RECENT EXHIBITIONS

PHOTOGRAPHY & the SPECIMEN

MILLS COLLEGE ART MUSEUM
January 11 - March 23, 2025

Oakland, CA (October 30, 2024) — Celebrating 100 years, Mills College Art Museum is organizing exhibitions throughout 2025 that showcase the museum’s long history as a laboratory space for contemporary artists and highlight the artistic gems in its collection.This selection of photographs from the Mills College Art Museum’s collection explores various modes of the photographic specimen and their operations as forms of knowledge.

Photographs, like natural specimens, preserve what is lost—to death, to extinction, to exile. Considering natural history museums' reliance on death to represent life, Susan Magnus strips museum butterfly specimens of their lifelike illusion by printing her photographs in funereal blacks. Musician Patti Smith began photographing possessions of the deceased in a time of deep grief, seeking to transmit something of the artists who inspired her to future generations. Mundane tokens become sacred relics in her dreamy prints from Polaroid negatives. Artists like Shi Tou, Joe Deal, Binh Danh, and Jennifer Brandon—slyly invoke the form of the specimen to critique classification systems and the cultural biases they reflect.

Never just a sample, every photographed specimen betrays a choice about representing the whole by example. Works in the exhibition explore specimens as emblems of place, anthropological evidence, teaching tools, cultural monuments, and exemplars of identities and communities. Others are more personal, deploying specimens as distillations of nature’s order, tokens of memory, or surrealist thought-objects. While some adopt the look of clinical objectivity to draw upon the specimen’s reputation for scientific fact, others opt for visual poetry to highlight artistic interpretation.

Photography & The Specimen is curated by Dr. Sarah Miller, Associate Adjunct Professor, Art History and is supported by the Bourne Special Gallery Projects Endowment.

SUSAN MAGNUS | IMAGEAFTER

GARRISON ART CENTER
September 21, 2024 - October 27, 2024

AUGUST 21, 2024, GARRISON, NY—Garrison Art Center (GAC) is pleased to present IMAGEAFTER, an exhibition of recent work by Visiting Artist, Susan Magnus. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition at Garrison Art Center and includes photo-based projects, sculpture, and drawing.

Magnus created IMAGEAFTER in response to photographs, film negatives, and artifacts she inherited after her mother’s cognitive decline and death. Reflecting on these materials, she found the vulnerability and deterioration of the analog snapshots emblematic of the fleeting nature of memory and the inevitability of loss. Moreover, objects from the landscape of her mother’s life—some pristine, others in disrepair—were not only a source of remembrance but insistent reminders of the fugitive nature of all things. Initially, exploring this familial archive was a way to process grief and past events; over time, it has compelled her to transform images and objects into works of art that explore impermanence, absence, and the residue of personal and collective narratives we leave behind.

Work by Susan Magnus is included in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive at the University of California; the Mills College Art Museum; and the Oakland Museum of California. She is the recipient of a Regional Fellowship for Visual Art from the Western States Arts Federation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Visual Arts Award from the Gerbode Foundation. She lives and works in Beacon, New York.

This project is made possible, in part, through the Putnam Arts Council's Arts Link Grant Program with public funds provided from Putnam County.

SHIFTING TERRAINS

MILLS COLLEGE ART MUSEUM
September 10, 2022 - February 18, 2023

Featuring work from the MCAM collection, Shifting Terrains examines artists’ responses to the West Coast landscape. Works in the exhibition explore the impact of climate change and the importance of environmental justice and preservation, as well as capture the stunning beauty and ecological diversity of the American West Coast.

The exhibition pulls from the Art Museum’s deep holdings of California artists, including early twentieth-century California Impressionist paintings that celebrate the state’s northern coastal scenery, and images by pioneering photographers whose work helped establish Yosemite Valley as part of the National Park Service.

These pieces underscore the conflicting interests of land conservation and commercial development throughout the history of California, often at the expense and displacement of Indigenous peoples and immigrant labor. Examples of Native American baskets as well as contemporary critiques of manifest destiny help demonstrate how cultural identity is often embedded in landscape and emphasize the politics of place.

The exhibition also explores humankind’s impact on nature, including the increasing threat of natural disasters due to rapid climate change. In recent years this has taken the form of devastating wildfires, ongoing species extinction, and the continued threat of earthquakes along the California coast.

While some of the artists investigate these topics directly, others in the exhibition create abstracted and often poetic representations of nature that serve as metaphors for beauty, volatility, and rejuvenation. Above all, the works in Shifting Terrains help reveal our complicated relationship with the physical world that surrounds us, both in terms of natural splendor and evolving environmental realities.

Organizing institution: Mills College Art Museum