(Main Lobby Area, Mullins Library)

One of the hallmarks of art that transcends the ordinary is a glimpse through an alternative way of seeing. Artist Marilyn Nelson, associate professor in the Department of Art at the University of Arkansas, creates just that in two projects currently on display in Mullins Library. Both projects allow the viewer to explore alternative ways of conceptualizing the written word.

The first project, titled "U. S. Naval Flag Signal Narratives," is a suite of twenty-six editions of serigraph prints--one edition to represent each alphabetic flag. U.S. Navy maritime flags are used to communicate with other vessels while maintaining radio silence. Each flag represents a single letter in the alphabet when hoisted on a halyard as a series, but represents another maritime signal when singly displayed. In addition, each letter also represents a word in the military alphabet code, such as "Charlie" for "C," "tango" for "T," or "Romeo" for "R." Nelson begins with these multiplicities of meaning and adds on additional evocative layers of images, colors, diagrams, documents--all of which are suggested by the original naval flag. Nelson explains that the flags are "visual abbreviations for the words they represent" and her imagery "revolves around lyrical interpretations of these words." Each serigraph represents complex layers of meaning, which Nelson, whose father was a career naval officer, says often arose from "personal histories and iconographies" that have "emerged and evolved to reveal patterns of experience and memory."

The second project, titled "Color Interpretations / Mediations," is a series of paintings depicting Nelson's interpretation of the "vivid color descriptions" in novels such as Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Tolstoy's War and Peace. A "grid field" painting shows a block of each color in the order in which they appear in the novel, and a companion black and white "digital grid" shows the actual color words and the page number on which to locate a specific color mentioned. Nelson says that because the color order is arranged according to the text, "many unexpected color juxtapositions occur" and "areas of pattern, or blocks of similar colors emerge."

Nelson received her BFA in printmaking and her MFA in painting from the University of Colorado in Boulder. From 1979 to 1987 she was Art Director / Designer at Celestial Seasonings, Inc., an herb tea company in Boulder, Colorado. On the faculty at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville since 1993, she currently teaches Visual Design. Previously, she taught at Eastern New Mexico University, University of Oregon and the University of Colorado. She has received grants and awards for her teaching activities, including the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences Master Teacher Award. Her work has been viewed in many solo exhibitions and juried group venues nationally and internationally. These include La Biennale Internationale D'estampe Contemporaine, Quebec, Canada, Siggraph: 30th International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, San Diego, Gallery Pecanians, Mexico City, Gallery International, Baltimore, aRaMoNaSTuDIo and Gallery 402, New York City.

Kristin Musgnug is Associate Professor, Art Department, University of Arkansas. She received a BA in Art History from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1981, and an MFA in Painting from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1988. She joined the University of Arkansas faculty in 1991.

Kristin Musgnug explores the domesticated American landscape in paintings that re-examine the Romantic tradition of landscape painting. Born in Buffalo, New York, Kristin Musgnug received a BA in Art History from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1981, and an MFA in painting from Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1988. Following graduate school, she joined the Core Residency Program at the Houston Museum of Art's Glassell School. Since 1991 she has been on the faculty of the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. During 1994-95 she was Artist in Residence at Lucy Cavendish College of Cambridge University, England. She has made painting trips to England, Macedonia, Nova Scotia and numerous parts of the United States, including residencies at the Norton Island Artists Colony, the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, the Ragdale Foundation, and the Dorland Mountain Colony. In 2002 she received an Arkansas Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Painting. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Kansas State University, Inman Gallery in Houston and the Galveston Arts Center. Her work is in the collection of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and was included in the book, Texas: 150 works from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Kristin Musgnug's work is represented by Inman Gallery in Houston, Texas.

Two of Musgnug's works, "Picnic Island" (2000) and "Maine Seascape" (1997) are on exhibit in the Fine Arts Library through the Spring 2008 semester.

Gallery

An exhibit commemorating the 25th anniversary of the University of Arkansas Press is on display in Special Collections.

The Press publishes approximately 20 titles a year, about a third of which fall under the general heading of Arkansas and Regional Studies.

The Special Collections Department celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year.

Established in 1967 from a closed-stack collection in Vol Walker, Special Collections is now housed on level one in Mullins Library. This exhibit features photos of facilities, personnel, and selected treasures.

The Libraries at the University of Arkansas have been a Federal Depository Library Program participant for United States documents since 1907. As part of its 100th anniversary commemoration as a participant, the Libraries assembled and digitized a small collection of government documents for this online exhibit. The items on display represent a wide variety of material that will be of historic and artistic value; but they will also satisfy a popular curiosity and an aesthetic sensibility. Visit the exhibit.

Dario Viterbo was born in Florence, Italy, in 1890. He was a student of Augusto Rivalta in Florence and had exhibited his work there and in Rome before holding a one-man show in Milan in 1922. Viterbo won prizes for work exhibited at the International Decorative Arts Show in Paris in 1925. He then moved to Paris and became a French citizen. He came to New York as a war refugee from Paris in 1941. His sculptures were shown in New York at the Wildenstein Galleries in 1944. He maintained studios and homes in both New York and Florence until his death in 1961. Other bronzes by Viterbo are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library.

This sculpture, “The Enchantment,” was created by Viterbo in 1942 and was shown in New York at the Sculptors Guild Annual Show in the Argent Galleries in 1950. Images of the sculpture from that show appeared in The New York Times and The Art Digest, where it was described as making “cleaner use of bronze to express simple convex and concave sculptural volumes” (Art Digest, April 1, 1950: page 9). “The Enchantment” was purchased by Marie Wilson Howells and donated to the University of Arkansas in 1956.

Marie Wilson Howells was an Arkansas philanthropist from the celebrated family in east Arkansas for whom the town of Wilson is named. Ms. Howells, who lived in New York for many years, was proud of her Arkansas heritage and made many generous gifts to her home state. She had a deep interest in the intricacies of the human mind as well as a profound concern for higher education. In 1979 she endowed a trust at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, establishing chairs in psychiatry and psychology there.

"Rebirth"

(Located on landing of East Staircase, Mullins Library)

Anita Huffington presented to the University of Arkansas Libraries this alabaster sculpture. According to an inscription on the pedestal, the piece was given in memory of her daughter Lisa Huffington Duque, formerly a student at the University, "with special thanks to Dean Bernard Madison" of Fulbright College "for his vision and fruitful efforts to bring art to the University of Arkansas."

Rebirth depicts a young woman in a curled fetal position. Huffington wrote that she saw it as "a metaphor for change and growth . . . a continuum of all that has been passed on to us from countless lives past and present." She finished the work on June 30, 1982, and on July 31, her daughter Lisa was killed by a drunk driver. The sculpture is mounted on a simple pedestal on a landing of the sprial staircase in the east entrance foyer of Mullins Library. Light from the large windows on the east side filters through the white alabaster, which is luminous in daylight, in accord with Huffington's wish that the piece be displayed in a quiet place near a window.

Although Huffington has settled in the Arkansas woods outside of Winslow, she is well known in national art circles. A native of Baltimore, she attended the University of North Carollina and soon went to New York City, intending to become a dancer. She did in fact study dance with Martha Graham and others and threw herself into the intellectual and artistic life of the late fifties and sixties. She abandoned her ambitions as a dancer, however, and returned to college, eventually earning her M.F.A. degree. She began working in stone and found that "it was the key" that seemed to unlock her creative energies.

Huffington's work is exhibited in galleries in New York, Houston, Dallas, and other cities. Her sandstone torsos were shown at the "Armory Show" in New York, an art event of international importance. In 1997 she received the Jimmy Ernst Award of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a "lifetime achievement" award given to a painter or sculptor whose lifetime contribution has been consistent and dedicated.

Rebirth is the second Huffington sculpture to find a home on the University of Arkansas campus. In 1998 a bronze torso entitled Spring was purchased and is on permanent exhibition in the Bogle Hall in Old Main, headquarters of Fulbright College of Arts & Sciences.

A permanent exhibit of art works by Stephen Chism, a librarian and Library faculty member, is located on the south end of the west lobby in Mullins Library.

Stephen Chism began showing artwork in 1985 as a participant in the Bluefield Gallery Exhibition and has exhibited work regularly in northwest Arkansas since that time. His one-person shows include exhibits at the University Fine Arts Gallery (1991), the Fayetteville Public Library (1992), the "I" Gallery at 111 West Lafayette Street (1992), the Walton Arts Center (1993 and 1995), and the Anne Kittrell Gallery (1994).

Honors include a 1995 artist's grant funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andy Warhol Foundation, and participation in the Illuminance Exhibit at the Lubbock Fine Arts Center in 1996.

Chism works primarily with photo-generated images which are hand-colored and manipulatd to achieve a variety of effects. Reviews of his work have appeared in Grapevine and Invision Magazine.

Some of these works are available for purchase. If interested, please leave a message with the artist at 575-8420.

The bronze bust of Dr. David W. Mullins, the University’s 14th president, was unveiled at a ceremony officially marking the change of the name of the University Library to the David W. Mullins Library on November 21, 1975. The name was changed by action of the Board of Trustess after Mulllins’ retirement as president of the university (1960-1974). The life-size bust was sculpted in the lost wax process by Subrata Lahiri, assistant professor of art.

“Sentascape#1”

(Located in hallway near the Walton Reading Room of Mullins Library)

“Sentascape #2”

(Located in the Public Services area near Reference Collection in Mullins Library)

These two sculptures were donated to the Libraries by Myron Brody in honor of his wife, Senta Brody. “Sentascape #1” is composed of American red granite. “Sentascape #2 is composed of Arkansas limestone and Brazilian black granite.

Myron Brody is an emeritus professor of Art at the University of Arkansas. He has exhibited his photography and his sculpture and other 3D design at museums and universities all over the country, as well as internationally in Europe. He has also contributed to the permanent collections of a number of museums and corporations, including the Museum Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro; the William C. Seitz Memorial Collection at Princeton University; the AVX Corporation at World Headquarters in Great Neck, New York; the Prudential Insurance Company of America in Newark, New Jersey; and Sumitomo Industries Limited in Tokyo, Japan.

“Someone Knocking”

(Located on Level Three West of Mullins Library)

Raised on a small farm outside of Paris, Arkansas, George Dombek received his bachelor’s degree in architecture and his MFA from the University of Arkansas. According to the book On a Clear Day: The Paintings of George Dombek, 1975-1994 (Conway: U of Central Arkansas Press, 1995), this painting is one of a series created for Dombek’s thesis.

Narrator of On a Clear Day, Donald Harington writes, “Midway through Dombek’s graduate studies in art, after doing hundreds of watercolors in his ‘slap-dash’ style, he grew nostalgic for the precise instruments of the architect, and began to use them: straight-edge and T-square and triangle. A course in architectural preservation had exposed him to the decaying barns of the Ozarks, which brought back memories of the hours he’d worked and played in the Arkansas family barn. He began to envision for his master’s thesis the suite of watercolors that he called ‘White Series,’ but which he now calls simply ‘Crates,’ for that is what they are: common wooden-slated vegetable crates tossed or piled in a barn.”

Harington continues, “In his thesis statement, Dombek is careful to point out that the ‘subject matter’ of these crates has no meaning for him; he is clearly concerned only with their visual design, their geometry, the patterns of shadows, the negative and positive spaces of light and dark, the purely formal qualities of the ‘visual experience,’ as Dombek refers repeatedly to the act of seeing.”

“There is no connection between the ‘subject matter’ of the banana and the crates, for they are not banana crates.” Harington writes, “The bananas do not ‘belong’ to the scene; they are clearly contrivances planted in the scene by the artist, to assert the artist’s presence and the viewer’s awareness that the artist is in charge, not merely a recorder of optical reality but a manipulator of it. This concept is reinforced by the presence of the light fixture, a common clamp-on lamp of the type used to illuminate a still-life in the studio. Its serpentine electrical cord, dangling down the picture plane, is a foil to the rigid geometry of the crates, just as the curves of the bananas, as well as their yellow color, are counterpoints to the painting’s gray complexity of diagonal straight lines” (On a Clear Day: The Paintings of George Dombek, 1975-1994, pages 23-25).