The University of Vermont launched its studio art program in 1924 and opened the Fleming Museum of Art on campus in 1931. Yet the museum has never hosted a show by the faculty, who teach nearby in Williams Hall. “Praxis: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM” is a late correction to that oversight — and a logical one, now that the museum has joined the university’s School of the Arts.
The latter was created in 2022 to bring together and encourage cross-pollination among UVM’s arts programs (formerly departments): music, theater, dance, art and art history, creative writing, and film and television studies.
After the Fleming joined earlier this year, executive director Sonja Lunde put out a call to all studio art faculty for work made since 2020. Submissions came in from 15 professors and lecturers, including some proposals for work yet to be executed. Curator Kristan Hanson chose which pieces to exhibit and how, naming the show “Praxis” to reference both the teaching and studio practices of the participants.
The gallery’s entry features a trio of large, muted-palette photographs with eerie touches by Bill McDowell opposite a riot of color in Mildred Beltré Martinez‘s colored pencil work on paper and three paintings by Pamela Fraser.
Martinez’s “Unseen” is a fitted arrangement of colored blocks and bars, reminiscent of a Tetris game, that hides a message — “See the unseen” — in its light-brown bars made from walnut ink. Purposefully, the work hangs opposite McDowell’s “Untitled (Erased Lawn Jockey), From North Elba,” depicting the base of a statue whose absent figure somehow casts a shadow. Seeing the unseen, indeed.
Fraser’s graphic acrylics of floral imagery, inspired by wallpaper designs by Austrian Swedish architect Josef Frank, are a departure for the formerly abstract painter. “It’s all a little bit corny, and I enjoy pushing that,” Fraser said by phone. The striking combination of reds, purples and greens is partly inspired by Josef Albers’ color theories; Fraser, one of three associate directors of the School of the Arts, wrote the 2018 book How Color Works: Color Theory in the 21st Century.
More of Albers’ influence can be seen in work by Steve Budington, who studied with Albers’ student Robert Reed. Budington makes gorgeous mixed-media paintings that combine elements of landscape with the abstraction of nautical signal flags.
In “Monhegan hillshade, wind, signal flag (I need help),” executed during his recent stay at Maine’s Monhegan Artists’ Residency, Budington overlaps two canvas-covered wood panels and connects them with a section of framing painted fluorescent yellow. One panel is a blue-hued satellite-view rendering of Monhegan Island, complete with elevations and a wind map. The other is a wind-ruffled, layered white flag marked with a red X — the international sign for needing aid.
It’s unclear where in that landscape aid is needed. Budington, who curated a simultaneous exhibition of five New York City painters in the Francis Colburn Gallery of Williams Hall, said he uses framing pieces to reference the idea that “our understanding of landscape is always partial.”
Partial leaves form the basis of images by Jenn Karson, an intermedia artist who is interested in artists’ use of artificial intelligence. “Stories of Consumption: Damaged Leaf Dataset Table III” and “IV” show photographs of 800 oak leaves she collected on her property that had been chewed by spongy moths.
“Every form is so incredible and so intricate,” Karson said in a presentation on the project for the Creative AI Vermont symposium in April, which she co-organized.
The defoliated trees put out leaves that were regenerated, if disfigured, and Karson collected those, too, and fed both data sets into a program that generated its own new leaf forms. Five of those AI-created images, machine-engraved on aluminum against an indigo background, form “Machined Leaves for the Dying Red Oak” — a hopeful use of AI amid the art world’s recent flurry of negative reactions to the tool.
Karson’s reflective metal works resonate with Jane Kent‘s silkscreens, whose subject is mirrored reflection, on the opposite wall. Seven works show cartoon-like mirrors, some on wallpaper, their reflections indicated by stripes. “The idea of reflection is super-challenging because it changes all the time,” Kent said by phone. It also has a long history, reaching back to the puzzling mirror image in Diego Velázquez’s 1656 painting “Las Meninas.”
Kent, who has been making prints for 40 years, began the drawings for her current pieces during the pandemic. Art historian Susan Tallman described them as “an invitation to look at looking” on the website of New York’s Lower East Side Printshop, where Kent produced her mirror-themed work in 2022.
Visitors to “Praxis” will find that a spinning disco ball animates the gallery lighting. That sets a positive mood for multidisciplinary artist Ace Lehner‘s site-specific installation “Barbershop: The Art of Queer Failure.” Curtained in gold fringe, the space is outfitted with a barber’s chair, pom-pom-framed mirror and zebra-print rug. Based on Jack Halberstam’s theory of “queer failure,” Lehner’s work also attempts to counter the recent decline in bars and other celebratory spaces for queer people.
On the exhibit’s opening night, Lehner’s installation went live: They gave haircuts to seven people, including curator Hanson, in return for the participants’ agreement to advocate for queer and trans people. A video with the artist’s voice-over shows visitors the process.
Viewers can find fascinating windows into many more UVM faculty members’ praxes in this inaugural exhibition. And former professors’ work, some of it long held in storage, now appears in the museum’s newly revamped Collections and Wolcott galleries. According to Lunde in an email, “Praxis” is not a one-off: Going forward, the Fleming’s leadership plans to feature faculty work “about every three years.”
“Praxis: Recent Work by Studio Art Faculty at UVM,” through December 8 at the Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, in Burlington. uvm.edu/fleming
The original print version of this article was headlined “Praxis Makes Perfect | UVM’s Fleming Museum presents a first-ever art faculty show”
This article appears in Sep 27 – Oct 3, 2023.
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