Project Type: 2025

02
Dec
2024
Beth Lipman: ReGift at the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH

Beth Lipman: ReGift at the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH

Beth Lipman: ReGift

Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH

ongoing installation

ReGift is a sculptural installation created specifically for the Toledo Museum of Art. Originally on view in Gallery 18 in August 2023, the installation was moved to a permanent wing of the Museum.

Motivated by histories Lipman discovered in the archives at the TMA, the project features a three-quarter life-sized recreation of the parlor in Edward and Florence Libbey’s Old West End house. Using the Libbey’s bookplate as a visual guide (the only known image of their home interior) Lipman filled this architectural space with objects found in the image that she fabricated in transparent and opaque white glass.

Some of these original household objects, including furniture, were gifted to the Museum by Florence Scott Libbey upon her death in 1938 and later sold in the 1990s. Lipman’s project symbolically gifts these objects, along with their stories, to the entire Toledo community. By looking closely at an internal aspect of Florence’s life, the project aims to emphasize her deeply personal commitment to the Museum. It emphasizes her involvement in building the Museum’s legacy and, importantly, the impact of the Libbey’s on Toledo.

Glass elements for ReGift were made in the TMA’s hotshop at the Glass Pavilion during a 2022 GAPP residency. A glass press, donated to TMA by Libbey company was also utilized to create components, conceptually triangulating the founder’s business with the Museum and the Libbey’s personal life. Through the GAPP residency, the project fulfills an institutional goal to continue to promote experimentation in the glass studio, connecting past history to present creative practice.

For artist Beth Lipman, the project’s intent is to accentuate the impact of Toledo Museum of Art founders and reaffirm the Museum’s position as a catalyst within community. Lipman states, “Today, our trust in institutions has been undermined; ReGift is an opportunity to strengthen and reinvigorate the Museum’s critical role in our culture.”

A short film will accompany the installation. Commissioned for the project, filmmaker Atesh Atici found inspiration in Florence Scott Libbey’s approach to her community in the early days of the Toledo Museum of Art. Considering current polarization within our society and a growing separation from public spaces, Florence’s desire to, “encourage attendance on the part of all people irrespective of condition of life” is key to refocusing attention on the Museum’s ethos of creating a space for serving the community of Toledo and beyond. The film evokes Florence’s ideas through a dramatization of these ideas.

More on the Installation HERE

More on Beth Lipman HERE

In 2025, ReGift was moved to the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Art Museum.

CATALOG

Beth Lipman: ReGift shares some of the unwritten histories that artist Beth Lipman discovered while conducting research in the archives of the Toledo Museum of Art. Her exploration inspired a room-sized recreation in wood, glass, and metal of a scene from a bookplate used by the museum’s founders, Edward Drummond Libbey and Florence Scott Libbey. Lipman was particularly keen to examine Florence’s life, and in conversation with curator Diane C. Wright and archivist Julie A. McMaster, she discusses the project’s origins in her own artistic practice and its relationship to shifting understandings of institutions and their publics. An essay by Wright and McMaster draws on additional archival materials to fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge of Florence Scott Libbey’s life.

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Beth Lipman: ReGift, exclusively at the Toledo Museum of Art, August 12, 2023-September 1, 2024.

Written by Diane C. Wright, Senior Curator of Glass and Contemporary Craft, Toledo Museum of Art; featuring a conversation with Beth Lipman and contributions by Julie A. McMaster, Archivist, Toledo Museum of Art.

Softcover, 9 1/4″ x 6 3/4″
Published by the Toledo Museum of Art. Š 2023 Toledo Museum of Art

$19.95

PURCHASE THE CATALOG HERE

06
Nov
2024
CHRIS ANTEMANN: An Occasional Craving

CHRIS ANTEMANN: An Occasional Craving

Chris Antemann: An Occasional Craving

Dixon Gallery & Gardens
4339 Park Ave
Memphis, TN

February 9 – April 6, 2025

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

In 2011, American ceramic artist Chris Antemann formed what would become a fruitful partnership with the centuries-old Meissen porcelain manufactory that continues today. With a profound respect for the innovation and artistry of Meissen porcelain, Antemann re-envisions the concept of porcelain figural groupings with a wink of her twenty-first-century eye. Chris’ colorful, imaginative, and often cheeky ceramic sculptures parody the dynamics between men and women, much as they did in the eighteenth century. And while viewers of rococo porcelain figural groupings would have been cognizant of the coded innuendos that abound in the art of that era, Antemann is much more explicit in her representations (and parodies) of human sexuality.

Chris Antemann: An Occasional Craving presents a variety of Antemann’s works, from her early MEISSEN collaborations to more complex dramatic table-top centerpieces produced in her studio in Joseph, OR. Inspired by the Dixon’s own Warda Stevens Stout Collection of Eighteenth-Century German Porcelain, by the vitality of our beautiful gardens, and by the Berthe Morisot painting in our collection, Peasant Girl among Tulips, Antemann created a pair of tulipieres specifically for the Dixon Gallery and Gardens. Visitors to the exhibition will be charmed by her sculptures, which walk a fine line between lighthearted and profound, and come away with a deeper understanding of the nuances of historic German porcelain.

PAST PROGRAMMING

ACC at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, Memphis, TN

The American Ceramic Circle traveled to Memphis on March 2-3, 2025 to explore the Dixon Gallery and Gardens collections and current exhibitions. The tour visited the studio of contemporary artist and University of Memphis professor, Kate Roberts, and the private home of renowned collectors of European porcelain.

At the Dixon, we went behind the scenes on guided tours of the museum and gardens with curators and horticulturists. We enjoyed a special tour with artist Chris Antemann and Julie Pierotti, curator of the solo exhibition, An Occasion to Gather, featuring a site-responsive commission, masterworks produced in her US studio, and selected vignettes produced during her 10-year collaboration with the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Germany.

Limited to 20.

ABOUT THE DIXON GALLERY & GARDENS

ABOUT THE DIXON’S COLLECTION

THIS EVENT HAS NOW PASSED

ABOUT CHRIS ANTEMANN

LEARN MORE ABOUT CHRIS ANTEMANN

American
b. 1970 Albany, NY
lives and works between Joseph, OR and Meissen, Germany

Chris Antemann is an American artist known for her frolicking, contemporary feminist parodies of 18th century porcelain figurines. For more than a decade, Antemann has worked collaboratively with the Meissen Porcelain Manufactory in Meissen, Germany to create increasingly ornate and elaborate variations on her lifelong love of the narrative, porcelain figurine. Recent years have seen a tremendous culmination of her time working with MEISSEN. Between 2015-2019, her large-scale installation Forbidden Fruit: Porcelain Sculptor Chris Antemann toured the US, Germany, and culminated at the State Hermitage Museum, Russia. In 2022, her largest, most complex sculpture to-date was unveiled at Hillwood Estate, Museum, & Gardens in Washington, DC; An Occasion to Gather reveals its sumptuous narrative across an eight-foot-long, four-foot-high dining room centerpiece. The relationship with MEISSEN continues and a decade of collaboration will be celebrated with an exhibition at the Meissen Porcelain Museum in Meissen, Germany from July 15, 2022 – February 26, 2023.

Antemann earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota and her BFA in Ceramics and Painting from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited extensively in the United States, Europe, Russia, and Asia. Her work can be found in many private and public collections, including the Crocker Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Museum of Arts and Design, the Portland Art Museum, among many others. Her awards include the Virginia A. Groot first prize, and residencies with the Archie Bray Foundation, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

02
Nov
2024
COURTNEY M. LEONARD in: Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland

COURTNEY M. LEONARD in: Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland

Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland

The Block Museum of Art | Evanston, IL

January 25–July 13, 2025

Featuring Courtney M. Leonard

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Through the perspectives of four collaborating artists with connections to Zhegagoynak—Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent), Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Tribe of Pottawatomi/Ottawa), Nora Moore Lloyd (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), and Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi) —Woven Being explores confluences that are continuing to shape Indigenous creative practices in the region and beyond.

The Chicagoland region is a longstanding cultural and economic hub for Indigenous peoples, including the Council of Three Fires— the Ojibwe, Potawatomi, and Odawa—as well as the Menominee, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois nations. People from many Indigenous nations call the region home today, and the city of Chicago has the third-largest urban Indigenous population in the United States.

Despite this rich history, Indigenous voices have often been excluded from Chicago’s art histories. This silence is harmful. Guided by Indigenous collaborations, priorities, and voices, the exhibition foregrounds the perspectives of Indigenous artists currently based in the city and those from nations forcibly displaced from the area in the nineteenth century.

Collaborating artists have partnered with The Block to create “constellations” of their own artwork and historical and contemporary artworks, primarily by Indigenous artists of the region. Overall Woven Being will present more than 80 works by 33 artists that speak to the diversity of Indigenous art, materials, and time, including several new and commissioned works and installations. Selections highlight themes we have identified in dialogue with diverse project advisors: kinship between materials, relations across regional landways and waterways,  and the weaving together of past, present, and future.

Seen together, the exhibition works form intimate and interwoven stories that resist monolithic storytelling. Instead of a comprehensive overview of regional art, Woven Being integrates four Indigenous perspectives of Chicagoland’s layered art histories. Such perspectives are central not only to understanding Chicago and its region, but also to understanding the widely interconnected Indigenous stories that have been, and continue to be, woven across the entirety of Turtle Island (North America).

VIEW THE PRESS RELEASE

ARTISTS IN THE EXHIBITION

• Josef Albers (American, born Germany)
• Rick Bartow (Mad River Band of Wiyot Indians)
• Frank Big Bear (White Earth Ojibwe)
• Roy Boney (Cherokee Nation)
• Andrea Carlson(Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent)
• Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné)
• Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa)
• Woodrow Wilson Crumbo (Citizen Potawatomi)
• Nancy Fisher Cyrette (Grand Portage Ojibwe)
• Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe)
• Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians/Cherokee)
• Teri Greeves (Kiowa)
• Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe)
• Mark LaRoque (White Earth Ojibwe)
• Courtney M. Leonard (Shinnecock Nation)
• Nora Moore Lloyd (Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe)

• Agnes Martin (American, born Canada)
• Wanesia Misquadace (Minnesota Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe Fond du Lac Band)
• George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe)
• Barnett Newman (American)
• Daphne Odjig (Odawa/Potawatomi)
• Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo)
• Chris Pappan (Kaw [Kanza]/Osage/Lakota)
• Cherish Parrish (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa)
• John Pigeon (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi)
• Jason Quigno (Saginaw Chippewa)
• Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi/Black)
• Sharon Skolnick (Fort Sill Apache/Lakota)
• Rhiannon Skye Tafoya (Eastern Band Cherokee/Santa Clara Pueblo)
• Lisa Telford (Haida)
• Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi)
• Joe Yazzie (Navajo)
• Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean)

EXHIBITION PUBLICATION

A 160-page multi-authored publication centers Indigenous voices and explores the exhibition’s expansive themes and questions. This book will be available midway through the exhibition run to document the installation and represent the constellations of artwork and thoughtful juxtapositions

Following an introduction by the exhibition’s co-curators, contributors Blaire Morseau (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi), Denise Lajimodiere (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe), John Low (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi), and Anne Terry Straus and Jacqueline Lopez expand on the collaborating artists’ contributions from their own disciplinary and personal vantage points,   These chapters are interspersed with poetry and prose, including by Heid Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe), Mark LaRoque (White Earth Ojibwe), and Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwe), a resource guide focusing on Chicago’s Indigenous-led arts organizations, and installation views of the exhibition.

The Woven Being book is published by The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, produced by Marquand Books, Seattle , designed by OTAMI, Montreal, and distributed by the University of Washington Press (Forthcoming in Spring 2025.)

 

ORDER HERE

ABOUT COURTNEY M. LEONARD

Courtney Leonard Artist Portrait

Courtney M. Leonard is an artist and filmmaker, who has contributed to the Offshore Art movement. Leonard’s current work embodies the multiple definitions of “breach”, an exploration and documentation of historical ties to water, whale and material sustainability.

In collaboration with national and international museums, cultural institutions, and indigenous communities in North America, New Zealand, Nova Scotia, and the United States Embassies, Leonard’s practice investigates narratives of cultural viability as a reflection of environmental record.