Tag Archives: Grossmann Gallery

Connecting Ties: A Transatlantic Friendship on Display in the Grossmann Gallery

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Connecting Ties: A Transatlantic Friendship and the Northern Ireland Peace Process, an exhibition opening next week in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, illustrates through textile language the human dimension to the relationship between the United States, Ireland, and the Northern Ireland peace process.

A collage featuring three arpilleras at the core of this exhibition; 'Pat Hume', 'Tip O’Neill' and 'John Hume, Peacemaker'. (Design and photo: Leisa Duffy, Copyright Conflict Textiles)
A collage featuring three arpilleras at the core of this exhibition: Pat Hume, Tip O’Neill, and John Hume, Peacemaker. (Design and photo: Leisa Duffy, Copyright Conflict Textiles)

The exhibition is co-curated by Conflict Textiles, a unique transnational collection of textiles focused on conflict and human rights abuses, in partnership with John Hume & Thomas P. O’Neill Chair in Peace, INCORE, Ulster University, and the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston. It will be on view from November 17, 2023 through May 2024. Prior to the exhibition opening, the Tip O’Neill textile will be unveiled at the Golden Bridges 2023: Conference Luncheon, where John Hume, Peacemaker and Pat Hume will also be displayed.

A reception with refreshments will be held in the Grossmann Gallery on Friday, November 17, 2023, from 4:30 pm – 6:30 pm, during which the exhibition will be officially opened by Dr. Tom O’Neill. RSVP at the following link to the invitation: Official launch of the Conflict Textiles Exhibition (Boston) Tickets, Fri 17 Nov 2023 at 4:30 | Eventbrite.

The Northern Ireland Conflict (“The Troubles,” 1969-1994), which focused on the division of the island of Ireland, left more than 3,600 people dead, many more injured, and impacted all sectors of society. From the mid-1970s, key individuals from the United States, including Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and Massachusetts Congressman Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, were involved in discussions and negotiations during the peace process, culminating in the Good Friday Agreement signed in April 1998. In supporting peace in Northern Ireland, Tip O’Neill worked closely with John Hume, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Northern Ireland. This unique friendship and the contribution of John Hume’s wife Pat are illustrated in the exhibition.

Tip O’Neill, by Lisa Raye Garlock, 2023. Recycled, hand-printed, and hand-dyed fabrics (cotton, linen, silk, wool), Irish linen, felt, and neckties (provided by the O’Neill family), Conflict Textiles collection. (Photo: Lisa Raye Garlock)
Tip O’Neill, by Lisa Raye Garlock, 2023. Recycled, hand-printed, and hand-dyed fabrics (cotton, linen, silk, wool), Irish linen, felt, and neckties (provided by the O’Neill family), Conflict Textiles collection. (Photo: Lisa Raye Garlock)

The exhibition showcases three specially commissioned textiles highlighting the interconnections and work of these essential people in the peace process. The three textiles entitled Tip O’Neill, Pat Hume, and John Hume, Peacemaker are accompanied by several Northern Ireland textiles depicting the conflict and search for peace in the late twentieth century. Four of these pieces, on loan from Causeway Coast and Glens Borough Council Museum Collection, were created in workshops in Northern Ireland in 2012 and 2013, during which two Northern Ireland communities explored the legacy of the conflict through textile language.

These textiles and many others on display draw their inspiration from early Chilean arpilleras, which are appliquéd picture textiles, handsewn from scraps of fabric onto hessian or burlap. Three Chilean arpilleras from the 1980s and 1990s narrate ordinary peoples’ experiences of the oppressive seventeen-year-long Pinochet dictatorship, which seized power in September 1973. An arpillera from neighboring Argentina
articulates the human rights violations of the Videla regime (1976-1983) and the enduring, courageous protests by the Abuelas (Grandmothers) de Plaza de Mayo.

Selected highlights from the Disappeared Children in Argentina: Rita Arditti’s Interviews with the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo collection and the Padraig O’Malley papers held at UMass Boston are also featured.

The Grossmann Gallery is open during Healey Library hours.

University Archives and Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives and Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives and Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

Elena del Rivero’s Grids and Stains: Aesthetic and Political Site Specificity

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Author: Prof. John Tyson, Art History

Side view of a red and white flag hanging from a railing.
Elena del Rivero (Spanish, b. 1949)
Letter from Home (Suffrage), 2019 
Nylon
3.8 x 5.2 ft (117 x 150 cm)
Installation view, Grossmann Gallery, Healey Library, UMass Boston.
Copyright Elena del Rivero. Photograph by Jon Bakos.

Since the beginning of the semester, one of Elena del Rivero’s monstrous dishtowels, titled Letter from Home (Suffrage), has been on display in the Grossmann Gallery of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.  Visible from the fourth and fifth floors of the library, the flag-artwork is presented on campus as part of the Arts on the Point public art program, directed by University Hall Gallery Director Sam Toabe. Del Rivero’s flag is one of nineteen with an identical design (in a range of different sizes) that have been, are, or will be flying across the United States. The number of flags references the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which legislated women’s right to vote in 1920. Del Rivero recognizes the de facto shortcomings of the change in legislation and the ongoing issues of enfranchisement with the stained forms on her work.

In addition to referencing American politics, Letter from Home (Suffrage) plants a flag in aesthetic territory. The dishtowel-banner alludes to a longer history of geometric abstraction within modern art and architecture. The grid of Letter from Home (Suffrage) recalls the basic structure of the Brutalist architecture of the Healey Library where it is installed; indeed, by this redoubling, it prompts illuminating reflections on the host site. Curiously, the library’s architect Harry Weese links our Columbia Point campus to the infrastructure of the District of Columbia.

Black-and-white photo of large brick building with scaffolding. Construction vehicle and equipment in the foreground.
White two-level study cubicles with desks and steps up to the second level.

Weese designed many of the Metro stations in the nation’s capital. Even as the dishtowel shares the geometries of these institutional structures, it markedly contrasts with the cold, rigid rationalism they communicate. In contradistinction, del Rivero’s use of a more humbly scaled, besmirched matrix tacitly advocates for a distinct logic: she celebrates human use and interaction with the grid.

Overhead view of a train in a Washington, D.C. Metro station.
View of the fourth and fifth floors of the Healey Library with a red and white flag hanging in the direct foreground.

Furthermore, throughout the twentieth century many male artists, from Piet Mondrian to Max Bill to Jasper Johns, were heralded as “geniuses” for their employment of the grid as a central motif. By translating and transposing the form of a gridded dishtowel into the realm of (public) art, del Rivero underscores the fact that textiles used primarily by women–and considered to fall in the lower category of “craft”—formally anticipate “groundbreaking” innovations of the avant-garde. Her flag labors to wrest the grid from the hands of male modernists and suggest it is an emblem of fluidity instead. Equally, the stains on the flag recall the marks and techniques of modernist painters like Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler, who infused their canvases with thinned-down paint. Thus, del Rivero’s project subtly asks us to revise the history of visual and material culture: Letter from Home (Suffrage) posits a reconsideration of gender binaries as well as hierarchies of cultural production between “art” and “craft.”

Beyond para-citing the grids of modern architecture and art, del Rivero’s dishtowel design also recalls the geometric bands and fields of actual flags. Most flags are condensers of a collective political or civic identity. Indicative of the weight of flags as symbols, we even pledge allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. Hence, in some sense, del Rivero’s banners unite the 19 diverse locations where they have been shown in a constellation of feminist politics. They ask us to dream of a yet-to-fully-exist (and perhaps always utopian) feminist political polity—as well as a corresponding imagined community who would rally around its flag. Nevertheless, raising a feminine-coded banner implicitly issues real calls to action too. Letter from Home (Suffrage) can be read as a reminder that engagement in our domestic politics is an urgent matter—a fact that increasingly rings true following the June 24, 2022, overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973).

Thus, the artwork calls attention to our nation’s broader aesthetic and political context as well as the specific site where it hangs, prompting curious audiences to consider United States history and investigate UMass Boston’s histories, herstories, and their stories.

University Archives and Special Collections houses construction photographs of Healey Library and the Columbia Point campus. Substantial holdings documenting feminist politics in Boston and Massachusetts include:

Melissa Shook: Inside and Out – Photographs on display in the University Hall and Grossmann galleries

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Melissa Shook: Inside and Out, a two-part exhibition in the University Hall Gallery and in the Grossmann Gallery on the fifth floor of the Healey Library, brings together photographs, video works, objects, and ephemera spanning six decades to honor the life’s work of artist, educator, and activist Melissa Shook (1939-2020). The exhibition is co-curated by Senior Lecturer II in Art History Carol G.J. Scollans and University Hall Gallery Director Samuel Toabe and will be on view from September 6 through October 29, 2022.

Woman stands in front of a mirror holding a camera, taking a picture of herself
Self-portrait, Melissa Shook, circa 1970s

Best known for her self-portraits and documentary-style photography representing and humanizing members of marginalized communities – including immigrants, queer people, elderly people, and people experiencing houselessness – Shook’s practice expanded throughout her career to include writing, book making, drawing, sculpture, video art, and social practice art through direct action and mutual aid projects. Shook joined UMass Boston in 1979, where she taught photography in the Art and Art History Department for thirty-one years, leaving an indelible mark on the department’s pedagogy as well as generations of students. A catalog with images of Melissa’s photographs will accompany the exhibition, including an introduction by Samuel Toabe, a contextual essay by Carol G.J. Scollans, and texts by Professor of Art Margaret Hart and Melissa’s daughter Krissy Shook. The University Hall Gallery presents the personal side of Shook’s practice, photographing and writing about her own life, as well as sculptural works and video experiments. Healey Library’s Grossmann Gallery features a large selection of her series -Streets are for Nobody, along with archival materials reproduced from the library’s collection of Melissa’s papers, as well as handmade books, sculptural objects, and a collection of her film and pinhole cameras. 

A public reception will be held on Saturday, September 17, 2022, from 2:00-4:00 p.m., starting in the University Hall Gallery.

The establishment of the Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award in honor of the artist coincides with the exhibition. This fund will provide an annual prize to one or more UMass Boston students or graduating seniors who demonstrate exceptional skill or promise in photography, with a preference for documentary photography skills. The award will be presented this year for the first time to Chloe Tomasetta whose photographic work in 2021 documented busy street scenes in Boston’s historic Haymarket district during the height of the pandemic. 

The exhibition and catalog are supported by the Paul Hayes Tucker Fund as well as a generous gift by Caleb Stewart and Richard Snow. The Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award is made possible with a generous gift by Nancy and Wendell Lutz. To contribute to the Melissa Shook Documentary Photography Award, please donate via this link.

For more information, please email UHGallery@umb.edu.

Melissa Shook donated her papers to University Archives and Special Collections in the Healey Library at UMass Boston. The collection contains files kept by Shook and includes correspondence, manuscripts, notes, interviews, research materials, workshop catalogs, show announcements, archival photographic prints, slides, hard drives, MiniDV tapes, DVDs, CDs, a VHS tape, and a selection of framed photographs and text from Shook’s 1994 publication Streets are for Nobody. Additional archival collections related to Shook include University of Massachusetts Boston, Art Department student photographs of the Healey Library, 1982-1984 and a collection of photographs taken by Shook for the Writers’ Workshop hosted by the William Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Social Consequences.

For more information about these collections, please email library.archives@umb.edu.

Elena del Rivero’s Letter from Home (Suffrage) Asks Us What It Means to Fly a Dishtowel Like a Flag

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Author: Prof. John Tyson, Art History

Beginning on August 22, 2022, one of Elena del Rivero’s monstrous dishtowels, titled Letter from Home (Suffrage), will be on display in the Grossmann Gallery of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston. Visible from the fourth floor of the library, the flag-artwork will be presented on campus as part of the Arts on the Point public art program, directed by University Hall Gallery Director Sam Toabe.

Three flags fly on a flagpole with trees and blue sky in the background
Elena del Rivero, Letter from Home (Suffrage), 2019. View of installation at Rocky Mountain College (Photo: Todd Forsgren).

Del Rivero’s flag at UMass Boston is part of a broader multi-site project celebrating women in politics. Elena del Rivero: Home Address has been convened by Professor John A. Tyson of the Art and Art History Department. The project began as a commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment of the United States Constitution, which gave women the right to vote in 1920. Home Address is ongoing and will place nineteen identical flags (in a range of different sizes) in various locations across the country, including: the Consulate General of Spain, Henrique Faria Fine Art, and the Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York City, Tulane University and Xavier University in Louisiana, Rocky Mountain College in Montana, Sun Valley Museum of Art in Idaho, Tampa Museum of Art in Florida, and the University of Wyoming.

Elena del Rivero is a Valencian-born, Spanish-American artist. With studios in New York and Madrid, she regularly exhibits her projects on both sides of the Atlantic. Her artworks are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Colby College Museum of Art in the United States as well as the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Spain. Additionally, del Rivero has been the recipient of many of fellowships and awards, most recently a Joan Mitchell Award and residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Louisiana (2017), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2019), and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2020).

Elena del Rivero, Letter from Home (Suffrage), 2019, Nylon, 3.8 x 5.2 ft (117 x 150 cm) 

Photograph showing flag on a railing in a gallery
View of installation of Elena del Rivero’s Letter from Home (Suffrage) in the Grossmann Gallery

“Del Rivero takes a familiar form—a ‘feminine-coded’ interior textile—and shifts it from the domestic realm into the public sphere,” explains Tyson. “Her banner is intended to be an allegory for women’s changing role in society. Like many of del Rivero’s artworks, it is characterized by openness and generatively dialogues with its surrounds.” The stains on Del Rivero’s flag evoke a range of concepts. “One of the artist’s key concerns is emphasizing the imperfections in the history of American democracy,” Tyson continues. “For example, despite technically winning the right to vote in 1920, many women of color were in practice disenfranchised until the creation of subsequent legislation, perhaps most importantly the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The recent expansion of restrictions on access to ballots in states such as Texas, Florida, and Georgia means that suffrage continues to be a relevant issue.”

Please look out for information about related programming and a blog post by Professor Tyson in the fall semester.

More information about Elena del Rivero and Home Address can be found at this web feature created by the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought and a video recording of a conversation between the artist and Professor Tyson presented by the Tampa Museum of Art in April 2021.

For questions about the Home Address project, please email JohnA.Tyson@umb.edu.

University Archives and Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

The Archives welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to the Archives, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

Grossmann Gallery hosts exhibit documenting U.S. soldiers who opposed the Vietnam War

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Waging Peace FlyerWaging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War, hosted in collaboration with the William Joiner Institute, is now on display through September 22, 2019, in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston. Organized by Ron Carver of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., the traveling exhibition has been exhibited in Vietnam and at the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at Notre Dame and will visit UMass Amherst and Washington, D.C. later this fall.

During America’s War in Vietnam, tens of thousands of GIs and veterans created a robust movement in opposition to the war. The Waging Peace in Vietnam exhibition explores how the anti-war GI movement unfolded, from the numerous anti-war coffee houses springing up outside military bases, to the hundreds of GI newspapers giving an independent voice to active soldiers, to the stockade revolts and the strikes and near-mutinies developing on naval vessels and in the U.S. Air Force. Waging Peace tells this story through oral histories, photographs, documents, and the pages of the underground press written by and for active-duty GIs. The presentation in the Grossmann Gallery also includes primary source documents from Healey Library’s University Archives and Special Collections, as well as materials from the Joiner Institute.

The book, also entitled Waging Peace in Vietnam: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed the War, is edited by Ron Carver, David Cortright, and Barbara Doherty, with an afterword by Christian G. Appy, and is published by New York University Press.  It features fourteen original essays by leading scholars and activists as well as first-hand accounts, oral histories, underground newspapers, posters, flyers, and photographs.

A reception for the exhibit opening and launch of the companion book is scheduled for Thursday, September 12, from 4:00-6:00 p.m. in the Grossmann Gallery on the 5th floor of the Joseph P. Healey Library. An inter-generational panel, hosted by Fred Marchant and featuring veterans from the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and UMass Boston student veterans, is scheduled for Wednesday, September 18, from 3:00-5:00 p.m. in the Alumni Lounge (Campus Center, 2nd floor).

View the exhibition panels online at the Waging Peace website. Read articles about the exhibition in The Guardian (UK) and USA Today.

University Archives and Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives and Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives and Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.