The Springfield Art Museum celebrates its 94th year of service to our community with a special exhibition calendar packed with local, regional, and international interest during 2022. On Oct. 28, 1994, Mayor N.L. “Mac” McCartney proclaimed Oct. 28 as Springfield Art Museum Day. Twenty-seven years later, Mayor Ken McClure issued a new proclamation honoring the museum’s 75th anniversary as a department of the City of Springfield. Prior to being deeded to the City of Springfield in 1946, the museum was privately run by a group known as the Art Study Club.
New in 2022
Yoko Ono: Mend Piece (April 9, 2022 – July 10, 2022) – Beginning in April 2022, the Springfield Art Museum invites our visitors to engage with the participatory exhibition, Yoko Ono: Mend Piece. Ono proposes communal mending as an act of healing. In a seemingly simple white room, shattered cups and saucers are placed on a table. Participants are asked to mend the fragments together using common household items: twine, glue, scissors, and tape. The resulting works are displayed on nearby shelves, evidence of the power of collective action.
Yoko Ono is widely recognized for her pioneering conceptual art, which has encompassed performance, instruction, film, music, and writing. She also continues to work tirelessly for world peace. Mend Piece embraces the metaphor of the ancient Japanese art of Kintsugi, a technique of repairing broken or cracked pottery using brushstrokes of gold and silver, a philosophy that treats the breakage and repair as part of the object’s history – an important and precious detail, rather than something to disguise.
This exhibition is organized by the American Federation of Arts (AFA). The presentation of Yoko Ono’s Mend Piece (Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York City version) is part of Art Room, an ongoing series of contemporary art installations organized by the AFA. Support for the Springfield Art Museum’s presentation of Yoko Ono: Mend Piece is generously provided by a lead gift from the Melinda J. McDaniel Charitable Trust, UW, Bank of America, N.A., Trustees and additional support from Howard C. and Nadia T. Cavner.
The Open Window (April 9–July 10) – Italian Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti instructed painters to consider the frame of a painting as an open window. This treatise laid out a method for effectively creating single-point space in painting and, consequently, served as a defining concept for theories of painting, architecture, and moving pictures. Of course, “Alberti’s window” has been challenged repeatedly by modern artists through painting movements like Cubism, photographic collage, and avant-garde film. The works in this special exhibition, pulled from the Museum’s permanent collection, either follow or challenge the metaphor of Alberti’s window, while providing an intellectual space to consider how our own views are framed.
Humanities: Vol. 1 (July 23–Nov. 13) – The Springfield Art Museum, like any institution, is supported by a wide variety of staff roles. While some might be familiar with the idea of a curator or educator, it takes everyone from security to custodial, development to administration to keep the museum moving forward. Regardless of job duties, everyone at the museum works in and around the permanent collection. So, what connections with art have we made as we secure the building, manage contracts, coordinate facility repairs, and write grants? This exhibition seeks to answer that question by highlighting favorite works by a range of people who help move the museum forward including staff, board, docents, and committee members.
Humanities: Vol. 2 (Sept. 17, 2022–Feb. 19, 2023) – This exhibition started with a series of questions: What does our collection mean to Springfieldians? Does our collection mean anything to Springfieldians? How would we know? To seek answers to this question, Curator of Art Sarah Buhr invited three local artists in different disciplines to tour the museum’s vaults and see the connections that might exist between the collection and the community. These tours have resulted in an exhibition that will pair objects from the museum’s permanent collection, as chosen by poet Kate Murr, musician Jin J X, and dancer Sarah Wilcoxon, with original work created in their own mediums, inspired by the chosen objects. The result will be an exhibition featuring the museum’s permanent collection, new poetry, new music, and a dance film created by these local artists.
Rodney Frew (Nov. 26–March 19, 2023) – This exhibition features work by longtime local artist and art educator Rodney Frew. Frew taught at Missouri State University for 34 years, retiring with emeritus status. He exhibited his work often at the Museum, as well as in national and international exhibitions. The museum was gifted a large body of work by the artist’s son, Morgan Frew, in 2019. This exhibition will feature many of these newly donated works in context with additional work by Rodney Frew from the museum’s collection.
Frieda Logan: Swap Meet (Nov. 26–March 19, 2023) – Frieda Logan was a local artist who was active in the Springfield Visual Arts Alliance, the Springfield Art Museum’s annual Watercolor USA exhibition, and the Visual Arts Committee for Springfield Public Schools. Prior to retiring in Springfield, Logan managed a freelance career in Kansas City creating commercial illustrations for Macy’s Department Store and Ray’s Advertising. This exhibition features a series of paintings, gifted by Logan to the Museum in 2004, featuring heartfelt depictions of daily life in the Midwest, circa 1982, from swap meets to flea markets, from Kansas City street musicians to mohawked museum visitors.
Lyrical Abstraction (Nov. 26 – March 19, 2023) – In America in the 1960s and 70s, a group of artists developed in reaction to the aesthetics and political implications of minimalist and conceptual art. Artists such as Dan Christensen, Larry Poons, Robert Natkin, and Sam Francis sought to expand the idea of abstract painting and to reassert the importance of the formal elements of line and color. These artists were dubbed “lyrical abstractionists” and their work was characterized by loose gestural brushstrokes, acrylic staining, occasional imagery, rich color, and other painterly techniques. This exhibit features work by lyrical abstract artists in the Museum’s permanent collection including Poons, Natkin, Francis, and Jules Olitski, among others.
Returning in 2022
All School Exhibition (March 5-April 24) – The museum’s longest running exhibition initiative, the All School Exhibition invites student artists from public, private, parochial, and home school cooperatives to exhibit outstanding artwork in our largest gallery space. This exhibit also reflects the work of the incredibly talented teachers in our community, many of whom are practicing artists themselves. This year marks the 90th anniversary of the All School Exhibition. Support for the All School Exhibition is generously provided by Howard C. and Nadia T. Cavner.
Missouri State University MFA Showcase (May 7–22) – This special exhibition features bodies of work produced by Missouri State University graduate students pursuing a master of fine arts degree in visual studies from the Art + Design Department.
Watercolor USA 2022 (June 4–Aug. 28) – This annual summer favorite returns with over $20,000 in cash prizes, artist materials packages, and possible Museum purchase awards available. This will be the 61st showing of the very best in contemporary American watermedia, as judged by Kevin Umaña, co-founder of The Ekru Project in Kansas City.
Evergreen in 2022
New works from American artists from the 18th century onward will continue to rotate quarterly into Creating an American Identity, our semi-permanent exhibition of our permanent collection that focuses on the ways in which artists respond to and reveal our cultural identity as Americans. This exhibition includes a selection of 75+ works from as wide an array of artistic voices as possible with our current collection including even more works by women, people of color, Indigenous peoples, and LGBTQ+ communities.
Selections from the museum’s Asian art collection are currently installed in our Hartman Gallery. Selections from the museum’s ceramics collections are currently installed in the Musgrave Gallery. Patrons can also enjoy installation pieces like Anne Lindberg’s titled sky and Dale Chihuly’s Autumn Persian and Feather Chandelier, year-round. The museum’s grounds also include outdoor sculptures including works by Rebecca Hackemann, John Henry, Richard Hunt, and Ernest Trova.
Continuing from 2021
The Inferno of Dante: Etchings by Michael Mazur (through Feb. 20) – This special exhibition pairs 41 etchings from the Museum’s permanent collection illustrating Dante Alighieri’s The Inferno. The exhibit pairs Mazur’s etchings with the relevant excerpted portions of Dante’s poem in Italian, along with English translations by U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Financial assistance for this project has been provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
Linda Lopez: Long Lost (through March 20) – This major solo exhibition features immersive spaces, mosaics, and sculptures by Linda Nguyen Lopez, a first-generation American artist of Vietnamese and Mexican descent. Her unexpected porcelain sculptures investigate language and identity as imaginatively embedded in the mundane objects around us. Financial assistance for this project has been provided by the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.