Otherness²: Hiding in Plain Sight explores the outsider’s perspectives and the impact of “Othering.” During the creative process, Harrison-Houser pursues authenticity and begins to reveal untold stories in her work. However, she instinctively hides within the mark-making with her use of symbolism, sgraffito, and abstraction. Layer after layer of gesso and paint erase her disclosures. Subsequently, the art installation shares these stories only in a type of Hide-and-Seek game for the viewer. For deeper connections, the viewer physically moves to a separate space to match the conceptual titles back to the abstract squares. Through this physical movement and mindfulness, the storyteller role shifts away from the artist and moves to the viewer to create awareness, conversation, and the momentum for change.  

September 10- October 12, 2019

Richardson Family Art Gallery
Exhibit Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 1 – 5 p.m.
Thursday: 1 – 9 p.m.
Closed on Sunday and Monday

Props: Personal identities in the Portrait Photography of Richard Samuel Roberts

The term “props” brings to mind the objects used in the theater that help establish the meaning of a scene. In this theater context, the word is shortened from “properties,” things collectively owned by a theater group. But could the term also reflect the notion that props show “properties” of a character, offering layers of information and meaning to a viewer.? “Props” is also a slang term, meaning “proper respect.” In this show, we analyze the props in photographic portraits taken by RSR between 1920-1936 to see the way that the “props”—most often objects chosen by the sitters themselves—tell us something about the self-identity of the sitters. The objects chosen often underscore the proper respect due the sitters based on their attainments, but also can give insights—in an otherwise very formulaic genre—into the inner desires and predilections of the sitters. Props thus can help us see beyond the surface, or, perhaps conversely, can reify socially-agreed upon tropes.  

September 3 – December 14, 2019

Richardson Family Art Museum (lower level)
Exhibit Hours: Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday: 1 – 5 p.m.
Thursday: 1 – 9 p.m.
Closed on Sunday and Monday

Southern Gothic: Intersections of Art and Literature in the Johnson Collection

From Edgar Allen Poe’s haunting tale of The Gold Bug (1843) to Flannery O'Connor’s biting short story “Good Country People” (1955), the Southern Gothic literary tradition has exhumed the American South’s aberrations, contradictions, and unique sense of dark humor. Drawing exclusively from the Johnson Collection, Southern Gothic examines how nineteenth-and twentieth-century artists borrowed from their literary peers, using a potent visual language to address the tensions between the South’s idyllic visions and its historical realities.This exhibition is guest curated by Elizabeth Driscoll Smith, a Ph.D. candidate from the University California, Santa Barbara, and the Johnson Collection’s 2019 graduate fellow.

September 3 – December 14, 2019

Richardson Family Art Museum (upper level)