Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen Museum of Art, will assume new administrative duties as the senior director for the arts and media, providing supervision to the staff in the Division of the Arts, as well as working more closely on behalf of the provost with the UW Press and Wisconsin Public Media. Gilman will also continue as director of the Chazen Museum.

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Lee Nam Lee, “Cartoon Folding Screen II”, 2010, five-channel digital video with sound on 5 LED monitors in custom frames with custom electronics

Exhibition imagines a digital future through art

The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison will highlight the work of 19 international artists at the forefront of digital and media art in Message from Our Planet: Digital Art from the Thoma Foundation, on view Feb. 19-June 2, 2024. The exhibition comprises a wide-ranging investigation on the artifacts of contemporary life and showcases software, video, and light-technology artworks from the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation collection.

Based on the idea of the time capsule, Message From Our Planet imagines a digital future where art communicates beyond our common era through computer code and invites contemplation on how future generations will comprehend the past. Like the interstellar time capsule found on NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the exhibition proposes that artworks may be reconstituted from their digital code by future worlds, containing a multi-vocal message by Earth’s artists.

“Message from Our Planet centers around a basic human desire to be understood,” said Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen. “The exhibition challenges the viewer to question their individual legacy and consider how art can be a conduit to communicating through time.”

Message from Our Planet utilizes media technologies from vintage devices such as Eduardo Kac’s Tesão, a digital poem on a vintage Minitel; to cutting-edge digital algorithms as demonstrated by interactive video using artificial intelligence to attract flies to viewers in Laurent Mignonneau and Christa Sommerer’s People on the Fly. Additional artists in the exhibition include Brian Bress, Jim Campbell, Lia Chaia, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Hong Hao, Matthew Angelo Harrison, Claudia Hart, Jenny Holzer, Lee Nam Lee, Christian Marclay, Elias Sime, Michal Rovner, Jason Salavon, Peter Sarkisian, Penelope Umbrico, United Visual Artists, and Robert Wilson.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a free take-away publication for visitors. Designed in the style of a newspaper, the keepsake features headlines about the art and exhibition themes with color images of all artworks.

Message from Our Planet: Digital Art from the Thoma Foundation is curated by Jason Foumberg, curator of digital art at the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation.

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About the Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation

The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation recognizes that education and the arts enhance individuals’ lives and communities. Education is centered in the rural Southwest, primarily focusing on scholarships. In the Arts, the Foundation makes grants, lends and exhibits their art collection. The Foundation believes strongly in leadership, innovation and equality of opportunity.

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Oct. 11, 2023, Bentonville, AR — Art Bridges Foundation, the national arts nonprofit founded by philanthropist Alice Walton, announced today the launch of “Access for All,” providing $40 million in funding to 64 museums nationwide. The initiative aims to increase access to museums across the country and foster engagement with local communities by covering the costs of free admission days and expanded free hours as well as programming, outreach, and community partnerships that together, will eliminate many common barriers to access.

Museums participating in the Access for All initiative span 36 states and Puerto Rico. Among the 64 partners representing a broad range of locations are the Chazen Museum of Art (Madison, WI); Howard University Gallery of Arts (Washington, D.C.); Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (San Juan, PR); Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND); Portland Museum of Art (Portland, ME); San Diego Museum of Art (San Diego, CA); Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY); Wichita Art Museum (Wichita, KS); and Yellowstone Art Museum (Billings, MT). The full list of participating museums can be found on the Art Bridges website.

“Everyone, no matter where they live, deserves access to art. That’s why we started Art Bridges: to support museums in deepening their connections with local communities, and to pave the way for new audiences to experience the creativity and joy that comes with seeing art,” said Alice Walton, founder and board chair of Art Bridges. “Access for All is our biggest and most ambitious effort to date, dedicating $40 million toward bridging gaps between museums of all sizes and their communities in order to foster meaningful connections and expand arts access in every region, from Peoria to Puerto Rico.”

Access for All represents a sweeping effort to get people back to museums after COVID-19 brought declines in revenue, staffing and attendance. With many museums seeing just 71 percent of their pre-pandemic attendance, the new initiative will aim to restore pre-pandemic levels – and open opportunities for all people to enjoy American art by reducing barriers to access and strengthening community relationships.

Of the participating 64 museums, all current partners of Art Bridges, 80 percent have annual operating expenses under $10 million. The majority charge admission fees and will be able to provide new free admission opportunities through Access for All. Others will use the Access for All funds to sustain or extend current free admission policies.

Each museum will have the opportunity to use the funds to develop tailored programming specifically for their communities, including but not limited to:

• Underwriting free admission on a designated “Access for All Day,” expanded hours, or full-time;
• Partnering with local transit agencies and community centers to facilitate free and accessible transportation;
• Designing interdisciplinary and culturally responsive programs relevant to community interest;
• Providing fully bilingual interpretation, assistive listening systems, marketing and programming, including Spanish, American Sign Language, and indigenous languages;
• Expanding outreach to local schools;
• Working with local organizations to help organize free community meals;
• Hiring new staff responsible for the creation of community engagement programming and more.

“We are thrilled to launch Access for All, a historic partnership with cultural institutions across the country to make it easier for people in every U.S. region to see and experience art. At Art Bridges, we can’t wait to see our trusted partners get creative and deliver impact to their communities,” Alice Walton said. “In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are confident Access for All will not only help to rebuild museum attendance but also bring more people than ever into museum galleries and reshape the arts world as one that is open to all.”

“The Chazen Museum of Art is thrilled to be part of the pilot for the Art Bridges’ Access for All initiative,” said Kristine Zickuhr, chief operating officer. “Accessibility is one of our guiding values, and we look forward to developing additional opportunities to welcome students and other visitors into the museum. While we already offer free admission, the funding will allow us to experiment with some fun programming ideas. We’re working on events like trivia and game nights, book clubs, and informal conversations at the Chazen Café. Students will be involved in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the events. We want every student on campus to feel welcome at the Chazen.” 

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About Art Bridges Foundation

Art Bridges Foundation is the vision of philanthropist and arts patron Alice Walton. The mission of Art Bridges is to expand access to American art in all regions across the United States. Since 2017, Art Bridges has been creating and supporting programs that bring outstanding works of American art out of storage and into communities. Art Bridges partners with a growing network of over 220 museums of all sizes and locations on nearly 700 projects across the nation, impacting over 4.1 million people, to provide financial and strategic support for exhibition development, loans from the Art Bridges Collection, and programs designed to educate, inspire, and deepen engagement with local audiences. The Art Bridges Collection represents an expanding vision of American art from the 19th century to present day and encompasses multiple media and voices. For more information, visit artbridgesfoundation.org.

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The archiving effort, a collaboration between the Chazen and UW–Madison Libraries, is supported by a $500,000 grant from The Mellon Foundation with UW–Madison contributing an additional $317,000. With the Chazen serving as the pilot organization, library staff developed tools to collect, preserve, and share digital assets. These tools will be adaptable to other collections across campus as part of the libraries’ Digital Preservation Repository.

When completed, the Chazen’s digital exhibition archive will include thousands of high-resolution images and documents from the museum’s physical archive, which spans more than 500 exhibitions over 53 years: images of museum events and gallery installations along with correspondence, promotional materials, research notes, checklists, and other items of interest to artists and scholars. As well, high-resolution images of about 3,000 of the museum’s 24,000 permanent collection objects are online, making highly detailed remote viewing widely available for the first time. The archive covers the time period when the museum was known as the Elvehjem Art Center, the Elvehjem Museum of Art, and the Chazen Museum of Art.

Developing the presentation of the museum’s archival materials required months of cross-organizational collaboration between the Chazen and library staff. After detailed content analysis by Chazen staff to determine user needs, library staff decided the Chazen’s exhibition records merited a new, visual user experience for mixed materials. The user experience is designed to be adaptable to a wide variety of gallery, library, archive, and museum content.

The Chazen’s digital archive is embedded in the University of Wisconsin Digitized Collections (UWDC), making it easily accessible to UW students and faculty alongside other library resources. It is also connected to the WorldCat global catalog of library materials, and the Digital Public Library of America, extending its reach far beyond the university.

Museums typically have only a few pages of past exhibitions posted on their websites to serve as an online archive of sorts. Even the nation’s largest art museums often have sparse records, offering bare-bones descriptions of past exhibitions and a few low-resolution images. Few other museums in the country have such robust online access to their archives, not only in terms of the diversity and depth of resources, but in the way they’re organized, tagged, and cross-referenced. Project leaders believe that such an effort will lead to more discoverability, not only by museum experts, but by general audiences and researchers outside the fields of art and art history as well.

“This is totally groundbreaking in the field,” said Chazen Director Amy Gilman. “I thought we were solving a problem that was particular to the Chazen, but I didn’t think we’d also land on something that the entire field should be paying attention to.”

That so much of the institution’s history had existed only in paper records concerned Gilman and other museum staff, including Andrea Selbig, the Chazen’s registrar for the past 22 years. Besides worries about deterioration and potential damage of physical records, Selbig also lamented that much of the museum’s history was, in effect, inaccessible.

“I’m absolutely thrilled, almost in tears,” said Selbig, who has fielded numerous requests for past exhibition materials over the years that often ended in frustration. “The fact that our actual archive documents are online is very rare. The vast majority of museums just have finding aids that tell you ‘these items are in a box somewhere.’ ”

A major part of the team’s effort involved the physical handling and processing of materials, building a strategy for preserving and organizing materials, and deciding what should be digitized. Once the items were analyzed and prepared, they were shipped off in batches to the UW–Madison Libraries, which did the high-resolution scanning.  Jordan Craig, the Chazen’s digital asset coordinator and multimedia archivist, expects exhibition content through 2002 to be incorporated by the end of the year.

Getting the content online has not been a simple process. Led by Craig, a small team dug through dozens of large storage boxes stuffed with manila folders, letters, memos, receipts, printed emails, three-ring binders, and glossy photos. They accessed documents from long-obsolete word-processing programs via specialized software. Floppy disks, dust, crumbling rubber bands, and rusty paper clips were par for the course.

There was even a bit of danger. “I suppose you could say I’ve literally bled for this archive,” Craig quipped. (She wound up going to the emergency room after injuring herself on a paper cutter.) No other injuries were reported. “No graduate students were harmed in the making of this archive,” she said. Craig praised the work of UW–Madison graduate students Kim Bauer, a PhD candidate in anthropology; Megan E. Fox, PhD candidate in English; and Bridget McMahon and Bonnie Steward, both master’s students in library and information studies.

As of mid-September, the digital archive contained material covering the museum’s first 24 years of exhibition history. This includes thousands of digitized 35mm slides and paper records documenting gallery spaces, promotional materials, museum events, curatorial practice, and educational activities. The graduate students also meticulously described all physical materials in a finding aid. Once the finding aid is published, all exhibition records will be publicly discoverable in their physical format, regardless of their inclusion in UW Digitized Collections.

Another key aspect of the team’s work is preserving the Chazen’s collection of videos, many stored on vintage videocassettes, which are at a high risk of deterioration. Craig prioritized preserving interviews with and presentations by artists of color, including artists Gronk and Xu Bing, and Freida High Tesfagiorgis, an artist, art historian, and UW–Madison professor emerita of African American studies. It’s hoped that such digitized media eventually will be incorporated into the Chazen’s digital collection.

Housing the Chazen’s archives within the UW–Libraries system yields more benefit besides greatly expanded access. Craig said archived files in the Digital Preservation Repository will be systematically monitored for obsolescence and file deterioration, a phenomenon known as “bit rot.” When implemented, the repository will update and restore any problematic files.

Archives staff are also working on adding thousands of high-resolution images of the museum’s permanent collection artworks, which haven’t been easily accessible to the public until now. High-resolution images that are out of copyright will be accessible to the general public; images that are still in copyright will be accessible only to UW affiliates for teaching and research purposes. The ultimate goal is to include high-resolution images of the museum’s entire permanent collection.

“To make our entire collection of more than 24,000 works accessible through the website, from UW faculty and students to those around the globe, with just a few clicks, truly embodies the Wisconsin Idea,” Selbig said. “To take these works out of the vault and share them with the world has been a priority of mine for the past 22 years.”

For more information about this project, see Coordinating Cultural Heritage Collections at UW-Madison.

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“Israhel van Meckenem was the first printmaker to experiment with using his name as a brand or a trademark,” said exhibition curator James Wehn, the Chazen’s Van Vleck curator of works on paper. “Art of Enterprise presents a new opportunity to look at Israhel van Meckenem as not only a printmaker but an entrepreneur during a time when there was no concept of copyright or legal protections for intellectual capital like we have today. The works on view illuminate how longstanding copy culture collided with the new ability to replicate an image through printmaking and, as a result, prompted emerging concepts of authenticity and authorship.”

The exhibition explores the business of printmaking in the late 15th century, focusing on Israhel’s operation of a productive workshop during the initial rise of printed text and images in Europe. The engravings in the exhibition highlight Israhel’s primary audiences and the ways they used engravings. The exhibition will also explore his strategic use of materials like paper and copper, as well as the development of new products, including intricate ornamental designs, engraved indulgences, scenes of everyday life and the earliest printed self-portrait.

Regarded by some as more of an editor or publisher than an artist, many of Israhel’s prints are direct copies of works that were already in the marketplace. Except for minor changes, such as the repositioning of a limb or adjustments to small details in the background, Israhel produced works nearly identical to images by other artists and signed his name to the work.

Art of Enterprise will include engravings Saint Peter and Saint John that were unknown to print historians until recently and are new to the Chazen’s permanent collection. Joined by Saint Judas Thaddeus from the same series of apostles likely produced around 1470, they will appear alongside source material by Master E.S. on loan from The Albertina Museum in Vienna. Placing the works together will encourage close looking as visitors discover slight differences between Israhel’s depictions and Master E.S.’s work.

In contrast to the 21st-century practice of putting prints in frames for display, many of Israhel’s works were distributed throughout Europe and used in manuscripts, often of devotional nature. Album with Twelve Engravings of The Passion, a woodcut of Christ as the Man of Sorrows, and a metalcut of St. Jerome in Penitence, on loan to the Chazen from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presents an example of Israhel’s Passion series in a bound prayerbook.

“In the late 15th century, when Israhel was copying existing images, the value was in the labor and the materials and not in the image. Today, we face similar questions about authorship and the value of intellectual capital with AI technology. Art of Enterprise will present Israhel van Meckenem’s work and encourage visitors to consider concepts of originality that were called into question then and remain relevant in today’s digital world,” Wehn said.

Art of Enterprise: Israhel van Meckenem’s 15th-Century Print Workshop is organized by the Chazen Museum of Art. The exhibition includes approximately 10 works from the Chazen’s collection and loans from nine other institutions, including The Albertina Museum (Vienna, Austria); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, New York); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and The National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.).

Generous support for the Art of Enterprise: Israhel van Meckenem’s 15th-Century Print Workshop comes from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. The Kress Foundation devotes its resources to advancing the study, preservation and enjoyment of European art, architecture and archaeology from antiquity to the early 19th century.

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MADISON, Wisconsin – The Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison will unveil more than 40 recent additions to its permanent holdings in Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection, on view Sept. 5–Dec. 23, 2023. The works produced between 2011 and 2022 offer depictions of past and present life in Africa and invite visitors to reflect on their lives, relationships and the 21st-century world.

The exhibition features 24 artists that span the continent, from Tunisia and Egypt to Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Mozambique and South Africa. Senegal, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Tanzania are also among the countries represented in the exhibition. The works came to the Chazen as part of the Contemporary African Art Initiative, a five-year project that built upon several contemporary African artworks the Chazen collected in the late 1990s. Many of the recent acquisitions were made possible by a generous gift from the Straus Family Foundation.

“The Chazen Museum of Art is committed to presenting global perspectives. The Contemporary African Art Initiative has been transformative for the Museum, bringing more diversity to the largely Eurocentric collection. We are grateful for the generous contributions from the Straus Family Foundation that help the Chazen present stories that encompass African culture and enhance relationships with artists and organizations in Africa. The project also bolsters UW–Madison’s academic exchange with the continent,” said Amy Gilman, the Chazen’s director.

Both the exhibition and accompanying publication are organized into three sections. The Body in Society section focuses on how people interact with one another and the world around them. The works explore a range of themes including individual and collective identity, politics and religious and social ideologies. Leilah Babirye (b. 1985, Uganda) places homosexuality at the intersection of precolonial, colonial and postcolonial power structures with Namuleme from the Kuchu Mbogo (Buffalo) Clan (2022). The ceramic bust emphasizes the need for belonging for queer people and addresses life in a place where anti-homosexuality laws that date to 1950 remain in force today.

The Artist is Present section features creators who use their bodies in performance, sculpture, photography, painting and animation to communicate personal and cultural histories. Mary Sibande (b. 1982, South Africa) used a mold of her own body to cast Sower in the Field (2015), a life-size bronze inspired by the experiences Black people faced during apartheid. With restricted access to education and limited job opportunities, women of that era pursued domestic work. The seeds sown in this work offer a symbolic nod to the future. The sculpture’s title alludes to a biblical parable in which a farmer scatters seed on both fertile ground and in areas where the seed will not yield a crop or will be eaten by birds. As the farmer in the story controls the seed’s destiny, Sibande’s bronze represents one’s power to determine their future.

Artists featured in The Absent Body theme use inanimate objects to suggest the human figure. Barthélémy Toguo (b. 1967, Cameroon) explores the African migrant and refugee crisis in Exodus (2019). A vintage Raleigh Sprite 27 bike serves as the focal point of the work. A wooden cart attached to the bike is loaded with goods wrapped in wax-print fabrics that are popular in West and Central Africa. The title references the Bible’s book of Exodus in which the Israelites are delivered from slavery in Egypt to the promised land.

Gonçalo Mabunda (b. 1975, Mozambique) presents a daunting throne studded with bullets in Throne of Languages (2019). Deactivated and spent warheads, AK-47 magazines and other materials comprise the work and serve as a reminder of the weapons used during Mozambique’s pursuit of liberation and the civil war that followed. Three years after that civil war ended, the Christian Council of Mozambique invited Mabunda and nine other artists to repurpose weapons and other materials.
“Insistent Presence offers a digest of African culture that invites viewers to experience life over many decades across the vast continent,” said Margaret Nagawa, the exhibition’s guest curator. “Each work in the exhibition provides a lens through which the viewer can gain insight into the social, political and religious context in the region. As the artists use the human figure to chronicle decolonization, restitution and other eras of African history, visitors will consider the role of the body in colonialism, humanism and modernity.”

Nagawa is a Ugandan artist and curator with expertise in African art and the relationships between visual, literary and performance art. She is pursuing doctoral studies in art history at Emory University and holds a master’s degree in curating from Goldsmiths, University of London and a bachelor’s degree from the Margaret Trowell School of Industrial and Fine Arts at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, where she studied painting and sculpture. She taught classes and curated several exhibitions at the Makerere University Art Gallery and lead several collaborative artist initiatives in Uganda.

Nagawa found inspiration for the exhibition title in Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s book Contemporary African Art Since 1980. The renowned African scholars assert that artists persistently depict the human figure when expressing Africa’s humanism and modernity. The artists in Insistent Presence use their practice to reclaim the body as an expression of political views, aesthetic experimentation and everyday disappointments and triumphs.

Insistent Presence: Contemporary African Art from the Chazen Collection is organized by the Chazen Museum of Art and will include a catalog that addresses the works’ relationship to the Chazen’s collecting strategy, details each section of the exhibition, features reproductions of the works on view and more. The catalog will also introduce Sara Guyer and Scott Straus, the donors of the collecting initiative.

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Lifting the Veil by Sanford Biggers

The new sculpture, which mirrors Ball’s work in size and medium, debuted May 4 at the Chazen Museum of Art as part of re:mancipation, a multi-year project that includes a documentary, a national symposium series, supporting research, archival material, educational resources and an exhibition on view at the Chazen through June 25. The title is intentionally lowercase to address the hierarchies that capitalization can reinforce in our culture.

“Lifting the Veil asserts the wisdom, power and foresight of Frederick Douglass, an African American pillar of our history, and gives the Chazen Museum of Art the privilege of recontextualizing a challenging work that reflects our American past and, in many ways, addresses today’s social and racial injustices,” said Amy Gilman, the Chazen Museum of Art’s director. “The murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the subsequent removal of monuments across the country, including Thomas Ball’s Emancipation Memorial in Boston, triggered a heightened sense of urgency for us to address Emancipation Group’s place in our collection and the Museum’s role in confronting contentious works on view.”

Lifting the Veil at right, contrasted with Emancipation Group, center and a Wide Awake Cape at left.

Ball’s marble sculpture in the Chazen’s collection was a study for Emancipation Memorial (1875), the bronze monument erected in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park. At the sculpture’s dedication in 1876, Douglass expressed disappointment in the partial truth it portrayed. In creating an object to mark the end of slavery in the United States, Douglass believed Ball failed to acknowledge enslaved people who protested, escaped and went to other active lengths in the quest for freedom. “The negro here, though rising, is still on his knees and nude,” Douglass said of Ball’s monument. “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”

In Biggers’ Lifting the Veil, Douglass stands above a seated, pensive Lincoln holding an antique red, white and blue quilt in his hand that he has lifted from Lincoln’s eyes. Biggers found inspiration for the name of his new work in Charles Keck’s Lifting the Veil of Ignorance. The 1922 monument on the campus of Tuskegee University depicts Booker T. Washington lifting the veil of ignorance from an enslaved man and is a tribute to Washington’s important work of using education and agriculture to introduce African Americans to a better life.

“In Lifting the Veil, history and dialogue are my primary media. I combined my encounter with Emancipation Group in 2019 with the conversations that have been circulating around monuments to create a new work that hybridizes Charles Keck’s depiction of Booker T. Washington and Thomas Ball’s sculpture,” explained Biggers. “Lifting the Veil serves as an artistic intervention in which we have examined a museum’s collection, acknowledged the complicated histories behind some works and proposed a pedagogical and object-based intervention to illuminate innovative ways of interpreting works on view.”

Camille Friend, Academy Award-nominated hair designer consulted on the fabrication of Lifting the Veil.

Fabrication for Lifting the Veil, which took place at Quarra Stone Company in Madison, Wisconsin, included input from Oscar-nominated hairstylist Camille Friend. As fabricators refined Douglass’ hair, she provided guidance about his hair type based on an array of historic images, ensuring that Biggers’ sculpture accurately reflects Douglass’ texture and curl pattern. “So often, American white men look at Italian sculptures and replicate that style as they depict African Americans. This is apparent in Thomas Ball’s sculpture as well as Chris Keck’s representation of Booker T. Washington,” said Biggers. “Hair is an important part of African and African American culture and one of Frederick Douglass’ most recognizable traits. It was important to me to veer away from neoclassical styles and enlist the counsel of someone who specializes in hair to perfect such an important element of the work.”

The debut of Lifting the Veil marks an important milestone in re:mancipation, a partnership between Biggers, the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the MASK Consortium, as the Chazen continues to consider new ways of display and interpretation. Using objects in the permanent collection to work through complex ideas and collaborating with artists in all media has been one of the institution’s primary approaches to advancing that goal. The re:mancipation project is the most significant realization of this type of work to date. Divided into four thematic sections, the re:mancipationexhibition at the Chazen highlights the collaborative process of the project and encourages visitors to participate in the conversation.

re:mancipation has been supported through a grant from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Education Association, the Brittingham Wisconsin Trust, UW–Madison’s Office of the Chancellor and members of the Milwaukee arts community, including the African American Network, African American Leadership Alliance Milwaukee, America’s Black Holocaust Museum and others.

About the Artists
Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including Morehouse College’s Bennie Trailblazer Award (2023), Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s MLK Visiting Scholar and Professor (2022), the 26th Heinz Award for the Arts (2021), Savannah College of Art and Design’s deFINE Art Award (2021), John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), New York Foundation for the Arts Hall of Fame (2019), and the American Academy in Rome’s Rome Prize in Visual Arts (2017). He has had solo exhibitions at the Speed Art Museum (2022), California African American Museum (2021), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2020), Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others.

MASK Consortium is a coalition of museums and educational institutions sharing knowledge. Its mission is to develop and promote a more complete understanding of human history and culture through the digital preservation of art and other cultural artifacts via 3D, 360-degree, VR capture. MASK develops curricula and programming for events, conferences and symposia around said works of art. Moreover, they work to create strategic partnerships with museums, universities, state and local government, as well as corporations and individuals who share their goal of fostering connection and expanding knowledge through the preservation and exhibition of art.

About the Chazen Museum of Art
The Chazen Museum of Art makes its home between two lakes on the beautiful campus of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Within walking distance of the state capitol, it sits squarely in the heart of a vibrant college town. The Chazen’s expansive, two-building site holds the second-largest collection of art in Wisconsin, and at 166,000 square feet, is the largest collecting museum in the Big 10. The collection of approximately 24,000 works of art covers diverse historical periods, cultures and geographic locations, from ancient Greece, Western Europe and the Soviet Empire to Moghul India, 18th-century Japan and modern Africa. For more information: chazen.wisc.edu

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Carolyn Herrera-Perez, curator of glass and ceramics

“Carolyn Herrera-Perez brings a commitment to accessibility and mentorship that pairs well with the Chazen Museum of Art’s mission to serve as a rich cultural resource for students at UW–Madison and everyone in the surrounding community,” said Amy Gilman, the Chazen’s director. “As the Museum continues to focus on collecting with attention to diversity and inclusion, we eagerly anticipate the acquisitions, special exhibitions and other programs that will result from Carolyn’s work.”

In this inaugural role, Herrera-Perez will oversee the museum’s holdings of contemporary and historic art glass and ceramics, expand the collection, assist in conservation planning, and guide the museum’s student employees. Her priorities will also include assessing the museum’s recent acquisition of nineteenthth-century mold-made British ceramics. The bequest from the late Frank Horlbeck will make the Chazen one of the top American institutions for studying the material. Many of Herrera-Perez’s efforts will consider UW–Madison’s history with a particular focus on the studio glass movement, of which the University’s former ceramics professor Harvey K. Littleton was the co-founder.

“Connecting people through craft and sharing underrepresented narratives are at the core of my work. This inaugural role at the Chazen will allow me to pursue that goal further. I look forward to delving into the Chazen’s permanent collection and collaborating with the local community to devise ways to best share the Museum’s collection of glass and ceramics with the students at UW–Madison and the public, ensuring that everyone feels welcome,” said Herrera-Perez.

Herrera-Perez’s research has been published in Material Intelligence, Studio Potter, and the exhibition catalog for Peters Valley: Present. She holds bachelor’s degrees in art history and art studio from The State University of New York at Potsdam and is a master’s degree candidate in the history of design and curatorial studies program at the Parsons and Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

The Chazen’s permanent collection of glass and ceramics spans many cultures and time periods. Highlights include American contemporary and studio glass, contemporary figurative ceramics, contemporary ceramics by Japanese artists, more than one hundred pieces of Lalique glass, Chinese export porcelain and Austrian glass from the early twentiethth century.

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MADISON, Wis. – A partially-clothed freedman kneels before an impeccably dressed Abraham Lincoln, who “heroically” breaks the chains of slavery with one outstretched hand while clasping the Emancipation Proclamation in the other. The scene is depicted in Thomas Ball’s 1873 Emancipation Group, a marble sculpture that serves as a study of Emancipation Memorial, Ball’s bronze monument erected in Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Park. Ball’s sculpture at the Chazen Museum of Art could easily stand on a tabletop and occupies little physical space in the gallery. However, the political, cultural and emotional significance of the work stretches far beyond its physical size.

Emancipation Group by Thomas Ball

A re-imagined Emancipation Group, 3D printed.

re:mancipation, a multi-year project led by the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, visual artist Sanford Biggers and the MASK Consortium, dissects the history of the sculpture; confronts its place in the Museum’s collection; and includes a new artwork by Biggers, a documentary, in-person and virtual exhibitions, an extensive national symposium series, supporting research, archival material and educational resources. A major public milestone of the project is an exhibition premiering at the Chazen Feb. 6-June 25, 2023. The project’s title is lowercased intentionally to address the hierarchies that capitalization can reinforce in our culture.

“It’s an incredible opportunity that we have here at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to really look at how we will move forward when dealing with contentious, challenging, problematic works from our American past and even our American present,” said Biggers. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to shut any of those conversations down. It’s better actually to allow them to be fertile and productive, constructive conversations as opposed to shouting matches—literally and metaphorically. I think artwork is a way to do that and have maybe a more eloquent conversation regarding some of those pasts.”

The Chazen is committed to considering new ways of display and interpretation. Using objects in the permanent collection to work through complex ideas and collaborating with artists in all media has been one of the institution’s primary approaches to advancing that goal. The re:mancipation project is the most significant realization of this type of work to date.

“We believe in the power of art to inform, enlighten and explore our shared history,” said Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen. “The sculpture is a difficult and problematic depiction of racial hierarchy in America, and we are taking it on. Contemporary artists, campus colleagues and community stakeholders are working together to respond to it and better understand its meaning to our culture and country. I hope it is only the start of this conversation.”

Divided into four thematic sections, the re:mancipation exhibition at the Chazen highlights the collaborative process of the project and encourages visitors to participate in the conversation. The first two sections provide a timeline of events and objects from 2500 BCE to the time when Emancipation Group was created. The rich historical context invites the viewer to deepen their understanding of cultural references and iconography, exploring both the intended and unintended meanings of the sculpture.

The next sections feature artistic responses in direct dialogue with the traditional gallery space Emancipation Group has occupied for many years. Offering counterpoints to the conventional installation, this includes newly created works; objects from the Chazen’s collections; sculptures by Biggers, including The Ascendant (2020); paintings on loan, such as Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Carrie Mae Weems from the series Tricksters; and images documenting the last two years of artistic responses in the Museum.

Biggers’s re-imagined Dusk and Dawn are printed in 3-D

DJ Rich Medina works on a musical response to Emancipation Group.

In the final gallery space, video footage of artists, students, faculty and community members responding to Emancipation Group dominates the back wall of the space, bringing to life this rich dialogue. Music created in response and as part of this project comprises the soundtrack to this footage. Included in the video are jazz musician Keyon Harrold; pre-eminent hip hop lyricist Pharoahe Monch; artist Wildcat Ebony Brown; dance faculty member Chris Walker; students from UW–Madison’s First Wave Program; Ph.D. candidate Quanda Johnson; and Robert “Bert” Davis, Ph.D. and Chantel McKenzie from America’s Black Holocaust Museum in Milwaukee, among many others. Additionally, an audio production of the play Necessary Sacrifices is installed near the new Biggers work. The production, written by Richard Hellesen, brings a “conversation” between Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln to life and invites viewers to immerse themselves in the words and voices of two of the most prominent figures of the age. Necessary Sacrifices stars Baron Kelly, a theatre professor at UW–Madison, and Norman Gilliland, a producer on Wisconsin Public Radio. The production is directed by Russell Vandenbroucke. Listen to the performance here.

The centerpiece of the final gallery will be Biggers’ highly anticipated new work created specifically for this project. Lifting the Veil will go on view in late spring and features a standing Frederick Douglass “lifting the veil” of ignorance from a seated Lincoln. Taking inspiration from historical monuments by Charles Keck and more recent Frederick Douglass memorials, Biggers’ work also incorporates a veil made from patchwork quilts. Before the work’s arrival in the gallery, visitors will get snapshots into Biggers’ artistic practice and have the chance to follow his process through interactive models and progress updates. The work will be revealed in the gallery during a special event in May.

“re:mancipation started as a conversation with Biggers about a possible ‘counter monument.’ The project scope has grown tremendously. It is fitting that the final visual response returns to that originating concept,” Gilman said.

At the conclusion of the exhibition, visitors are invited to write, draw, question and comment as part of a collective response that will be incorporated into the gallery wall. Additional opportunities to explore research, original sources and 3D printed elements offer an expanded interpretation of the process as the project continues to develop.

Gilman said the Chazen recognizes the often complex and difficult past associated with works such as Emancipation Group. The Ball work presents Black freedom as an act of white power given to a figure who remains on the ground and is unable to free himself. That characterization was part of the impetus behind the project to “better illuminate and understand” historical works in the collection.

“These conversations are about both understanding and changing the world we live in,” Gilman said. “We imagine people leaving an engagement with this project empowered to examine and think about the symbolism and context of any work of art. We hope this will spark a conversation about systemic and structural racism, history and representation that reaches well beyond the confines of this museum and this exhibition moment.”

This project has been supported through a grant from the Mellon Foundation with additional support from the National Education Association, the Brittingham Wisconsin Trust, UW–Madison’s Office of the Chancellor and members of the Milwaukee arts community, including the African American Network, African American Leadership Alliance Milwaukee, America’s Black Holocaust Museum and others.

About the Artists
Sanford Biggers’ work is an interplay of narrative, perspective and history that speaks to current social, political and economic happenings while also examining the contexts that bore them. Biggers (b. 1970) was raised in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York City. He was awarded the 2017 Rome Prize in Visual Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (2018), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2016), the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (2012) and the Brooklyn Museum (2011), among others.

MASK Consortium is a coalition of museums and educational institutions sharing knowledge. Its mission is to develop and promote a more complete understanding of human history and culture through the digital preservation of art and other cultural artifacts via 3D, 360-degree, VR capture. MASK develops curricula and programming for events, conferences and symposia around said works of art. Moreover, they work to create strategic partnerships with museums, universities, state and local government, as well as corporations and individuals who share their goal of fostering connection and expanding knowledge through the preservation and exhibition of art.

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MADISON, Wis. – The Chazen Museum of Art has named Mieke Miller as its inaugural academic coordinator. In this newly created position, Miller will facilitate access to the Chazen’s Objects Study Room and Prints and Drawings Study Room. Both spaces welcome classes, visiting groups, researchers, artists, and community members for an up-close look at works not on view in the galleries. Miller will also catalog artworks, field reproduction requests, process digital images of artwork, provide tours, and work closely with faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

“The Chazen endeavors to support the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s teaching, research and public service mission, and Miller’s work will advance that goal,” said Katherine Alcauskas, the Chazen’s chief curator. “As the academic coordinator, she will help identify relevant artworks in the Chazen’s permanent collection to enhance the University’s teaching and learning mission that extends to the classroom and out into the community. Her broad knowledge of art history and passion for making art available to everyone pairs well with our aim to help students and the public make greater connections with the works in the Museum’s permanent collection.”

Miller brings a wealth of experience to the role. Before joining the Chazen’s team, she was the assistant registrar at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, Wis.). She has also served as a collections and gallery assistant at Wriston Art Galleries (Appleton, Wis.) and a project curator for the Milton College Preservation Society (Milton, Wis.). While completing graduate studies in Scotland, Miller served as an art and design intern at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. She started her museum career as a collections assistant at the Wright Museum of Art (Beloit, Wis.).

“I strongly believe in promoting access to collections through direct engagement with objects. I look forward to serving the Chazen’s visitors and the students at UW–Madison,” Miller said. “I am especially passionate about works on paper and collaborating with others to use art to make interdisciplinary connections. The chance to work with curators, faculty, community members, and the Chazen’s education staff to illuminate the artists and themes represented in the Chazen’s collection is a remarkable opportunity.”

The Chazen’s permanent collection includes 24,000 works. Approximately 60 percent of the collection consists of works on paper. The Prints and Drawings Study Room allows visitors greater access to the Museum’s works on paper. The Objects Study Room is dedicated to three-dimensional art.

Miller holds a master’s degree in the history of art from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and a bachelor’s degree in art history from Beloit College in Wisconsin. She joined the Chazen’s team on Oct. 24.

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