisible enemy should not exist – Seated Nude Male Figure, Wearing Belt Around Waist (IM77823) (Recovered, Missing, Stolen Series), 2018. Middle Eastern packaging and newspapers, glue, cardboard, 96 x 73 x 73 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Barbara Wien Gallery.
William Everard Balch (United States, 1854–1919), attributed to Edward Gerrard and Sons England, ca. 1850–1967. Red-lored parrot (Amazon autumnalis), late 19th cen. Courtesy of the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium Z02346
Richard Ross (United States, b. 1947), Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, France, from Museology, 1982. Ektacolor Plus print. Gift of the artist 1987.19.1
University of Vermont FabLab (United States, opened 2012). Copy of the Bust of Nefertiti, 2023. Resin, 3-D printed. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Attribution: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Courtesy of the UVM FabLab
Never Spoken Again: Rogue Stories of Science and Collections is a traveling exhibition curated by David Ayala-Alfonso and produced by Independent Curators International (ICI). It is the result of a new series of programs, pioneered with the support of the Hartfield Foundation, aimed at providing opportunities to alumni of ICI’s Curatorial Intensive as they move through the stages of their career, and reflecting ICI’s commitment to fostering and championing new curatorial voices who will shape the future of the field. Never Spoken Again is made possible with the generous support of ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum. Additional support for Erkan Öznur’s participation is provided by SAHA. The presentation at the Fleming Museum of Art has been organized in collaboration with Kristan M. Hanson, the Fleming’s curator of collections and exhibitions. Crozier Fine Arts is the Preferred Art Logistics Partner.
Artists: Morehshin Allahyari, Maria Thereza Alves, François Bucher, Giuseppe Campuzano, Alia Farid, Sofia de Grenade, Laura Huertas Millán, Ulrik López, Carlos Motta, Erkan Öznur, David Peña Lopera, Claudia Peña Salinas, Michael Rakowitz, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Reyes Santiago Rojas, Daniel R. Small, and Felipe Steinberg.
Collections Rotations | Fall 2023
Over the course of the summer, the small but mighty Fleming team–composed of staff and interns–has made significant changes to the Museum’s Collections Gallery. These changes include improvements to the physical space of the galleries, and a complete reinstallation of art objects drawn from across the Fleming’s collections. Both of which aim to make the Collections Gallery a more welcoming and inclusive space for everyone to enjoy.
We are excited for visitors to experience the physical transformation of the Collections Gallery. A more spacious entrance, as well as newly added benches, combine to make the galleries more accessible and inviting. Upgrades to lighting throughout the galleries enhance, for example, the appearance of boldly colored paintings and luminous metal objects. And walls freshly painted–vivid blue or warm gray–create a vibrant space for exploring art that has a greater sense of coherence and improved wayfinding.
Visitors to the Collections Gallery will also find a new, more expansive installation of art objects. This installation brings together objects from disparate time periods, geographic locations, and cultures. Through selecting such a diversity of works, we aim to present a more global, inclusive, and relevant installation—generating new opportunities for meaning making.
The Collections Gallery also presents a selection of art that enacts values articulated in Fleming Reimagined. We have prioritized showing works that amplify diverse perspectives, giving greater visibility to artists who are members of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ communities or whose work centers such folks. We have also arranged objects thematically to invite reflecting on urgent topics within the museum context and beyond. Repatriating cultural heritage, racism and police violence, the climate crisis, and LGBTQ+ rights and representation are but a few.
The reinstalled, physically transformed Collections Gallery is just the beginning of an ongoing, iterative reimagining of this space. Moving forward, objects will be rotated more frequently, with input from visitors, students, faculty, interns, and staff. On your next visit to the Fleming, spend time in the Collections Gallery exploring objects that may be familiar favorites, as well as some that have rarely been shown and still others that are new to the Fleming. Your feedback is encouraged and welcomed!
Sanford Biggers, “The Pasts They Brought with Them,” 2013
Sanford Biggers (United States, b. 1970), The Pasts They Brought with Them, from The Floating World series, 2013. Screen print with collage and hand-coloring. Museum purchase, Way Fund 2020.6 © Sanford Biggers
Unrecorded Artist, Ndebele, Basket, late 20th c.
Unrecorded Artist, Ndebele (southern Africa, active late 20th c.), Basket, late 20th c. Telephone wire, metal, plastic. Museum collection 2023.3
William Villalongo, “Palimpsest,” 2017.
William Villalongo (United States, b. 1975), Palimpsest, 2017 (detail). Seven-run screen print with laser cut areas and intaglio collage elements. Museum purchase, 2020.10
Forrest Myers, “Untitled,” 1975
Forrest Myers (United States, b. 1941), Untitled, 1975. Metal ball composed of various metal tubes, ropes, wires, and cables. The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States, a joint initiative of the Trustees of the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection and the National Gallery of Art, with generous support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute for Museum and Library Services 2009.4.23
Art and the Matter of Place
September 5 – December 8, 2023
Art objects can illuminate many ways in which place matters to the human experience. Art can give visual form and material expression to human connection to place. So too art can reveal different ways that humans have and continue to imbue places with meaning.
Grounded in these ideas, Art and the Matter of Place presents a small, compelling group of works from the Fleming’s collections. Through contemplation of form and materials, these objects encourage critical thinking about place and why it matters. A photograph of a marble quarry, for example, can evoke reflection on human interactions with material environments and natural resource extraction. A jar can offer insights about traditional cultural, geographical, and ecological knowledge of place. And additional objects can expand thinking about human attachment to place and more.
Importantly, Art and the Matter of Place is being shown in the Fleming’s Wolcott Gallery. This small, comfortably furnished space nurtures deeply focused engagement with art. Visitors are invited to spend time here exploring the visual and material qualities of objects, and how these qualities relate to notions of place.
Just as importantly, Fleming staff are increasingly thinking about issues of place. As part of Fleming Reimagined, we are considering how to make the Museum a more welcoming and inclusive place for everyone. We are also reflecting on the Museum’s colonialist history of collecting and displaying objects: practices that involved removing objects from places where they were originally made and used and where they formed an integral part of cultural life.
By highlighting the manifold meanings of place, Art and the Matter of Place aims to introduce visitors to issues that currently animate the work of Fleming staff and that relate to larger, ongoing efforts to reimagine the Museum.
Maria Martinez and Julian Martinez, “Jar,” ca. 1934
Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, 1887-1980) and Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, New Mexico, 1885-1943), Jar, ca. 1934. Polished blackware pottery with matte paint. Gift of Franklin Huntington Stevens and Eldora Wright Stevens 1977.29
Francis Ray Hewitt, “Vermont State,” 1971
Francis Ray Hewitt (United States, 1936-1992), Vermont State, from Four Corners Series, 1971. Dirt on linen. Gift of Karen Hewitt 2001.15
Don Ross, “Quarries, Rope, W. Rutland,” ca. 2010.
Don Ross (United States, b. 1951), Rope, W. Rutland, from Quarries, 2010s. Gelatin silver print. Bequest of J. Brooks Buxton ’56 2019.1.203
PRAXIS: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM
September 12 – December 8, 2023
Bridging the artist’s studio and the museum space, PRAXIS: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM provides a unique opportunity for members of the university and local and regional communities to discover and explore the creative work of UVM’s current teaching artists. PRAXIS: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM is the first-ever group faculty exhibition organized by the Fleming Museum, since the University’s Studio Art program began in 1924. The exhibition also celebrates the 2022 formation of UVM’s School of the Arts and commemorates the Fleming Museum officially joining the School this past year–opening many new avenues for future collaboration.
PRAXIS: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM brings together an exciting array of artworks, in different media, created by more than a dozen established and emerging artists. Each artist’s work has a distinct presence in the exhibition while, at the same time, generating meaningful relationships with other works shown in the galleries. Such relationships range from compelling visual, material, and process-oriented resonances to shared critical engagement with topics relevant to the present moment: identity, representation, and visibility; political action, community building, and social justice; and place, history, land use, and climate change.
The works in this exhibition invite exploration of praxis as an approach to art making and more. Praxis is a reflective process of thinking and making through which artists can nurture transformative change in their work, in the world and the self, and in their students’ lives. For this reason, a praxis-based process is apt for creating social justice-oriented art, as many works in the show demonstrate. Similarly, the exhibition opens thinking about how the acts of making art and teaching can shape each other and what it means, right now, to be a teaching artist at UVM.
Visit the Fleming’s website to learn about upcoming programs related to PRAXIS: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM. And, after you visit this exhibition in person, explore the Fleming’s other art spaces where you’ll find works on display by former UVM Studio Art faculty or guest teachers, including Francis P. Colburn, Francis Ray Hewitt, Barbara Marion Zucker, Cameron Davis, Toshiko Takaezu, William Earl Davison, and George W. Smith.
Faculty members featured in PRAXIS:
Misoo Bang, Lecturer
Hoyt Barringer, Lecturer
Mildred Beltré Martinez, Associate Professor
jen berger, Lecturer
Steve Budington, Associate Professor
Pamela Fraser, Program Head, Art & Art History
Jennifer Karson, Lecturer
Jane Kent, Professor
Christopher Kojzar, Assistant Professor
Ace Lehner, Assistant Professor
Jaimes Mayhew, Lecturer
Meg McDevitt, Senior Lecturer
Bill McDowell, Professor
Heimo Wallner, Lecturer
Micah Wood, Lecturer
Land Marks: Paintings of Human-Altered Landscapes
Extended through May 18, 2024
Landscape painting came into prominence in the visual arts of this land, now called the United States, in the early 1800s. Over the course of the century, the genre–with European roots–gained favor in the U.S., especially in the Northeast and among white artists and collectors. Many such paintings hold special significance today as historical records of European settler colonialism and as visual documents of environmental changes brought by humans.
Focusing on portrayals of Vermont and New England, Land Marks: Paintings of Human-Altered Landscapes brings together fifteen works, spanning roughly 1800 to the late 1900s. These paintings and a mirror, with a reverse painting on glass, infuse the Fleming’s Marble Court Balcony with color and with imagery that registers human interactions with the land.
The works in Land Marks show farms, cities, industrial buildings, and hydraulic structures. Once celebrated by some as signs of progress, these types of land use are increasingly under scrutiny today because they can–and often do–negatively impact the environment. Such changes to the land are depicted in James Hope’s painting Wedding Cake House, Iron Furnace Road, Pittsford, Vermont, from circa the early 1850s, which invites consideration of present-day concerns around agriculture and sustainability.
Many of the works in Land Marks also contain imagery that recalls current debates over land, fertilizer, herbicide, and water uses in Vermont. That is particularly so for representations of water systems and flows in landscape paintings by Henry Schnakenberg, Howard Giles, and Francis P. Colburn, all of which take on added significance when considered in the context of the flooding in Vermont last summer. Such works open thinking about current practices and their consequences for future generations.
Still, gaps in the Fleming’s holdings of landscape paintings are noticeable in this exhibition. Only two of its fifteen works are by women, Felicia Meyer Marsh and Yvonne Twining Humber, and none represent Indigenous peoples or give expression to their perspectives. That is partly because landscape paintings were traditionally made by–and for–mainly white Euro-American men and because the Fleming historically privileged acquiring such works. These disparities in the representation of women and Indigenous artists in the exhibition are examined in gallery labels and are part of ongoing conversations about evolving museum practice and experience.
Image: James Hope (United States, 1818–1892, b. Scotland), Wedding Cake House, Iron Furnace Road, Pittsford, Vermont, ca. early 1850s. Oil on canvas. Bequest of J. Brooks Buxton ’56 2019.1.4
Josef Albers | Formulation: Articulation
February 7 – May 20, 2023
The exhibition Formulation: Articulation is a chance to look at every color differently—through the lens of an artist’s teaching exercises that show how our perceptions of colors are affected by the environments in which they are viewed. In color studies like Homage to the Square, artist and educator Josef Albers (1888-1976) demonstrates how immediate proximity changes our viewing of shades and values of color.
Albers’ teaching materials about color interactions have long been used in UVM courses. Art faculty who were students here decades ago remember borrowing the silkscreen studies for Interactions of Color (first published in 1963) from Howe Library, before the book was transferred to the Fleming Museum. Current students use Albers’ work in painting, color photography, printmaking, and other studio courses to ground their studies in his maxims—practice before theory and actual, not factual—that stress the need for close observation as the foundation of any artist’s understanding. Inspired by painters like Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who sought to describe and codify interactions of color and sound, Albers developed these studies while teaching at the influential Bauhaus art school in Germany. Like many Bauhaus artists who were persecuted by the Nazis, he and his wife Anni Albers immigrated to the United States in 1933. He first taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later at Yale University, where his color studies became foundational in art pedagogy.
Deepening these studies, Formulation: Articulation (first published in 1972) considers more examples of “perceptual ambiguities,” in which two colors might initially appear to be the same, only to be revealed to be distinct based on how they interact with a clashing or complementary color. A color might also appear to pop or recede from a pattern, based on how it is articulated with surrounding colors. “Until one has the experience of knowing he is being fooled by color,” as Albers explains, “one cannot be expected to be very careful to look at things inquiringly.” He goes on to write, “Only comparison entitles one to evaluation…. I want to imbue others with my delight in the endless possibilities for new color experiences.”
Seeing color is not only about the science of perception, however; followers of Albers’ work have expanded upon these ideas to point out how understandings of color are also political and social. In exhibiting Formulation: Articulation, the Fleming Museum will supplement Albers’ color studies with artworks from its collection by artists like Glenn Ligon, Ellsworth Kelly, and David Powell. Such works can illuminate how the political and social dimensions of color inflect our lived experiences.
The exhibition was organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions of Los Angeles, CA.
Josef Albers’ “Formulation: Articulation II,” I:25, 1972
Josef Albers (German-American, 1888-1976), Formulation: Articulation II, I:25, 1972 (Detail). Screen print. Sheet: 15 x 40 in. (38.1 x 101.6 cm) © 2022 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
W. David Powell’s “Sense and Sensibility,” 2008
W. David Powell (American, active 1970-present), Sense and Sensibility, 2008. Digital print, edition: 1/20. Museum purchase 2009.8
Wassily Kandinsky’s “Blau (Blue),” 1922
Wassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944), Blau (Blue), 1922. Color lithograph. Museum purchase 1972.4