Mirrors, minors, and Modernism in dialogue at the new Ackland exhibit

ARTS & CULTURE

By Diana Newton
Correspondent

Paintings of a nameless newsboy, a backstage moment from the Jazz Age, and a modernist portrayal of a German village share little in common concerning style or subject. However, the Ackland Art Museum curators have found a novel approach to presenting selected American artworks on long-term loan from the Terra Foundation in Chicago. The freshly opened exhibit,  Triple Take: Dialogues with the Terra Collection-in-Residence, features four Terra paintings colliding and conversing, challenging and being challenged by pieces from Ackland’s own permanent collection. Four museum staff curators and educators worked independently, intentionally creating three quite different sections in which photographs, drawings, paintings, and three-dimensional works offer diverse themes that inspire intense looking and raise provocative questions for viewers.

Through the Looking Glass

The exhibit’s first section is anchored by Terra’s loaned painting, Between Acts (1935) by Archibald Motley Jr. Motley was one of the most important 20th-century African American artists of the Jazz Age in America, capturing revealing moments from Chicago’s cultural scene.

In this case we see two nude women readying for performance, one partly seen in a mirror, and a Black man portrayed as a minstrel at the doorway.

Dana Cowan, Shelton Curator for European and American Art before 1950, who organized this grouping, focused on the mirror motif, selecting works from the 16th to the 20th centuries that invite the viewer’s gaze at the gazer, whether it is welcomed or not. A ballerina studying her reflection backstage was willingly photographed for a series in Look magazine by Walker Evans, while Danny Lyons caught the vulnerability of nude male prisoners in the shower, hiding their faces from his lens. Cowan points out that there are “images in which we become … someone who is in their intimate space that shouldn’t be.”

Carrie Mae Weems, a contemporary artist, calls forth the female gaze—her own—as she studies her form in the mirror.  Entitled Not Manet’s Type (1997). Weems assertively places herself in the history of art yet defies the dominance of the male gaze by calling out Manet, Picasso, and Duchamp.  Vanity and privacy, innocence and intrusion, call attention to the nature, ethics, and history of looking.

What’s in a Name?

Advancing to the second section of the exhibit, two portraits of children from the Terra collection—Ammi Phillips’s Girl in a Red Dress (c. 1835) and Robert Henri’s Sylvester (1914)—are surrounded by other images of children from various eras that have been painted for very different reasons. Some of their stories and names are known, while others are lost to history. Selected by Lauren Turner, associate curator for contemporary art and special projects, and Carolyn Allmendinger, interim director and director of education and interpretation, the viewer meets a very serious child named only by her dress, an unknown kid on the street smoking and hawking newspapers, an artists’s own son, and a young Henry Ford.

Sylvester, a young newsboy, was a preferred subject for painter Robert Henri.
Image credit: Robert Henri, American, 1865–1929, Sylvester, 1914, oil on canvas. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Art Acquisition Endowment Fund, 2017.2, L2023.2.4.

Henri’s Sylvester is an oil painting of a young Black child who worked as a newsboy. Allmendinger explained that the artist asked the child for permission to paint him and produced three different portraits. By contrast, the Girl in the Red Dress is a commissioned portrait in which the family of the unnamed girl paid Phillips to paint her. The artist apparently carried the red dress with him for use with children whom he painted traditionally formally.

The photograph Girl at Gee’s Bend, Alabama (1937) by Arthur Rothstein frames a formerly enslaved girl at a window. The photographer was on assignment with the New Deal Resettlement Administration and raises questions of isolation and identity. But the outsider artist Howard Finster asserted only Biblical answers through his religious folk art. The exhibit includes a colorful painting of a very young Henry Ford. Finster admired for Ford his invention of the “horseless carriage” later in life, relating it to a passage from Ezekiel in the painting.

Nostalgia meets modernism

The third section of the exhibit focuses solely on the work of German-American painter Lyonel Feininger. Here the anchor painting from the Terra is an expressionist view of a German village, Denstedt (1917), rendered in bold citrus colors and severe angles. The artist melds the hardships of the World War I period with his nostalgia for pre-war Germany.

Peter Nisbet, Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, drew on Feininger’s works from other museums and collections and Ackland’s to represent the range and focus of the artist’s work. Interestingly, Nisbet, who has studied and published about Feininger for many years notes a persistent tension in the work: “ You’ll find all these modern styles, but the subject matter is relentlessly old fashioned.” Indeed, romantic repetitions of German churches and seascapes convey a 19th-century sensibility put forth in the geometric shapes and fractured planes of cubism.

The Triple Take exhibit brings three sets of curatorial eyes to the Terra paintings on loan, viewing them as in dialogue with one another and hopefully with viewers who come to see these different approaches. The show runs now through May 11, 2025, at the Ackland Art Museum.

Diana Newton is a coach, facilitator, filmmaker, writer, artist, yoga teacher and general Renaissance woman. Her documentary film, The Ties That Bind, is available for streaming on UNC-TV. She lives in Carrboro and is a UNC alum. This reporter can be reached at: Information@TheLocal Reporter.press.