Past Exhibits
The Joy of Humanistic Design:
Drawings and Objects by Michael Graves
Dates: July 1 - Jan. 20, 2025
University of Cincinnati
DAAP Library Teaching Gallery
This July, American architect Michael Graves would have turned 90 years old. He was an educator, a prominent figure who contributed to American postmodernist architecture, and an alumnus from the College of Applied Arts at the University of Cincinnati. To celebrate his legacy, DAAP Library is proud to showcase some of the items from its collection that are designed by Graves. With this exhibit, the DAAP library aims to show that good design is a necessary aspect of the user experience and makes the design process democratic in nature. Thinking about design through this lens led Graves to create thoughtful, appealing and affordable products for the masses. For more information.
Posteriors:
Sitters’ Backs in 19th-Century Photographs
Dates: Sept. 15 - Dec. 15, 2024
University of Cincinnati
DAAP Library Teaching Gallery
Part of the 2024 FotoFocus Biennial: Backstories, an ambitious collaboration between FotoFocus and the region’s museums, galleries, universities, and
non-traditional spaces, the FotoFocus Biennial is a month-long celebration of photography and
lens-based art.
The variety of posterior imagery in the late Victorian era is astonishing. Women showcase luxurious long locks and fashionable dresses, while men in briefs flaunt extensive tattoos and muscles. Pairs and trios of homosocial friends, as well as heterosexual couples, link elbows or wrap arms around each other’s waists. Toddlers hug draped studio chairs, get weighed, and wear matching gingham clothing. Double exposures reveal babies’ faces and backs of heads in the same image. Paired prints and double-sided cabinet cards present frontal portraits with matching back portraits. Pictures within pictures depict sitters gazing at photos or in mirrors. A woman bent over on a bicycle offers a racy view of her derrière for cigarette customers.
While some of these photographs are visual jokes, others are sentimental, documenting fleeting youth, beauty, and intimate relationships. Some are nostalgic, as when sitters pose with photos of loved ones, while others, like that of actor Sarah Bernhardt, are promotional and reminiscent of today’s celebrity selfies. The exhibition includes cabinet cards, stereographs, ambrotypes, and tintypes from private collections. Included are works by famous photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Napoleon Sarony, as well as notable female image-makers, such as Mrs. Laura Gaites (Macomb, IL), Mrs. W. Streetman (Abilene, TX), and Susan Spence (Blanchester, OH). By analyzing imagery in terms of what is revealed and concealed, the exhibition seeks to explain why posterior views became so popular and what they express about visual culture in the United States.
For more information.
A House for an Art Lover: Charles Mackintosh’s Vision of Scottish Vernacular with a Modern Spirit Dates: May 1 - Sept. 20, 2024
Universtiy of Cincinnati
DAAP Library Teaching Gallery
This summer, DAAP Library is showcasing drawings by Scottish architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, which were part of a competition entry for a house for an artist. Produced within a deadline of only a few weeks, these drawings provide insight into the greatest contribution that Mackintosh made to the architecture discipline – the blending of structural and the ornamental elements of a building into a cohesive work of art.
For more information.
Rediscovering Catharina van Hemessen’s Scourging of Christ: Women Artists, Patrons, and Rulers in Renaissance Europe
Dates: Mar. 7 - Apr. 30, 2024
University of Cincinnati
DAAP Library Teaching Gallery
This exhibition focuses on the Netherlandish painter Catharina van Hemessen’s Scourging of Christ, a jewel-like devotional work signed by the most famous woman artist of the Northern Renaissance. Rarely on public display, this dynamic yet little-known narrative panel reveals Catharina’s originality, refined color palette, and adept rendering of the human form. The painting, recently redated to 1556 through technical examination, unites the exhibition’s three themes—female artists, female patrons and collectors, and female rulers in Renaissance Europe (ca. 1400-1600). Indeed, the Scourging of Christ is the only signed work by Catharina van Hemessen that could have been executed for her patron Mary of Hungary, Regent of the Netherlands, who in 1556 invited the painter to the Habsburg court in Spain.
For more information.
European Art in a Global Perspective: Medieval Illuminated Manuscripts & Early Modern Prints from UC Collections
Dates: Nov. 1 - Dec. 13, 2023
University of Cincinnati
DAAP Library Teaching Gallery
Featuring intricately designed prints and lavishly illuminated manuscripts, this exhibition explores late medieval and early modern European art in a global perspective. It focuses on the visual and material traces of social and political connections between Europe and Africa, Asia, and the Americas from the 15th to 17th centuries. During this era of unprecedented cross-cultural exchange, ideas, artworks, and artists themselves circulated widely through trade, diplomacy, pilgrimage, and immigration. Simultaneously, religious conflict and colonization across the Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea, and Indian Ocean affected cultures and peoples as never before.
The twenty artworks on display include woodcuts, engravings, etchings, and illuminated manuscript leaves and scrolls from the UC Art Collection and DAAP Library Special Collections. They illustrate four themes: European Representations of Asia, Africa, and the Americas; African and Asian Illustrated Manuscripts; Traveling Artworks and Ideas; and Exotic and Precious Materials in Medieval Illumination and Printmaking. These objects offer diverse perspectives on some of the most significant social, religious, and political entanglements of the later Middle Ages and early modern era, helping us embrace a more expansive and more nuanced view of the rapidly globalizing world.
Curators: Christopher Platts, Aaron Cowan, and Elizabeth Meyer
Irises by Emil Robinson and Etchings by Nick Mancini
Summer 2023
University of Cincinnati
DAAP Library Teaching Gallery
Mancini's deep blue ethchings internalized the experience of stepping into a garden, while Robinson paintings of irises are brief intense relationshops with single flowers. Robinson designed the table/lectern to invite close reading, while Mancini's prints are hug a different heights to invite the viewer to lean down and see more clearly what is at their feet. The exhibition is without title, and the poem the Moths by Mary Oliver is included next to the infromation for the works.
