Fleming Museum of Art

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Small Worlds: Miniatures in Contemporary Art

By Staff

February 13 – May 10, 2019

Small Worlds explores the ways contemporary artists use miniatures to inspire awe, whimsy, and even dread. These artists either create or employ found miniature figures, rooms, and landscapes, displaying them through photographs or sculptures. The resulting scenes, reminiscent of our childhood playthings, can recall in us that sense of wonder for the world around us, but also call our attention to the dark forces hidden beneath the seduction of the small. As our inherent attraction to the miniature sucks us into the imagined world of the artist, real-world traumas such as violence, displacement, and environmental disaster are brought to our attention in intricate and intimate ways.

Joe Fig and Minimiam (Akiko Ida + Pierre Javelle) each communicate the joys of creating. Fig seeks to understand famous artists by constructing obsessively meticulous models of their studios, providing viewers unique access to the creative process. Under the joint name Minimiam, photographers Ida and Javelle merge their love for art and food by arranging miniature train figures with fruit, pastries, and ice cream to create whimsical scenes of recreation, labor, and culture.

Sally Curcio and Allison May Kiphuth translate their love of landscape into enchanting capsules. Curcio creates modern renditions of snow globes made from found objects. Some recreate real sites such as New York City’s Central Park, while others become other-worldly fantasies. Kiphuth is inspired by her travels and her New England environment to integrate watercolors into “uncontained dioramas” that communicate her passion for the natural world.

Thomas Doyle and Lori Nix + Kathleen Gerber depict the human world eerily overtaken by nature. Doyle constructs models of suburban homes subject to sudden, inexplicable environmental disasters that displace and bewilder their inhabitants. Nix + Gerber create and then photograph intricate scenes of cities and sites of arts and culture reclaimed by natural forces after humans have disappeared.

Corin Hewitt and Mohamad Hafez communicate the dark psychological charges evoked by the buildings that constitute “home.” A native Vermonter and descendant of a family of artists, Hewitt has constructed a modified miniature version of his family’s cabin in East Corinth, Vermont, in which outer and inner walls are manipulated to question the distinctions between public and private, inside and outside. Hafez’s heart-wrenching models of Syrian buildings, destroyed by war but displaying signs of life and hope, reflect the artist’s longing for a home transformed by turmoil.

Two artists based in Vermont recreate in miniature the museum activities of collection, classification, and display. Brian D. Collier developed The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects, a taxonomy used to name any solid, non-living thing smaller than 8mm x 8mm x 25mm. Visitors can peruse The Traveling Museum of Very Small Objects and make their own contributions to the collection. Matt Neckers created the Vermont International Museum of Contemporary Art + Design (VTIMoCA+D), a series of galleries—many of them mobile—full of miniature artworks. VTIMoCA+D galleries in antique suitcases and a vintage fridge will be on view. The latter will be interactive, demystifying the act of curating for Fleming visitors.

Whether conveying the simple joy of a clever visual pun, or exploring some of the greatest challenges facing our world, art in miniature compels us to look closer, in awe at the skill, enchanted by the size, captivated by the message.

Special thanks to all of the artists and their galleries for their generous assistance. This exhibition is supported by the Kalkin Family Exhibitions Fund and the Walter Cerf Exhibitions Fund.

Thomas Doyle’s “Staging Area,” 2014

Detail of Thomas Doyle's "Staging Area," 2014

Thomas Doyle, Staging Area (detail), 2014. Mixed media, 21 x 20 x 4 ½ inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber’s “Library,” 2007

Detail of Lori Nix & Kathleen Gerber's "Library"

Lori Nix / Kathleen Gerber, Library (detail), 2007. Archival pigment print , 30 x 40 inches. Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City. © Lori Nix/Kathleen Gerber

Mohamad Hafez’s “Hiraeth,” 2016

Detail of Mohamad Hafez's "Hiraeth," 2016

Mohamad Hafez, Hiraeth (detail), 2016. Plaster, paint, antique toy tricycle, found objects, rusted metal, and antique wood veneer, 61 x 35 x 21 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

Sally Curcio’s “Happy Valley (Fall), 2016

Sally Curcio's "Happy Valley (Fall)," 2016.

Sally Curcio, Happy Valley (Fall), 2016. Beads, flocking, fabric, thread, plastic, pins, painted wood frame, and acrylic bubble. 12 x 12 x 6 inches. Smith College Museum of Art, Purchased with the Deaccession Acquisition Fund  2016:22-2.

Global Miniatures

By Staff

February 13 – May 10, 2019

Miniatures—small versions of real-world objects—can be found the world over and throughout time. What is the appeal, seemingly universal, of seeing something familiar made small? What functions do miniatures serve? This exhibition will explore these questions using a wide range of objects from the Fleming Museum’s global collection.

In many historic cultures including Ancient Egypt and Pre-Columbian Central and South America, miniature objects were included in burials in order to provide service in the afterlife. In Europe and America from the 1500s to the 1800s, miniature versions of sacred texts or portraits might be carried on one’s person as a constant reminder of spirituality and family. These objects, despite their small size, were also a display of wealth, due to the laborious production and fine materials that went into creating them.

Small things naturally came to be associated with children. Dolls, dollhouses, action figures, and miniature housewares were used to educate girls and boys about their future roles as adults. Yet miniatures were also used to teach adults in a museum setting, as evidenced by many remnants of past Fleming Museum displays. This was particularly true in the case of global cultures, in which unfamiliar forms of housing or transport could be displayed in dioramas and models.

Yet, for westerners, miniatures from foreign lands served more than an educational purpose. As traders and tourists made incursions into Asia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the indigenous Americas, artisans in those places increased production of figures, models, and dolls of various kinds, in order to supply a ready market of people seeking decorative souvenirs of their global travels.

Miniatures from around the world have the potential not only to delight us, but to provide us with a tiny window into the intentions of the people who made them, used them, collected them, and donated them to the Fleming Museum.

Japanese miniature chest

Japanese miniature chest with plates

Japan, Miniature Chest with Plates, late 1800s-early 1900s. Lacquered wood, metal, and ceramic, 2 1/16 x 1 1/4 x 1 7/8 inches. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Frank Wells, 1982.12.2

Miniature Bible

Gloved hand holding a miniature Bible

David Bryce and Son (Glasgow) and Oxford University Press, The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, 1896. Photolithography on paper with mother-of-pearl cover, 1 1/2 x 1 inch. Gift of Mrs. Frank Patten  1947.2.1

Model house with dog on roof

Miniature model house with dog on roof

Mexico, Nayarit or Colima, Model House with Dog on Roof, about 300 BCE-300 CE. Ceramic, 5 1/8 x 4 x 4 inches. Gift of Thomas Wilber  1980.1.38

Japanese model litter

Miniature model of a Japanese litter

Japan, Model Litter. Laquer, wood, silver, paper. 13 1/4 x 9 1/2 x 12 inches. T1243

The Impossible Ideal: Victorian Fashion and Femininity

By Staff

September 21 – December 14, 2018

The Victorian era (1837-1901), named for the reign of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, is known for extreme expressions of women’s fashion, and for a narrow definition of women’s roles in society. Tight-laced corsets, wide hoop skirts, bustles, and trains exaggerated women’s forms while restricting their movement and activity. Thus fashion, and the popular magazines that promoted it, reinforced the “cult of domesticity”—the idea that women’s place was in the home and not the public sphere. This feminine ideal belonged to an urban leisure class, excluding great swaths of rural or working class populations. Mass print culture also implicitly and explicitly promoted a vision of the ideal woman as white and Protestant rather than any other race or religion.

Even as mainstream periodicals promoted the Victorian cult of domesticity, they also provided a forum for debate about the “woman question:” to what degree should women be educated, seek work outside the home, and have certain rights within marriage, including the right to divorce. These discussions were evidence of a growing restlessness on the part of women, and an ambivalence on the part of the magazines’ editors and contributors, many of them female. While mid-century styles reflected the restrictiveness of women’s roles, by the 1890s fashion evolved to express increasing autonomy. Sleeker skirts, broader shoulders, lighter fabrics, and suit styles that mimicked menswear gave women greater freedom of movement, representing how more women were venturing outside the home for education, excercise, or to work for philanthropic or activist causes.

Through women’s clothing and accessories from the Fleming Museum’s collection, along with excerpts from popular American women’s magazines such as Godey’s Lady’s Book and Peterson’s Magazine, this exhibition explores how fashion embodied the many contradictions of Victorian women’s lives, and, eventually, the growing call for more diverse definitions of women’s roles and identities.

Victorian era dresses photographed in the Marble Court

Victorian era dresses photographed in the Marble Court

LEFT:  Ballgown, about 1860. Green and cream silk satin, embroidered with changeable green silk thread. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Falls  1960.20.43 

RIGHT:   Suit-style two-piece dress, about 1895. Black and red silk with red silk and white lace. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. James Thomas, Terrill Hall Collection  1987.11.570

“The Snowy Day,” fashion plate from Peterson’s Magazine

“The Snowy Day,” fashion plate from Peterson’s Magazine (detail), January 1881.

The Illman Brothers (active Philadelphia, 1860s-1890s), “The Snowy Day,” fashion plate from Peterson’s Magazine (detail), January 1881. Hand-colored engraving. Museum Collection  2006.3.173 LA

Bustle, about 1875. Steel and linen.

Bustle, about 1875. Steel and linen.

Bustle, about 1875. Steel and linen. Gift of Misses Marguerite and Elsa Allen  1936.44.11

Self-Confessed! The Inappropriately Intimate Comics of Alison Bechdel

By Staff

January 30 – May 20, 2018

In the spring of 2018, the Fleming Museum of Art presents an exhibition of the work of Alison Bechdel, spanning her illustrious, decades-long career. A renowned cartoonist and graphic memoirist who lives in Bolton, Vermont, Bechdel is a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner, and the third Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont—a position unique to the state. Her pioneering comic strip about the lives of a group of lesbian friends, Dykes to Watch Out For, ran from 1983 to 2008 and was syndicated in over fifty alternative papers, including Vermont’s Seven Days, which recently published new Dykes strips by Bechdel focused on current political events.

In 2006, Bechdel published the graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which explores her relationship with her father, her coming out, and his possible suicide. Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller and the basis of the Tony-award winning musical of the same name. Bechdel followed up in 2012 with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, which follows her relationship with her mother, girlfriends, therapists, and her exploration of psychoanalytic theory. Both books are works of multilayered complexity, employing nonlinear storytelling and a rich trove of literary and historical references.

Self-Confessed presents these primary bodies of work in depth through original drawings and sketches, while incorporating other aspects of Bechdel’s creative output, from early drawings to activist ephemera to large-scale self-portraits. The exhibition also includes a model of the set for the musical Fun Home, reconstructed for this exhibition.

The exhibition explores Bechdel’s work as a writer, an artist, and an archivist of the self, someone who constantly mines and shares her own experiences as a way to communicate something vitally human: the quest for love, acceptance, community, and social justice.

Page from Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home”

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Alison Bechdel (American, born 1960)
Page 118 from Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006)

Page from Alison Bechdel’s “Are You My Mother?”

Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?

Alison Bechdel (American, born 1960)
Page 234 from Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)

Page from Alison Bechdel’s “Dykes to Watch Out For”

Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For

Alison Bechdel (American, born 1960)
Dykes To Watch Out For, “The Rule”. 1985

Alison Bechdel’s “Tour of Vermont”

Alison Bechdel's Tour of Vermont

Alison Bechdel (American, born 1960)
from “Vermont,” from State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America
(Ecco-HarperCollins, 2008)

Herbert Barnett: Vermont Life and Landscape, 1940-1948

By Staff

September 26 – December 15, 2017

Herbert Barnett: Vermont Life and Landscape, 1940-1948 reexamines the contribution of this mid-century modernist painter through the subject matter and time period in which the artist’s distinctive style found its greatest expression: his Vermont landscapes of the 1940s. The exhibition was organized in consultation with the artist’s son and features works on loan from public and private collections.

Barnett was born and raised in Rhode Island and studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. At the age of seventeen, he had his first solo show at a Boston gallery. After spending several years in Europe absorbing the Old Masters and avant-garde alike, Barnett divided his time in the late 1930s between New York, Boston, and Cape Ann, Massachusetts. In the 1940s, Barnett was head of the Worcester Museum School in Massachusetts, and spent his summers in Plainfield, Vermont. In the summers of 1941 and 1942, he taught painting at the University of Vermont, and from 1951 until his death in 1972, Barnett served as dean of the Art Academy of Cincinnati.

Combining a Cubist approach to structure and paint application with a deep interest in Renaissance and Baroque composition, Barnett’s Vermont paintings portray the winding paths of quarry towns, the patchwork of pastures, and aspects of daily farm life. When Barnett identified such a picturesque scene, he depicted it in a variety of media, from paintings and oil studies to drawings in ink, pencil, charcoal, and chalk. The exhibition is structured around these multiple expressions of his favorite themes.

For example, several works in the exhibition depict the fields of the Orton family, the proprietors of the Vermont Country Store. When summering in Plainfield, the Barnetts stayed in a hillside cottage overlooking the Ortons’ pastures in neighboring Marshfield. A grouping of four works on this subject gives the museum visitor a revealing glimpse into the artist’s process and development. Barnett’s renderings of the same scene in different color palettes and styles represent the ever-shifting quality of light caused by the temperamental New England weather, as well as the artist’s formal experimentation.

The Fleming Museum’s relationship with Herbert Barnett dates back to his time spent teaching at UVM. In 1942, the Fleming featured Barnett’s work in a two-person exhibition with Barse Miller. In 1978, a few years after Barnett’s death, the Fleming mounted a solo exhibition. Several works in the current exhibition were included in one or both of those shows.

Dressing Down the Bull, Plainfield, Vermont (detail)

Herbert Barnett's Dressing Down the Bull, Plainfield, Vermont

Herbert Barnett (American, 1910-1972), about 1941.

Oil on masonite.

33 x 27 in.

Collection of J. Brooks Buxton ’56, Promised Gift

New England Farm (detail)

Herbert Barnett's New England Farm

Herbert Barnett (American, 1910-1972), about 1941.

Oil on canvas

24 x 36 in.

Collection of J. Brooks Buxton ’56, Promised Gift

Orton’s Pasture (detail)

Herbert Barnett's Orton's Pasture

Herbert Barnett (American, 1910-1972), about 1941.

Oil on masonite.

16 x 36 in.

Lyman Orton Collection – Lost Vermont Images

Reflections, Plainfield, Vermont (detail)

Herbert Barnett's Reflections

Herbert Barnett (American, 1910-1972), 1944

Oil on fiberboard.

23 7/8 x 36 1/8 in.

Collection of the Worcester Art Museum,
Gift of Lawrence R. McCoy

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated brochure with essays by the artist’s son Peter Barnett and Fleming curator Andrea Rosen. 

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