The of the Ģ����ý is pleased to announce the reappointment of Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director Jonathan Binstock for another five-year term. Binstock became the seventh director of the Memorial Art Gallery of the Ģ����ý in September 2014. Since then, he has led an expansion of the museum’s permanent collection, special exhibition program, public engagement and outreach efforts, and its annual operating budget.

“I am very pleased that Jonathan Binstock has been reappointed director of the Memorial Art Gallery,” said Ģ����ý president Richard Feldman. “His commitment to the museum as a community asset and his dedication to artistic innovation have expanded MAG’s collection and enhanced its work with the rest of the University. I’m confident that under his continued direction, MAG will explore new and exciting ways to build community and enrich lives through the direct experience of art.”

Reflecting Feldman’s sentiments, Vice Provost of Academic Affairs Joan Saab continued, “In his first term as director, Jonathan Binstock has brought tremendous energy to the MAG. His innovative programming and art acquisition projects have introduced new audiences to the museum and strengthened ties to the University, the broader Rochester community, and beyond.”

“It is an exciting time to be leading the Memorial Art Gallery,” Binstock added, “and I am having the time of my life. Our collections and programs are expanding, and we are connecting with more and a greater variety of people in the Rochester region and beyond.” Binstock continued, “I am grateful to be working with an incredible team that, for years now, has been consistently reaching new heights in the quality and significance of its work. I am also grateful to have the support of about 1,000 truly dedicated volunteers, including a generous and passionate Board leadership, who understands how important a strong, ambitious, and fun educational arts program is to the vitality of a community.”

During his tenure, new scholarship and exhibition catalogs have accompanied MAG-originated exhibitions such as Isaac Julien’s and , the latter traveling to museums nationally. Important paintings and sculptures by artists such as George Condo, Beauford Delaney, Monir Farmanfarmaian, Hung Liu, Mickalene Thomas, and Grayson Perry have been added to MAG’s permanent collection. Binstock created the position of consulting senior curator of media art for the renowned John G. Hanhardt, who has introduced the art of the moving image into the museum’s permanent collection and exhibition program. Major acquisitions include Bill Viola’s complete series of Martyrs, a late Nam June Paik Bakelite Robot, and video installations by Charles Atlas and Sondra Perry.

Binstock is successfully leading an effort to make the museum more accessible and to engage new audiences, including millennials and underserved populations. MAG’s popular and programming, for example, are introducing the museum to new generations and demographics of visitors, and helping to diversify its membership with free family memberships for those who take advantage of the MAGconnect program. MAG’s Expanding Learning Collaboration with Rochester City School District brings about 475 students to MAG on weekly visits over a 10-week period, helping to improve educational and behavioral outcomes for these elementary students and to positively affect the culture of their schools.

Before coming to Rochester, Binstock was senior vice president for modern and contemporary art in the Art Advisory & Finance group of Citi Private Bank. At Citi, he worked with clients and their families in the United States and abroad to build personal art collections, and assessed the quality and value of artworks in the Bank’s art lending program. He joined Citi after more than a decade of curatorial work in museums. An expert in art of the post-WWII era, he was curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and assistant curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

Binstock earned a master’s degree and PhD in art history from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and has taught art history at the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania. He lectures regularly in graduate seminars on art and cultural criticism at Columbia University. In July 2015 Binstock completed a residency at the Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

He is the author and/or curator of, among other books and exhibitions, Meleko Mokgosi: Pax Kaffraria, published by the Hammer Museum, UCLA (2014); Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective (2005); the 47th (2002) and 48th (2005) Corcoran Biennials; Andy Warhol: Social Observer (2000), and two exhibitions devoted to the late and influential artist Jeremy Blake (2000 and 2007). Most recently he was the co-curator with Josef Helfenstein of The Music of Color. Sam Gilliam, 1967–73, a major exhibition that was on view at the Kunstmuseum Basel, June–September 2018, and simultaneously with the Art Basel art fair.

He is a peer reviewer for the US General Services Administration Percent-for-Art Art in Architecture Program; a scholarly consultant for the Visual Art Gallery of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture; and a member of the Association of Art Museum Directors, and of the Board of Trustees of the American Federation of Arts. He is also an executive champion for Sankofa, the Ģ����ý’s resource group for African American staff.

Clocks ticking, trains whistling, doors creaking, ropes whipping.

Those are the gripping sounds in Isaac Julien’s visionary 10-screen film installation a meditation on the life, words, and actions of the former slave, abolitionist leader, and internationally recognized statesman who made Rochester his home, his final resting place, and by his own account, the place where he accomplished his most important work.

Those sounds are equally as commanding as the images—or lack thereof. There are moments each screen is blank. Sometimes one image occupies them all, sometimes multiple images play at once.

The immersive montage technique “is an aggregate form of storytelling, not a linear form of storytelling,” Julien says from his home in the United Kingdom. “I try not to treat audiences in a patronizing manner. I think they enjoy putting things together.”

Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass, on view through May 12 at the is the second exhibition in MAG’s “Reflections on Place” series of media art commissions informed by the history, culture, and politics of the City of Rochester, New York. The work, also recently on view at the Metro Pictures Gallery in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, will next be shown in October at the Yale Center for British Art, and in summer 2020 at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

The installation is named after one of Douglass’s most important speeches, on slavery and human rights, and was created on 35mm black-and-white and color film using both analogue and digital technologies. It is a staging, according to the artist, of history seen through a contemporary lens, with actors portraying Douglass and other personalities of his time, including his wives and friend and suffragist leader Susan B. Anthony, another Rochesterian.

“There is no artist working today who makes such compelling and powerful statements about global forces shaping history and our world,” says project curator John Hanhardt, a renowned authority on the moving image.

Shown in a dark exhibition space, the panoramic Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass draws on others among Douglass’s best-known speeches, including “What to the Slave is the 4th of July?” and “Lecture on Pictures.”

In one montage, Douglass addresses his audience:

It is said that the best gifts are the most abused, this among the rest. Conscience itself is misdirected: shocked by delightful sounds, beautiful colors and graceful movements—but sleeps amid the ten thousand agonies of war and slavery.

His words are followed by a low buzz, then the sound of a whip cracking, rhythmically, as one screen after another flashes—and rests—on the same scene from a cotton field.

“Certain parts need an emphasis,” explains Julien. “They are devices to direct the spectator’s attention to certain sounds or images that feel important. There’s a kind of musical notation approach to the work.”

The work was filmed in multiple settings, including in Washington, D.C., where Douglass lived late in life and where he delivered Lessons of the Hour, his final speech; in Scotland, where Douglass was an active member of the “Send Back the Money” movement and where he delivered a number of anti-slavery speeches; and in London, inside the Royal Academy period rooms, where he also delivered lectures on his struggle for equality.

“This is the first time the spirit or ethos of Frederick Douglass has been brought to life through the moving image,” says Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of MAG. Referring to scenes of Douglass walking a black stallion through the meadows of Arthur’s Seat, an ancient volcano in Edinburgh, Binstock adds that the installation “evokes not only his life’s work, words, and actions but also his sense of self—who he dreamed of being had he not been born into the situation he was born into.”

Julien draws from paintings, historical footage, architecture, photography, performance and sound to construct poetic narratives of hybrid scenes. He came to prominence in the film world with his 1989 drama-documentary gaining a cult following with his exploration of author Langston Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance.

The work seeks to enthrall curious audiences who want to examine art in unconventional, forward-thinking ways.

“We live in a kind of multisensory experience to some extent,” says Julien. “There are screens everywhere. So how do we distinguish them? How do we communicate in an age where we’re overstimulated? All these questions are questions in my work.”

Read more

Museum launches Media Arts Watch project
Renowned curator John Hanhardt ’67 will lead an effort to build a collection featuring the aesthetics of film, video, and other technologies.

Dedicated in memory of a beloved son, the Memorial Art Gallery marked its centennial celebration in October 2013 as a community landmark and resource for the arts.

Tribute to Frederick Douglass in word and song
The sheet music of a rediscovered song honoring Frederick Douglass has a new home in River Campus Libraries, and the song was performed for the first time in a century at an event celebrating the bicentennial of his birth.

Though the doesn’t actively collect photography, its curatorial team has brought in a rare and powerful portfolio. which includes work by several giants in the history of modernism, reflects a concerted effort to use new imagery, materials, and techniques to portray the realities and hopes of modern societies—at a time, during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslavakia, when modern art was illegal.

The portfolio, on exhibit beginning December 13, features 10 works by masters such as Josef Sudek, known as the “Poet of Prague” for his atmospheric back-and-white portraits of his adopted home; and Jaromír Funke, who experimented with light and shadow in his highly composed and somewhat abstract still lifes.

“These artists were avant garde in the way they saw photographic pictures as opportunities to be formally adventuresome, to complicate how we see the world,” says Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the Memorial Art Gallery. Binstock recently donated the body of work, which had been a gift from his father. “This idea of an abstract aesthetic being cultivated through photography was really advanced for the time.”

Their work remained largely unknown throughout World War II, and during the Soviet domination of Czechoslovakia and the Eastern Bloc following the war. Once the so-called Velvet Revolution of 1989 brought an end to the communist regime, however, awareness of the distinctive art traditions of what now is called the Czech Republic quickly flourished.

Institutions including the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Olomouc Museum of Art in the Czech Republic also house examples of modern Czech photography in their permanent collections.

The portfolio had only eight of the original 10 photographs when it was acquired by Binstock, who located and then added the remaining prints.

Of his decision to donate the works to the museum, he says, “The portfolio deserves a broader audience.”

—Robin L. Flanigan

The intricate needlework and fabric panels Esther Nisenthal Krinitz created for her two daughters, simply to record her memories, are the subject of a Memorial Art Gallery exhibit evoking both beauty and tragedy in rich detail.

, on view through December 2, chronicles the artist’s bucolic childhood in Poland and subsequent decision—at 15—to go off on her own, with her younger sister, rather than stay with her family and neighbors who were forced on a journey to a death camp during the Holocaust.

The 36 panels on exhibit are relevant in today’s world, says Marlene Hamann-Whitmore, the museum’s McPherson Director of Academic Programs.

“It can be too easy to forget—or never learn—our collective history, and it’s so important for our collective memory to keep it alive,” says Hamann-Whitmore. “These atrocities are still happening, and sometimes art allows us to have conversations that are difficult otherwise.”

Though Krinitz, who died in 2001, had no formal art education, she was trained as a seamstress, which made textiles a natural conduit for her poignant story.

Jonathan Binstock, the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director at MAG, says Krinitz could be labeled an “outsider” or “untutored artist,” but her work “is of an extraordinary quality and deserving of a place in an art museum exhibition program.”

Home to more than 600 textiles in its permanent collection, the museum routinely presents and collects textile works of art.

“Some people have something incredible inside them that they are able to convey visually, in material form,” says Binstock. “Krinitz was one of these people.”

Over the years, Krinitz filled notebooks with stories about what had happened to her, but she was 50 before she created her first panel—an image of herself as a girl in the picturesque village of Mniszek, carrying water from the river up a hill toward her house and family. Her second panel, made a year later, showed her swimming with her older brother in that same river, while three of her sisters tend geese nearby.

Krinitz produced the rest while in her 60s, the images detailing what followed: the Gestapo terrorizing her family; she and her sister fleeing across fields; soldiers leaving her alone only after being swarmed by bees.
“Despite the pain that she experienced in reliving these memories so slowly, so carefully as she stitched them, it was important for her to be able to take them out of her mind and onto fabric,” says her eldest daughter, Bernice Steinhardt.

“I cannot recall a time when I did not know my mother’s stories,” she says, “but during the roughly 10 years she spent creating most of these pictures, she talked about her memories even more than she had before. I think she was trying to keep them from disappearing.”

Each image includes meticulous hand-embroidered captions.

The caption for the panel Ordered to Leave Our Homes: “This was my family on the morning of October 15, 1942. We were ordered by the Gestapo to leave our homes by 10 a.m. to join all the other Jews on the road to Krasnik railroad station and then to their deaths.”

Recalls Steinhardt: “She always said that was the most difficult picture for her to do—not technically, but emotionally.”

Krinitz’s story inspired a 30-minute award-winning documentary, Through the Eye of the Needle, which examines her life and work.

The first two panels that Krinitz made, hanging outside the exhibition entrance, are being used to help elicit positive memories for people with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia who visit to the museum every week as part of a partnership between .

The panels also are helping to spark conversations with younger visitors, and there are plans to bring in refugees as well.

“Maybe this will encourage other people to tell their stories,” says Hamann-Whitmore.

Fabric of Survival is on view through December 2.

—Robin L. Flanigan

Monet’s Waterloo Bridge: Vision and Process includes eight versions of the same scene captured from his balcony at the luxurious Savoy Hotel.

“Exhibiting together so many outstanding examples of one of Monet’s great late series would be a coup for any museum, [and] we are especially pleased to do this in Rochester, where we steward one of the best examples of the ‘Waterloo Bridge’ series,” says MAG Director Jonathan Binstock, referring to Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience firsthand the quintessence of Monet’s contribution to this history of art.”

The exhibition includes MAG’s painting and seven others on loan from North American sister institutions, including museums in Chicago, Denver, and Washington, D.C.

An ancillary show draws from works in MAG’s own collection to provide a deeper context for the Waterloo Bridge paintings, showcasing two earlier paintings by Monet as well as works by Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, James McNeill Abbott Whistler, and others.

Although Monet once said the fog in London gives the city “its magnificent breadth,” the artist became frustrated with his attempts to capture the atmosphere just right. After taking on the same subject again and again, from the same point of view, he brought his paintings back to his studio in Giverny, France, to work on them some more. He refused to send any to his dealer until he was satisfied with them all, both individually and as an ensemble.

“We’re trying to get a sense of his working process with this exhibit, to understand his vision and the means by which he achieved that vision—or didn’t,” says Nancy Norwood, the museum’s curator of European art.

New technologies and video were developed specifically for the exhibition, the result of a 2016 collaboration with Buffalo State College’s art conservation program. Scientists there conducted an extensive new imaging and materials analysis on Waterloo Bridge, Veiled Sun, showing the changes Monet made to the work as well as the exact pigments he used in his efforts to capture the effects of water, light, fog, and smoke.

State-of-the-art interactive touchscreens created as a result of that analysis allow visitors to look beneath the surface of the painting and more deeply into Monet’s process.

A companion exhibition, Seeing in Color and Black-and-White, offers yet another way to discover how color is used to create form, suggest space, and imply motion.

Showcasing 17 paper prints and three mixed-media sculptures from abstract artists such as Josef Albers, Victor Vasarely, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Edna Andrade, these are works from the museum’s permanent collection but displayed infrequently because of light sensitivity.

During the spring of 2018, students in the course The 21st Century Art Museum, taught by Andrew Cappetta, the assistant curator of academic programs at MAG, researched and developed thematic elements for Seeing in Color and Black-and-White, and created drafts of wall texts and catalogue entries for each work of art.

Cappetta says they wanted viewers to take what they learn about human visual perception from this exhibit and apply it to Monet’s paintings.

That’s easier to do here than with most shows.

Unlike a retrospective, a focus exhibition invites an in-depth look at a small number of works, rather than a superficial view of a large number of works.

“It’s a luxury,” says Norwood, adding that getting permission to borrow the “Waterloo Bridge” paintings was a process in itself. “These are very important pictures, and nobody wants to give them up.”

—Robin L. Flanigan

, which will be exhibited through September 9, brings together more than 90 of Tota’s paintings, about 20 of which are drawn from the museum’s collection and the rest on loan from family and friends.

Condensing art-historical and popular culture sources—medieval illuminated manuscripts, early Renaissance panel paintings, the work of surrealist icons Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí, fairy tales, and children’s book illustrations—Tota created private images of startling immediacy and timelessness, says Jessica Marten, curator of American art at the
museum.

Imbued with themes of metamorphosis, family bonds, physical pain, human frailty, the natural world, loss, and tragedy, the work represents the “audacious and radical voice” of an artist almost lost to history, one who challenges commonly held assumptions about female artists working outside the mainstream.

In the exhibition’s catalog, Marten writes, “Unusual paintings like these—near death-defying expressions of a little-known artist’s interior world, with incisive inquiries into womanhood, age, and power—rarely find their way inside an art museum’s walls.”

A seamstress and amateur artist who lived a conventional life among the Italian immigrant community in Rochester, Tota discovered the medium of egg tempera in her early 70s. Painting in the privacy of her home, she created a body of work that includes more than 90 small jewel-like paintings. In 1990, an exhibition in the faculty and student exhibit space included more than 20 of her late paintings and a small group of ceramic figures and masks. That was the only time her late paintings were exhibited during her lifetime. The paintings were not available for sale and almost everything remained in the artist’s possession until her death in 1996.

In an essay about the exhibition, Janet Catherine Berlo, a professor of art and art history and of visual and cultural studies at Rochester, puts Tota in a line of artists that includes mediaeval painter and nun Hildegard of Bingen, Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo, and 20th-century “outsiders” Theora Hamblett and Charlotte Salomon. Except for Kahlo, who came to the attention of the art world during her lifetime, Berlo writes, the work of the other women “could easily have been overlooked or lost—a fate surely encountered by other unsung women. . . . The serenditpity of these histories makes us wonder how many other bodies of astonishing work by singular and remarkable women may have perished in the last century. Such a thought should make us value even more highly those that have survived.”

After the exhibition’s premiere at the Memorial Art Gallery, additional venues will be arranged by International Arts & Artists, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that promotes the arts internationally.

—Robin L. Flanigan

EVENTS

2 p.m. Sunday, July 15, MAG Auditorium

In the context of unconventional artists developing their unique voices later in life, MAG curator will discuss Josephine Tota, and noted art historian will discuss American folk artist Anna Mary Robertson Moses, best known by her nickname Grandma Moses. A panel discussion will follow, which will include Tota’s family members–daughter Rosamond Tota and great-niece Lisa Rosica. Larry Merrill will moderate, and questions from the audience will be welcomed. The talk will be included with museum admission.

“I felt challenged by the work,” he says. “I didn’t understand it then and I can still say that I don’t quite grasp it entirely.”

Even so, Binstock, now the Mary W. and Donald R. Clark Director of the , is respected as an international expert on Gilliam. He has cocurated the Washington, D.C.–based artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Europe, “The Music of Color.” Opening this month at the , which houses one of Europe’s significant public collections, the exhibition will run simultaneously with , the largest and considered the most selective modern art fair in the world.

In addition, Binstock will lead a VIP tour of the Gilliam exhibition and the opening of Art Basel for members of the University and MAG communities who are taking part in the The behind-the-scenes looks are highlights of a weeklong trip to Switzerland organized by the Gallery Council.

In 2017, Art Basel attracted 95,000 people—many of them private collectors and representatives from museums and institutions around the world—over six days.

“There is no greater global stage for art than this,” Binstock says.

“The Music of Color” presents some 50 works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States. The show focuses on a period of great radicalism for Gilliam—from 1967 to 1973—in which he poured acrylic paint directly onto unprimed canvas, then folded and crumpled the canvas before the paint dried. It also covers work reflecting the 1968 race riots, and the polarizing debate over black art and abstract painting in 1960s and 1970s America.

The show was cocurated by Josef Helfenstein, director of the Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, a city on the Rhine River in northwest Switzerland.

Helfenstein characterizes Binstock as “indispensable in many ways” in advising which of Gilliam’s works should be exhibited.

“Jonathan was also a great sparring partner both for the artist and me,” he says, “and I think the result will be the proof of what a productive conversation this has been.”

Gilliam is known for his vivid drape paintings, hung not on wooden stretcher bars but unsupported like curtains, or bunting. They are never hung the same way twice. He never stopped creating abstract work despite accusations from African-American contemporaries that he didn’t support civil rights—other black artists were making figurative pieces meant as overtly political statements about civil rights from the 1960s to the 1980s—and even as abstract art fell out of favor internationally between the late 1960s and the early 2000.

“Sam remained committed to abstract painting precisely when it seemed irrelevant, but he also demonstrated how painting was also sculpture, also architecture, and also performance art,” says Binstock, who completed the first doctoral dissertation on Gilliam, curated a major retrospective of his work for the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and wrote a monographic catalog on his work. “In this way he helped lay the groundwork for the interdisciplinary thinking and making that is so central to artistic practices today.”

Binstock characterizes the fact that Gilliam’s work remains a challenge—long after he sat partially bewildered as a doctoral student in Sharon Patton’s African-American art history class—as “a testament to its strength and quality.”

, in fact, recently characterized Gilliam, represented internationally by Los Angeles–based David Kordansky Gallery, as a “living legend” who is “enjoying his greatest renaissance yet.”

There’s something in there for Binstock as well.

“For me, I think it means that I get to join the club of people who say, ‘Do what you love, do what you think is right, and it will all work out,’” he says. “I’m very glad Sam is getting his due for what he has accomplished, and I’m very fortunate to have been able to play a role in helping him achieve the recognition he so rightly deserves.

“I’m enjoying a fantastic ride.”

—Robin L. Flanigan