Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art
Encyclopedia
The Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art is an art museum on the campus of Auburn University
, and is the only university art museum in Alabama
. Opened on October 3, 2003, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art contains six exhibition galleries within its 40000 square feet (3,716.1 m²) of interior space. In addition to the galleries, the museum facility includes an auditorium
, cafe
, and museum shop. Outside the main building, the grounds encompass 7 acres (28,328 m²) of land, including an expansive lake.
The museum is named after Jule Collins Smith, the wife of Albert Smith, who graduated from Auburn University in 1947. Smith donated $3 million to the project as a gift to his wife, in honor of their 50th wedding anniversary.
and Europe
an Art. The museum includes works by Romare Bearden
, Ralston Crawford
, Arthur Dove
, Georgia O'Keeffe
, Jacob Lawrence
, John Marin
, and Ben Shahn
, within its Advancing American Art collection. Within the museum's Louise Hauss and David Brent Miller Audubon Collection are 114 prints by naturalist John James Audubon
. In addition, the museum contains the Bill L. Harbert Collection of European Art collection. This exhibit contains works by Marc Chagall
, Salvador Dalí
, Henri Matisse
, Joan Miró
, Pablo Picasso
, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
.
Curated by JCSM Director Marilyn Laufer for the Georgia Museum of Art, The Spirit of the Modern: Drawings and Graphics by Maltby Sykes, on view summer 2006, featured works on paper by the former Auburn University professor. The exhibition of more than 50 objects charted Sykes’s technical experimentation in printmaking and followed his progression from American Scene imagery in the 1940s through his mid-1970s work in abstraction.
From March 24, 2006 through May 28, 2006, the museum displayed an exhibit on loan from the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia
.The exhibit featured drawings from 19 and 20th century artists such as Charles Burchfield, Giorgio de Chirico
, Elaine De Kooning, and Robert Motherwell
. The drawings were a representation of Modernism
, with images from the Renaissance
to modern times.
Beginning in May 2006, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art unveiled another exhibit with the assistance of the Georgia Museum of Art. Entitled The Spirit of the Modern: Drawings and Graphics by Maltby Sykes, the exhibit featured work by Maltby Sykes. Known for his work in both paint
and print
, Sykes was represented by more than fifty objects. Together, the works are indicative of his development from social realism
through modern abstraction
and remained on display until July 30, 2006.
In 2007, JCSM organized an important exhibition of the work of Alabama native Roger Brown, guest curated by Sydney Lawrence. Roger Brown: Southern Exposure highlighted the southern roots and connection to family that mark the highly distinctive art of this celebrated Chicago Imagist painter. The exhibition traveled subsequently to American University in Washington, D.C. and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Fall 2008, JCSM presented The Indian Gallery of Henry Inman, a collection of 19th-century portraits of southeastern Native American leaders and warriors. Originally assembled by the High Museum in Atlanta, the exhibition of 13 oil paintings created by one of America’s most noted portraitists, was augmented at Auburn by hand-colored lithographs published after the paintings and contemporaneous Creek and Seminole beadwork.
During the years since it opened, the museum has also featured traveling exhibits displaying ceramic work by Eva Zeisel
, architecture inspired by Sambo Mockbee, and paintings by Hugh Williams.
The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums
program.
Auburn University
Auburn University is a public university located in Auburn, Alabama, United States. With more than 25,000 students and 1,200 faculty members, it is one of the largest universities in the state. Auburn was chartered on February 7, 1856, as the East Alabama Male College, a private liberal arts...
, and is the only university art museum in Alabama
Alabama
Alabama is a state located in the southeastern region of the United States. It is bordered by Tennessee to the north, Georgia to the east, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico to the south, and Mississippi to the west. Alabama ranks 30th in total land area and ranks second in the size of its inland...
. Opened on October 3, 2003, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art contains six exhibition galleries within its 40000 square feet (3,716.1 m²) of interior space. In addition to the galleries, the museum facility includes an auditorium
Auditorium
An auditorium is a room built to enable an audience to hear and watch performances at venues such as theatres. For movie theaters, the number of auditoriums is expressed as the number of screens.- Etymology :...
, cafe
Café
A café , also spelled cafe, in most countries refers to an establishment which focuses on serving coffee, like an American coffeehouse. In the United States, it may refer to an informal restaurant, offering a range of hot meals and made-to-order sandwiches...
, and museum shop. Outside the main building, the grounds encompass 7 acres (28,328 m²) of land, including an expansive lake.
The museum is named after Jule Collins Smith, the wife of Albert Smith, who graduated from Auburn University in 1947. Smith donated $3 million to the project as a gift to his wife, in honor of their 50th wedding anniversary.
Permanent collection
The museum's permanent collection focuses mainly on 19th and 20th century AmericanUnited States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
an Art. The museum includes works by Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...
, Ralston Crawford
Ralston Crawford
Ralston Crawford was an American abstract painter, lithographer, and photographer.-Early life:He was born on September 5, 1906, in Canada, at St. Catharines, Ontario, and spent his childhood in Buffalo, New York. He studied art beginning in 1927 in California at the Otis Art Institute. After...
, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
, Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
, Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence
Jacob Lawrence was an American painter; he was married to fellow artist Gwendolyn Knight. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", though by his own account the primary influence was not so much French art as the shapes and colors of Harlem.Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth...
, John Marin
John Marin
John Marin was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.-Biography:...
, and Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn
Ben Shahn was a Lithuanian-born American artist. He is best known for his works of social realism, his left-wing political views, and his series of lectures published as The Shape of Content.-Biography:...
, within its Advancing American Art collection. Within the museum's Louise Hauss and David Brent Miller Audubon Collection are 114 prints by naturalist John James Audubon
John James Audubon
John James Audubon was a French-American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He was notable for his expansive studies to document all types of American birds and for his detailed illustrations that depicted the birds in their natural habitats...
. In addition, the museum contains the Bill L. Harbert Collection of European Art collection. This exhibit contains works by Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall
Marc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
, Salvador Dalí
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....
, Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse
Henri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, Joan Miró
Joan Miró
Joan Miró i Ferrà was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona.Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride...
, Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to...
.
Exhibition Highlights
In addition to its changing displays of works in the permanent collection, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art has hosted several notable loan exhibitions. In fall 2005 JCSM presented The Quilts of Gee’s Bend, an exhibition of 70 quilts “created by four generations of artists from the isolated community of Gee’s Bend, Alabama,” described as “some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.”Curated by JCSM Director Marilyn Laufer for the Georgia Museum of Art, The Spirit of the Modern: Drawings and Graphics by Maltby Sykes, on view summer 2006, featured works on paper by the former Auburn University professor. The exhibition of more than 50 objects charted Sykes’s technical experimentation in printmaking and followed his progression from American Scene imagery in the 1940s through his mid-1970s work in abstraction.
From March 24, 2006 through May 28, 2006, the museum displayed an exhibit on loan from the Georgia Museum of Art at the University of Georgia
University of Georgia
The University of Georgia is a public research university located in Athens, Georgia, United States. Founded in 1785, it is the oldest and largest of the state's institutions of higher learning and is one of multiple schools to claim the title of the oldest public university in the United States...
.The exhibit featured drawings from 19 and 20th century artists such as Charles Burchfield, Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico
Giorgio de Chirico was a pre-Surrealist and then Surrealist Italian painter born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. He founded the scuola metafisica art movement...
, Elaine De Kooning, and Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell
Robert Motherwell American painter, printmaker and editor. He was one of the youngest of the New York School , which also included Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Philip Guston....
. The drawings were a representation of Modernism
Modernism
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement, its set of cultural tendencies and array of associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society...
, with images from the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
to modern times.
Beginning in May 2006, the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art unveiled another exhibit with the assistance of the Georgia Museum of Art. Entitled The Spirit of the Modern: Drawings and Graphics by Maltby Sykes, the exhibit featured work by Maltby Sykes. Known for his work in both paint
Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
and print
Old master print
An old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition . A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are...
, Sykes was represented by more than fifty objects. Together, the works are indicative of his development from social realism
Social realism
Social Realism, also known as Socio-Realism, is an artistic movement, expressed in the visual and other realist arts, which depicts social and racial injustice, economic hardship, through unvarnished pictures of life's struggles; often depicting working class activities as heroic...
through modern abstraction
Abstract art
Abstract art uses a visual language of form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world. Western art had been, from the Renaissance up to the middle of the 19th century, underpinned by the logic of perspective and an...
and remained on display until July 30, 2006.
In 2007, JCSM organized an important exhibition of the work of Alabama native Roger Brown, guest curated by Sydney Lawrence. Roger Brown: Southern Exposure highlighted the southern roots and connection to family that mark the highly distinctive art of this celebrated Chicago Imagist painter. The exhibition traveled subsequently to American University in Washington, D.C. and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans.
Fall 2008, JCSM presented The Indian Gallery of Henry Inman, a collection of 19th-century portraits of southeastern Native American leaders and warriors. Originally assembled by the High Museum in Atlanta, the exhibition of 13 oil paintings created by one of America’s most noted portraitists, was augmented at Auburn by hand-colored lithographs published after the paintings and contemporaneous Creek and Seminole beadwork.
During the years since it opened, the museum has also featured traveling exhibits displaying ceramic work by Eva Zeisel
Eva Zeisel
Eva Striker Zeisel is a Hungarian-born industrial designer known for her work with ceramics, primarily from the period after she immigrated to the United States. Her forms are often abstractions of the natural world and human relationships...
, architecture inspired by Sambo Mockbee, and paintings by Hugh Williams.
The museum is a member of the North American Reciprocal Museums
North American Reciprocal Museums
The North American Reciprocal Museums program is a consortium of museums in the United States, Canada, Bermuda, El Salvador and Mexico which offers benefits to museum membership holders in more than 530 institutions...
program.
External links
- Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art official site
- The Quilts of Gee’s Bend in context. Auburn University’s program in Women’s Studies
- The Life of Samuel "Sambo" Mockbee courtesy of Rural StudioRural StudioThe Rural Studio is a design-build architecture studio run by Auburn University which aims to teach students about the social responsibilities of the profession of architecture while also providing safe, well-constructed and inspirational homes and buildings for poor communities in rural west...