Reframing America: Works from the Baruch College Art Collection

Elliott Erwitt, Amagansett, New York, 1969. Gelatin silver print. 11 x 14 in. Gift of Sheldon Itzkoff (Class of ’52 and ’57), 1988.

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Reframing America is an exhibition of forty-one works by artists such as Mary Ascher, Beverly Buchanan, Lynda Benglis, Larry Clark, Milton Hinton, Robert Indiana, Andy Warhol, Carrie Mae Weems and more. The exhibition has been collectively organized on the occasion of the 2021 course Contemporary Issues in Curating at Baruch College (CUNY). Throughout the summer, the curators researched works in the college’s art collection that responded to a myriad of critical issues regarding “Americana,” defined by Merriam-Webster as “materials concerning or characteristic of America, its civilization, or its culture broadly.” Art has always been a mirror for society. As America is in the throes of simultaneous health, economic, labor, gender and racial justice crises, this exhibition looks to art to help us grapple with the current situation, while also considering the country’s past to understand where the issues at hand arise from.

Each curator of Reframing America has identified three works from the collection which resonate with their understanding of what American identity would have meant to these artists, as seen through the lens of today. Rather than create one unified concept of American identity or nationality, the exhibition aims to diversify and complicate “America” through artworks that represent numerous ideas: from Mary Ascher’s pictorial representations of oppressive ideologies, Andy Warhol’s portraits of Indigenous fictions, Milt Hinton’s celebratory coverage of famous African American jazz performers, Walker Evans’ humanistic depictions of families during the Great Depression, and so much more.

According to Walter Benjamin, “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.” Many factors have shaped the collection over decades, but this exhibition puts the personal back into the narrative through the interpretation of its student stakeholders. It also complicates what curatorial work means by curating this project together and sharing it with fellow Baruch and CUNY communities for years to come through this digital platform.

Reframing America: Works from the Baruch College Art Collection has been curated by Jonathan Anderson, Bianca Bailey, Wendy Berot, Zhidan Dai, Marcello Di Russo, Elena Freije Urdaneta, Randall Houston, Shawn-Ta Jones, Joyce Laoagan, Zachary Longstreet, Christina Lynch, Jeff Park, Ali Rossi, Robin Schatell, Jialu Tang, and Weigine (Marisa) Wang. The exhibition is part of a curatorial partnership between the Mishkin Gallery and Baruch’s MA in Arts Administration program.

For more information, please e-mail mishkingallery@baruch.cuny.edu

Artist Talk: Ralph Gibson

Thursday, Dec 2, 2021

6:00 PM Eastern Time

Free, Online

Zoom Registration: https://tinyurl.com/zxx88aab

Join Mishkin Gallery on Thursday, December 2nd at 6pm on Zoom for an intimate conversation with world-renowned photographer Ralph Gibson, whose work has been in the Baruch College Art Collection as a resource for students and the public for decades. Ralph Gibson is an American photographer best known for his images that utilize abstraction to explore surreal visual representations of the subconscious. He founded Lustrum Press in 1969 in order to support and publish photography books of his and his peers’ work. Notable collaborations include a campaign for Bottega Veneta and his image Hand Through a Doorway published on the inner sleeve of Joy Division’s seminal 1979 album Unknown Pleasures. Gibson’s works can be found in several significant private and public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, the Whitney, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, has been awarded the Leica Medal of Excellence, and is a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France. In 2018 he was appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the president of France.

Ralph Gibson will be in conversation with Alaina Claire Feldman, Director and Curator of the Mishkin Gallery. This conversation is in collaboration with Baruch’s Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center. It has been organized on the occasion of Mishkin Gallery’s 2021 online exhibition Reframing America.