About The Fralin
In the News
May 2013
C'ville Art Blog
Learning How to Read—On STrAY by Suzanne McClelland
by A.I.Miller and Rose Guterbock, May 28, 2013
Suzanne McClelland asks a lot of her audience. Her exhibition STrAY: Found Poems from a Lost Time, currently at the Fralin Museum of Art, is dense, complicated and poetic. For a casual viewer it may appear obtuse and contemporary in the worst possible way. For another viewer willing to invest time into closely exploring and examining the work, it opens windows to the grinding mechanisms of history and language.
April 2013
C-ville
Fralin Museum’s “Corot to Cézanne” paints a portrait of the collectors
by Sarah Sargent, April 24, 2013
One of America’s great art connoisseurs and patrons, Paul Mellon was quoted as saying that he and his wife “almost never buy a painting or drawing we would not want to live with or see constantly.” Having cut his teeth on father Andrew Mellon’s renowned art collection (which formed the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art), Paul Mellon was graced with an extraordinarily refined eye.
This is evident in Corot to Cézanne: French Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts now on view at the Fralin.
To create the exhibit, Director Bruce Boucher selected 55 works (from 75) that would say something about Paul Mellon because “each collection is in some sense a portrait of the collector.”
March 2013
C-ville
Time pieces: Master drawings at the Fralin are teaching tools and historical documentation
by Sarah Sargent, March 29, 2013
Frederick and Lucy S. Herman began collecting drawings as college students, and over the ensuing 50 years amassed a considerable collection of more than 250 works on paper that showcase the myriad techniques and approaches within the field. Produced between the years 1530 and 1945, these drawings run the gamut. There are religious and genre scenes, portraiture, landscape and social satire. Visual interest seems to be the common thread linking them. Executed in chalk, pen and ink, gouache, or charcoal, some are informal sketches, others studies for paintings, and still others are stand-alone works of art.
UVA's Fralin Museum of Art features a selection of drawings from the Herman's sizeable collection curated by McIntire Department of Art's Lawrence O. Goedde. Most of the works were donated to the museum in 2006–07 for the instruction of the University's students. Working with the drawings has enabled art history students not only to examine original artworks, but also to gain an understanding of the role drawing plays in the creative process. Here, the research done by graduate and undergraduate students has resulted in important new discoveries pertaining to the attributions and subject matter. The collection should also naturally serve as a vital teaching tool for studio art students; how better to learn techniques than by seeing them so consummately employed?
February 2013
C-ville
Breaking the chrysalis: Whistler's early work reveals non-conformist beauty
by Sarah Sargent, February 21, 2013
The butterfly of Becoming the Butterfly, The Fralin Museum's current exhibition of etchings and lithographs by James Abbott McNeill Whistler refers to the stylized butterfly that Whistler used to sign his work and the exhibition. Curated by Emilie Johnson, the show provides a succinct yet effective window into Whistler's evolution as an artist. This is the first of two shows at the museum focusing on the American 19th century master's prints (through April 28). The second (opening April 30), will feature portraits.
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, Whistler began studying art when he was 9 in St. Petersburg, Russia, where his father, an eminent civil engineer, was employed by the Moscow-St. Petersburg Railway. Following the death of his father when Whistler was 15, the family returned to America.
December 2012
The British Society for the History of Science
Great Exhibitions 2012
by Sarah Sargent, September 13, 2012
The Fralin's Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott was awarded third place in the small exhibitions category of the British Society of the History of Science's Great Exhibitions 2012.
November 2012
UVA Today
Workshops Meld Science, Art to Pique Middle School Girls' Interest in STEM Fields
by Lisa Kessler, November 8, 2012
Inside the dark room, six young girls huddle around a green glow. The glow comes from a green laser refracting through a large crystal that redirects beams to bounce off several carefully positioned small mirrors. A fog, produced by a hand-made machine that one girl continuously thumps, makes the beams more visible; the girls take digital pictures, adjusting the crystal or the laser to create a new shot.
Their enthusiasm is audible—besides the beat of the fog machine, the girls' exclamations fill the smoky green darkness as they move around, testing new angles with their cameras to get the perfect photograph. Afterward, in a brightly lit hallway, the girls talk excitedly about the images they captured before moving on to the next workshop.
September 2012
C-ville
Jean Hélion's journey through abstraction at the Fralin Museum of Art
by Sarah Sargent, September 13, 2012
Jean Hélion: Reality and Abstraction, currently on view at U.Va.'s Fralin Museum of Art presents a small, yet rich collection of this under-appreciated artist's work. The eight paintings and numerous works on paper are both handsome works of art and revealing souvenirs from Hélion's artistic journey "through and then away from abstract art."
Curated by Matthew Affron, associate professor, McIntire Department of Art, the exhibition provides an excellent showcase of [French artist, Jean] Hélion's strong compositional sense. Whether working in oil on canvas, or watercolor, charcoal, and ink on paper, his abstract shapes have real authority. In his oils, Hélion uses alternating flat areas of color with volumetric modeling that recalls the work of Fernand Léger. Deftly arranged on the picture plane, these shapes achieve Hélion's ideal of "a surface fully organized and optically integrated." This compositional skill continues in Hélion's representational work where the unexpected placement of figures and objects in space adds drama and interest. Hélion uses a striking combination of cool and warm tones in his paintings. His works on paper rely on strong lines with subtle smudges and washes of watercolor and gouache.
artdaily.org
University of Virginia's Fralin Museum of Art photography exhibit makes science visible
September 7, 2012
Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott, which opened Aug. 31 at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, explores how the photography of Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) has been used in both artistic and scientific contexts.
Abbott's images are important in art, science, documentaries and the history of science education. Trained in New York as a sculptor, she left for Europe in 1921. In Paris, she became the Surrealist artist Man Ray's photographic assistant and saw the photographer Eugéne Atget's work. In 1929, Abbott returned to New York and began a series of documentary photographs of the city and directed the "Changing New York" project for the Works Progress Administration in 1939.
By the early 1950s, Abbott was experimenting with photographs of scientific subjects, and produced images of an array of scientific processes. On display in this exhibition are photographs of magnets, parabolic mirrors, insects, soap bubbles and bones created for scientific textbooks and Science Illustrated magazine. Her images represent a unique melding of science and art, which produces an aesthetic that compels the viewer while also conveying scientific ideas.
The New Criterion
The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed
by Marco Grassi, September 2012
Review of The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed organized by The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia (UVaM) on view at the Museum of Biblical Art (MOBIA), New York.
August 2012
artdaily.org
University of Virginia Fralin Museum of Art exhibits "Jean Hélion: Reality and Abstraction"
August 30, 2012
The French painter Jean Hélion made his name as an abstract painter. Throughout the 1930s, he created extraordinary geometrical compositions that balance pristine clarity with both a strongly dynamic feeling and a sense of unceasing transformation. But by the end of the decade, Hélion turned in a different direction and began to paint worldly subjects in a realistic style.
The Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia explores Hélion's evolution in Jean Hélion: Reality and Abstraction. The exhibit, curated by art history professor Matthew Affron of the College of Arts & Sciences, who is also the museum's curator of modern art, runs from Aug. 31 through Dec. 16.
Hélion helped found an international artists' group called "Abstraction-Création" in Paris, participated in many important exhibitions in Europe, and forged connections with modern art circles in the United States. He spent much of the 1930s shuttling back andforth across the Atlantic and between studios located in Paris, New York City and Rockbridge Baths, Va. His evolution is more complicated than it might first appear, Affron said. "The abstract compositions had contained configurations of form, which were ultimately converted into recognizable figures and objects. And the newer figurative pictures possessed strongly formal qualities. Hélion complicates any simple opposition between notions of abstract art's detachment and realism's involvement in social immediacy."
Daily Progress
Chinese ink paintings at UVa reveal a wealth of details
by David Maurer, August 26, 2012
The artistic alchemy of ancient and modern Chinese masters will be presented in a major exhibition... Included are paintings so skillfully rendered as to make water appear to flow and trees radiate with life. Minimal brushstrokes animate a bird and contrast a green praying mantis with the hue of autumn leaves.
Delicate wisps of fog materialize as if produced by natural forces. A featureless face, all but hidden beneath the sheer pitch of looming cliffs, reveals emotions with the cant of the head.
Unlike exhibits in which one stands back several paces to admire the paintings, Ancient Masters in Modern Styles: Chinese Ink Paintings from the 16th-21st Centuries invites viewers to draw near.
"Get close to the paintings," said Kathleen M. Ryor, curator for the exhibit, which will be on display through Dec. 16. "You'll see Chinese scholars of paintings get their face right up to it.
"That's how you see the brushwork, individual strokes, movement of the artist and the process. And it's amazing, because it's so minimal, and yet so much is achieved."
New York Times
Come Let Us Adore Him
by Holland Cotter, August 9, 2012
...Mr. Boucher and Ms. Fiorani also deliver a masterpiece but supplement it with fresh research, probing questions and answers that try to tell us things that we (and they) didn't know. In short you get, through modest means, a big art experience: beauty, deepened by information, leading to contemplation. As I said, perfect.
C-ville
Lady Like
July 31 — August 6, 2012
French novelist Roland Dorgelès wrote, "Émilie Charmy, it would appear, sees like a woman and paints like a man, from the one she takes grace and from the other strength, and this is what makes her such a strange and powerful painter who holds our attention." Remembered in part for her place in the early avant-garde movement, Charmy produced a body of work full of...full the body. Her sensuous, expressive portraits of the female form have remained objects of admiration....
July 2012
GalleristNY
Museum of Biblical Art Hosts Newly Reconstructed 14th-Century Sienese Altarpiece
by Laura Gilbert, July 31, 2012
One of the must-see exhibitions of the summer is now on view at the Museum of Biblical Art ... "It's Bartolo's masterpiece," said Bruce Boucher, the director of the University of Virginia Art Museum, which first hosted the show and owns one of the predella panels. The other is loaned from the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg, Germany.
Art Newspaper
"A river runs through it: American painting, photography, and prints in the Civil War period"
No 237, July/August 2012
Like Caesar's Gaul, this exhibition is divided into three parts. The first is a display of paintings by Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, David Johnson, Standford Robinson Gifford, John Frederick Kensett and Aaron Draper Shattuck, all mainly New York-based, who composed the first and second (and final) generations of what art historians have name the Hudson River School.
June 2012
C-ville
Emilio Sanchez reveals beauty in unremarkable landscapes
by Peter Barnes, June 26, 2012
Sunlight does peculiar things in the city. It overwhelms surfaces in ways it can't when there's more organic matter around to soak up the glare or scatter it into chaotic shadows. The portfolio of Cuban-American painter Emilio Sanchez contains a broad range of still life and natural scenes, but a collection featuring only his depictions of the built environment makes for a rewarding summer show at the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia.
May 2012
You Tube
The Fralin Museum of Art
by University of Virginia, May 31, 2012
Heywood Fralin (College '62) and his wife Cynthia talk about their gift to the newly named Fralin Museum of Art, and the Museum's importance to future study at the College.
The Roanoke Times | roanoke.com
UVa names art museum for Roanoke benefactors
by Mike Allen, May 22, 2012
The couple responsible for providing Roanoke's Taubman Museum of Art with its collection of American paintings will have an art museum named after them in Charlottesville.
The name of the University of Virginia Art Museum will be changed to the Fralin Museum of Art to honor the donation of a 40-piece collection of American art by Roanoke philanthropists Heywood and Cynthia Fralin, UVa officials announced Monday. The Fralins' gift is the largest single gift of art in the university's history.
"We're really enamored with the idea of future students being able to study American artists ... on an up close and personal basis," Heywood Fralin said Monday.
Daily Progress
Couple to donate 40 artworks to UVa museum which will take their name
by Ted Strong, May 21, 2012
The University of Virginia has named its art museum after Board of Visitors member and former rector W. Heywood Fralin and his wife, Cynthia, after the Fralins announced the donation of their collection of American art to the university.
Newsplex.com
UVa Art Museum Offering Lectures on Art Conservation
May 16, 2012
The University of Virginia Art Museum is allowing the public to get a behind the scene look into art conservation.
The lectures allows visitors to have a hands on experience with art pieces.
Newsplex.com
Fashion Shown to Benefit Local Museum and Public Television
May 7, 2012
A high-end fashion fundraiser is being held at the Main Street Arena Thursday, May 10, 2012.
The ice rink will be transformed into a runway for the Art in Heels event. Art in Heels is a benefit to help the University of Virginia Art Museum and local public television.
Top celebrity designers like Johnathan Kayne and Heidi Elnora from the show Project Runway will showcase their collection.
March 2012
Newsplex.com
Pieces of 14th-Century Altarpiece reunited at UVa Museum
March 1, 2012
Pieces of historic art have been reunited for the first time in hundreds of years, and you can see them at the University of Virginia Art Museum.
On Thursday, the museum hosted a preview of "The Adoration of the Magi," a 14th-century Italian altarpiece painting by Bartolo di Fredi.
Completed around 1385, the altarpiece was dismantled and broken into four pieces at the turn of the 19th century. The painting stayed in Italy while accompanying panels were scattered in museums across the world.
One of the panels ended up at UVa, and now, for a short time, three of the four pieces will be on display together in the "The Adoration of the Magi" exhibit, which opens Friday and runs through May 27.
"It's a great opportunity for us to learn about altarpieces and why our particular panel fits into this larger work of art," said Bruce Boucher, director of the UVa Art Museum
February 2012
C'ville
UVA Art Museum reassembles a 14th century Italian masterpiece
by John Rusher, February 28, 2012
A momentous reunion is happening at the University of Virginia. No, we're not talking about alumni returning to town to relive their glory days. This goes back much further than even Mr. Jefferson himself – all the way to 14th century Italy, when painter Bartolo di Fredi took up his brush to create an altarpiece for a church in his native city of Siena. As he applied his tempera and gold leaf, he surely didn't imagine that half a millenium* later parts of his painting would scatter across the globe, nor that they would be reunited for "The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed," an exhibition opening Friday at the UVA Art Museum.
Midea, Marucs Institute for Digital Education in the Arts
iPad apps, Part 3: Pleasures of the Kin-Aesthetic, Sculptural and Journalistic
by Peter Samis. February 14, 2012
"... In the last post, while praising MoMA's AbEx NY app for its stunning photography and excellent design, I confessed that the sculptures were less
satisfying: the works themselves are often monochrome, and we want to pivot them, see them in 3D.
It took a little known art museum at the University of Virginia, working together with Jason Lawrence, an assistant professor at the same university and co-founder of the
company Arqball, to present a convincing proof-of-concept for how 360° views like the ones we saw in The Elements
might convey the magic of 3D objects in art museums' collections."
NBC 29
UVA Art Museum to Reopen Friday
by Mary Dunleavy, February 2, 2012
The doors at the University of Virginia Art Museum will reopen Friday with a few new quirks. The ground floor will be showcasing masterpieces and Renaissance era art.
Landscapes, 100 years of photography and 18th century porcelain will be featured on the upper level of the museum. In celebration of Valentine's Day, Japanese woodcuts from the 19th century will be on display.
January 2012
C'ville
UVA Art Museum's new run covers ground: Four shows, 500 years, and three mediums
by Sarah Sargent, January 31, 2012
The UVA Art Museum unveiled four new shows earlier this month that cover a breathtaking expanse of ground and make for an enjoyable afternoon of fine art. Curated by Paul Barolsky, Commonwealth Professor of Italian Renaissance Art and Literature, "Master Printmakers: The Italian Renaissance and its Modern Legacy" features engravings, woodcuts, and etchings by artists who made prints from the work of Renaissance masters like Raphael, Tintoretto, and Titian.
Daily Progress
UVA Art Museum opens four new exhibits
by Jane Norris, January 20, 2012
The dawn of abstract art in the early 20th century didn't mean sunset for traditional forms of art. Four new exhibitions opening today at the University of Virginia Art Museum show that there's room for plenty of different forms of self-expression under the sun.
December 2011
Newsplex.com
UVA Today: New Art Museum iPad App
December 9, 2011
In this week's UVA Today segment, Nicole Anastasi visited the Newsplex to introduce the University of Virginia Art Museum's new iPad app.
November 2011
Idea
Put 3D objects at your visitors fingertips: UVaM on the iPad
November 29, 2011
Hopi doll with painted headdress springs to life, spinning under my finger tips on a new iPad app from the University of Virginia Art Museum (UVaM).
The delightful app presents 19 different objects in 3D, to spin and zoom, providing an immediacy that rivals seeing an object in real life. In fact, it's better in many ways than peering at an object through a protective case because the objects can be spun through a full 360°, view under bright lighting, at high resolution.
October 2011
The Hook
Make it classy! How the Renaissance codified a style
by Laura Parsons, October 27, 2011
Repeat after me: Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Tuscan, and Composite - anyone who's taken high school Latin knows these are the five types of columns used in Roman architecture. Right? Wrong! As the University of Virginia Art Museum's current exhibition, "Variety, Archeology, and Ornament: Renaissance Architectural Prints from Column to Cornice," shows, Roman builders were much more imaginative than later architectural experts, like Palladio and Vignola, would have us believe.
August 2011
New York Observer
Jennifer Farrell Named Curator of Exhibitions at the University of Virginia Art Museum
by Andrew Russeth, August 30, 2011
The University of Virginia Art Museum has tapped scholar and curator Jennifer Farrell, who has a long history of working at institutions throughout New York and New England, to be its new curator of exhibitions. Ms. Farrell comes to the museum from the New York-based Nancy Graves Foundation, which maintains the archive of the late sculptor and painter Nancy Graves and makes grants to artists.
Before joining the Nancy Graves Foundation, Ms. Farrell served as a fellow and then assistant curator of prints, drawings and photography at the Yale University Art Gallery in in New Haven, Connecticut.
June 2011
The Hook
Getting into shape: Printmakers color perceptions
June 27, 2011, by Laura Parsons
"How to Steal like an Artist" is a humorous blog post by Texas-based artist Austin Kleon, full of down-to-earth advice for creative types. (Google it, if you're not reading this online where there's a hyperlink). Kleon writes that artists by nature constantly cop others' ideas and methods, adapting them for their own use. Examples of just such beneficent thievery are currently on view in the University of Virginia Art Museum's exhibition, New Images, New Techniques: Abstraction in British Screenprints circa 1970.
The seven artists included in the show not only appropriated silkscreen printing from the realm of industrial and commercial production, but they also snagged ideas from previous abstract artists as well as from each other. Drawn from the Museum's permanent collection, the works displayed reveal the dynamic interplay of ideas between artists working in close proximity, as they used the same medium to delve into relationships between shape and color on the page.
May 2011
Newsplex.com, WCAV-TV, CBS 19
Beth On the Bright Side: Flower Exhibition
by Beth Duffy, May 5, 2011
Many flower arrangers have been busy at the University of Virginia's Art Museum, as they work to prove the grounds around the museum can be just as artistic as what is inside.
March 2011
Richmond Times-Dispatch
Arts Briefs: U.Va. museum is as close as your computer
by Times-Dispatch Staff, March 6, 2011
The University of Virginia Art Museum has launched an online collection catalog.
The collection provides access to more than 1,000 images and accompanying catalog information for browsing, studying, research and teaching.
The Hook
That '70s show: U.Va. paints an era
by Laura Parsons, March 1, 2011, issue #1009
No artist works in a vacuum. Whether consciously or un-, artists constantly respond to a host of factors: exposure to other artwork, the immediate environment, ideas discussed with creative types, political, economic, and social circumstances, etc. But inevitably, what seems radical at the moment will fade to unremarkable in the future.
So, reinvigorating the zeitgeist of the era was curator Andrea Douglas's challenge in organizing Excavating New Ground: American Art in the 1970s, currently on view at the University of Virginia Art Museum. Douglas selected 13 paintings and one sculpture from the Museum's permanent collection, most of them monumental in size, to reflect the "big" East Coast ideas of the period, which included a both/and rather than either/or approach to formerly clear-cut divisions like realism and abstraction, sculpture and painting.
February 2011
NBC 29 WVIR-TV
Henry Moore's Seated Woman
February 22, 2011
CBS 19 WCAV
Seated Woman Statue Now Sits Along Rugby Road
February 22, 2011
On Tuesday, a statue entitled Seated Woman 1958-1859, was installed along Rugby Road in Charlottesville. The statue which now sits in front of the University of Virginia Art Museum is an indefinite loan from the Henry Moore Foundation.
The Hook
Southern (dis)comfort: Photographers expose their roots
February 21, 2011, by Laura Parsons
"You don't have a southern bone in your body," a friend recently remarked. She meant it as a compliment, but the truth is I consider myself quintessentially southern. I was born in Lexington, to parents who were both native Virginians, and although I don't identify with bigots, moonshiners, or those who pine for the Confederacy, I do love storytelling and the melancholia of faded beauty.
The South is fundamental to my identity, just as it is for the six artists with work in the UVA Art Museum's exhibition, Southern Views/Southern Photographers. Each contributor offers a distinct aesthetic, but what Shelby Lee Adams, William Christenberry, Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, Pamela Pecchio, and Jeff Whetstone share is a sense of place and a nostalgic impulse that finds beauty in the not-always-pretty way history - both personal and impersonal - unfolds
Cavalier Daily
Framing Andy Warhol: U.Va. Art Museum shows collection of portraits and snaphsots by post-modern master
by Sofia Economopoulos, February 10, 2011
"Old-school glamour made its appearance at the University's Art Museum Jan. 14 when photography by Andy Warhol came to town. The Andy Warhol Foundation in Pittsburgh, Pa. gave more than 28,000 photographs to 200 museums across the nation. The pieces on display include the Polaroids that later became his iconic, four-color silk-screen portraits and snapshots from Warhol's photographic diary (1975-1980). The photos are striking in their variety of style and technique and prominently feature both celebrity and unknown subjects."
"These photographs are like a time capsule of New York in the 1970s and '80s," curator Matthew Affron said of the collection. "My favorites are pictures of celebrities like Debbie Harry and Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West in the Wizard of Oz... Many are spontaneous, candid snapshots of places he was and the people he saw there, and then there are the studies for portraits, so it's this back and forth between the posed and the unposed."
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Art and Alzheimer's at U.Va.
by Carolyn Mooney, February 3 , 2011
"Art engages the senses and makes few demands. It is easily appreciated for its own sake. It humanizes."
"That helps explain why more art museums are developing programs for people suffering from Alzheimer's disease and memory loss. The University of Virginia Art Museum recently
began offering its Eyes on Art program, a collaboration with the Alzheimer's Association's Central and Western Virginia Chapter. Docents trained to deal with Alzheimer's patients lead them on small-group tours when the museum is closed to the public. The tours, which also include family members and care givers, typically focus on three paintings that encourage discussion and self-expression: The Lobby by Willard Franklin Midgette; Jerdon's Courser, a Frank Stella abstract; and Our Good Earth, a World War II poster by John Steuart Curry."
January 2011
WVTF Public Radio
Warhol in Charlottesville
by Sandy Hausman, January 26, 2011
The artist Andy Warhol was known for thumbing his nose at the world of fine art while putting ordinary objects and portraits of celebrities on museum walls. Sandy Hausman reports on a little-known collection of Warhol's works on display at the University of Virginia's art museum.
NBC 29 WVIR-TV
U.Va. Art Museum Get Kids Jammin For Art
by Dannika Lewis, January 24, 2011
The University of Virginia Art Museum is handing over the canvas and encouraging families to enjoy art together.
NBC 29 WVIR-TV
Warhol Photographs on Display at UVA
by Derick Waller, January 19, 2011
He is known as the creator of iconic 1960s pop culture paintings, but now you have a chance to see another side of Andy Warhol.
