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About:
Slow Looking is taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance, revealing new insights and deeper complexity. We invite you to immerse yourself in this cornucopia of 165 artworks from William Blake to Pablo Picasso — a recent gift from Bucknell alum Stuart Coyne — and to see for yourself.
Sonia Delaunay, Untitled (from Les Illuminations), 1973
Related Events:
Slow Looking Soirée
Thursday, September 19, 7 p.m.
Campus, Top floor, Elaine Langone Center
Celebrate the museum’s fall exhibition, Slow Looking. This extraordinary collection took Bucknell alum Stuart Coyne over 50 years to cultivate. Each piece in this collection is a testament to Coyne’s unique tastes, interests, and values. Enjoy refreshments as you observe the scope of artwork in the museum’s newly acquired collection.
Curatorial Text:
Slow looking
People are good at quickly skimming information from road signs and ads to short-format Tik Tok videos; see it, register it, and move on. It’s a tactic required for navigating the modern world. Slow looking is the opposite skill; taking the time to carefully observe more than meets the eye at first glance.
Slow Looking:
* Requires direct observation of original objects because it attempts to reveal details or aspects that have escaped previous description and reproduction.
* Promotes empathy by encouraging the looker to remain open to the expressions and perspectives of others through art before imposing one’s self through opinion or evaluation.
* Can be a meditative retreat from the toxic chaos of world news but also offers ways to re-engage thoughtfully by looking for nuance and complexity in the world.
* Resists consumer culture and spectacle society and provides an alternative method for many fields from Slow Food to Slow Journalism.
You can practice Slow Looking anywhere but a dedicated space with intriguing objects can help…
….Enter Stuart Coyne ’48, Bucknell alum who avidly collected the artworks in this exhibition, recently bequeathing them to the Samek Art Museum. Coyne practiced the ultimate Slow Looking living with his art over the years seeing deeper layers in each work by Man Ray or Sonia Delaunay and creating new connections among them as he arranged them in his San Francisco apartment.
Coyne had a highly personal relationship with his artworks; when he had to remove and sell a Miró print to pay his bills, he left the space on the wall blank in silent homage. We have tried to re-create the intimate feeling of Coyne’s life with his art; reproducing his original art groupings and domestic environment. The handwritten note cards and bills of sale reveal an attentive archivist. The music is that which he enjoyed while looking at his art.
The Samek Art Museum invites you to celebrate a lifetime of Slow Looking and to see for yourself.
Installation Images:
