Vaughn Spann: Lineage
August 24 – December 05, 2021
VAUGHN SPANN: LINEAGE is the first museum exhibition to focus exclusively on the artist’s abstract paintings, including examples from his ongoing series of Xs, Rainbows, Dalmatians, and Flags. He refuses to restrict himself to one visual language – abstraction or figuration – and prefers instead to give himself the freedom to flex in either direction, often both at once. Spann often speaks about his refusal to “choose one conversation:” “I wanted to tap into a lineage of making. . . a lineage that represented my heritage not just ethnically but materially.” He is mindful of the interrelatedness of his formal and conceptual concerns, and this reciprocal process is one of unifying elements of his practice.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age
January 18 – March 27, 2022
Published on the occasion of the art exhibition Screen Time: Photography and Video Art in the Internet Age, this catalog features a selection of leading international artists who engage with and critique the role of media in contemporary society. Their work demonstrates what has become known as post-internet artistic practices—art that may or may not be made for the internet but nevertheless acknowledges online culture as an omnipresent influence, inseparable from contemporary social conditions. They ask what it means to be a photographer when everyone is an Instagram influencer; what it means to make video art when everyone is a TikTok video star; and how to deliver meaningful social commentary in the age of the meme. The exhibition and accompanying catalog showcase artwork by N. Dash, Nathalie Djurberg, Marcel Dzama, Peter Funch, Cyrus Kabiru, William Kentridge, Christian Marclay, Marilyn Minter, Vik Muniz, Otobong Nkanga, Erwin Olaf, Robin Rhode, Vee Speers, Mary Sue, Puck Verkade, Huang Yan.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Barro Mestiza Solo Exhibition
Barro Mestiza is the first solo exhibition of the Nicaraguan artist ELYLA. The work shown in this catalog was produced during their artistic residency as an Artist Protection Fund Fellow (APF-IIE) at Bucknell University, with support from the Ekard Artist Residency, the Samek Art Museum, and the Department of Art and Art History.
This show calls on us to reflect that hidden in our memories, lies the joy of being a kind disruption to that which holds everything. Just as Elyla calls it, Clave cochona is about more than a bet on a fictitious reality, it is about the possibility of a true cochón present. Just as Arundhati Roy once noted, “other worlds are not just possible, they are indeed on the way, and we can already hear them breathing.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Guerrilla Girls: Art of Behaving Badly
October 15 – December 8, 2019
Guerrilla Girls: The Art of Behaving Badly is the first book to catalog the entire career of the Guerrilla Girls from 1985 to the present. The Guerrilla Girls are a collective of political feminist artists who expose discrimination and corruption in art, film, politics, and pop culture all around the world.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Richard Misrach and Guillermo Galindo: Border Cantos
January 18 – March 24, 2019
Border Cantos | Sonic Border is a collaboration between American photographer Richard Misrach and Mexican American artist and composer Guillermo Galindo. Together, they explore the complexities of the US-Mexico border through photography, sculpture, and sound, inviting us to bridge boundaries and initiate conversations.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Mystic Detectives
October 16 – December 2, 2018
The Samek Art Museum exhibition Mystic Detectives surveys the influences and echoes of Surrealism in contemporary art and is presented in concert with “SURREALISMS: the Inaugural Conference of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism” hosted at Bucknell University. Historical Surrealism is often remembered for outlandish images and visual puns, but it also attempted to levy a serious social critique. Melding the ideas of Marx and Freud, Surrealists saw reason and order as means of bourgeois social control that must be overthrown. They embraced the irrational and emotive as potential pathways to pure imagination and social liberation.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
1%: Privilege in a Time of Global Inequality
January 16 – March 11, 2018
This exhibition brings together 30 renowned photographers from around the world to address the wicked problem of economic inequality. Their images shine a light onto what is often unseen–the lives of the wealthiest 1% of the world–and gave visual form to this timely topic.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Laleh Mehran
August 8 – December 3, 2017
Drawing on the visual languages of Middle-Eastern and European cultures, artist Laleh Mehran creates a room-sized immersive and interactive multimedia installation. This installation invites viewers to consider the process in which we form our identities, ideologies, and allegiances and the rituals we perform to sustain them.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
The Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative
March 7 – June 4, 2017
Engineers borrow designs from nature in a process called biomimicry. The Reciprocal Biomimicry Initiative by artist Jonathon Keats is an attempt to return the favor, providing nature with the benefits of human technology and humorously addressing our relationship with the natural world.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Tomorrow Never Happens: Art and Queer Futurity
August 30 – December 4, 2016
This exhibition catalog explores queer futurity and the aesthetics of utopia.
From marriage equality, to “bathroom bills,” to the massacre in Orlando, queerness is central to current social and political life. Current events can mire us in an unrelenting present that makes it hard to imagine a path beyond.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Collect Call
March 22 – June 5, 2016
The first in a new series of projects that invite artists to engage the Samek Art Museum’s collection, Collect Call features new work by Marisa Olson in conversation with works from the collection about what we cherish and what we forget.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Masterworks on Paper
Prints and Photographs from the Samek Art Museum
catalog available for purchase here.
Salthouse
January 19 – March 20, 2016
Presenting 13 recent photographs of central PA artist, Stephen Althouse. Althouse was raised Quaker and his large-scale, lushly printed photographs depict Amish tools, Medieval armor, and implements of country living that foreground the aesthetics of use and material memory.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
R. Luke DuBois: Portraits & Landscapes
August 18 – December 6, 2015
DuBois handles data like origami – transforming 19 million online dating profiles into an atlas of American love, every U.S. president’s state of the union address into a linguistic eye chart, and recording a version of the star spangled banner that takes four years to play.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Country Living
September 30-December 7, 2014
This exhibition taps into the ongoing conversation between the art world and rural America and looks at country as a cultural aesthetic that flows between contemporary art and regional culture. Country Living explores how place, identity, and values are communicated in visual culture.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
Dusk To Dusk
August 20- November 19, 2012
These thirty-two works by artists including Louise Bourgeois, Huma Bhabha, Salvador Dali, Yang Shaobin, and Gilbert & George present the world through a darker lens. Unsettling visions of personal isolation, political repression, and collective mania are presented through painting, photography, sculpture, and video and the anxious beauty of the works offers strange comfort in the face of the dark. This phantasmagoria of objects and images departs in the general direction of abject, uncanny, and gothic art, but soon breaks up in diverse directions.
Full catalog available for purchase here.
The Sandy & John Nesbitt Collection: The Discriminating Eye at Work
January 27 – March 29, 2012
The works on display range from the years around 1500 to the late twentieth century, from the early German printmakers Master MZ and Albrecht Dürer to the Surrealist Joan Mirò and the American realist artist Fairfield Porter. The earliest examples document the beginnings of the medium in early Renaissance Germany, while the latest examples were created only about forty years ago. The greatest masters and most skilled innovators in printmaking, such as Dürer and Rembrandt, are well represented by important works. Conversely, some artists who are not at all known for their prints are included, such as Cézanne and Morisot.
– Christiane Andersson, Guest-Curator
Full catalog available for purchase here.
