Reynolda House Museum, North Carolina will present an exhibition named 'Now/Then: A Journey in Collecting Contemporary Art at Wake Forest University' running from October 30, 2009 to December 31, 2009, at Mary and Charlie Babcock Gallery.
A collection of contemporary art developed entirely by students seems at first like a radical idea. But this idea, hatched in 1962 by students and faculty at Wake Forest University, led to the formation of a significant and wide-ranging collection that captures the important trends and developments in contemporary art over the last half-century.
Every four years since 1963, a small group of Wake Forest students has undertaken a trip to New York to purchase art. Under the direction of an art department faculty member, the students spend several months prior to the trip researching the contemporary American art scene. In New York, they visit galleries and studios and devote hours to debating the merits of the pieces under consideration. Then, using student union funds, they make their selections.
The result is the Wake Forest University Student Union Collection. Now the University's premier collection, numbering over 150 pieces by over one hundred different artists, the collection includes paintings, prints, drawings, photography, and sculpture by such notable artists as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Alex Katz, Milton Avery, Kiki Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Jules Olitski, Ellsworth Kelly, Adolph Gottlieb, Ben Shahn, Richard Diebenkorn, Collier Schorr, and Do-Ho Suh.
Now/Then: A Journey in Collecting Contemporary Art at Wake Forest University will showcase the breadth and importance of the Student Union Collection by presenting four different models of organizing a collection. The exhibition, installed in Reynolda's main gallery, will be divided into four areas: Collecting Names, highlighting the best-known artists in the collection; Collecting Styles, examining the tension between abstract and representational art since the 1960s; Collecting History, focusing on the 1969 buying trip; and Collecting Stories, documenting the memories of the student collectors.
An exhibition of this kind presents a significant opportunity to reveal the stories that objects have to tell about art history, about American history, and about the ways that younger generations participate in the construction of our culture. -- www.reynoldahouse.org
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