Vassar College’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center presents a summer of art with exhibitions ranging from Robert Rauschenberg’s news-inspired screen prints and a related photo display, drawings by sculptor Harry Roseman, and a poignant commemoration of Juneteenth.

The Loeb Art Center also returns to regular public hours, every day (except Monday) from 11am to 5pm.  As always, admission is free.  For more information about accessing the Vassar campus, please refer to VassarTogether.

“Although we’ve been open to visitors on weekends since last August,” noted Bart Thurber, the Anne Hendricks Bass Director, “we are delighted that all visitors will be welcome six days per week to see our special exhibitions and the rest of the Loeb’s galleries.”

Summer exhibitions include:

Time Capsule, 1970: Rauschenberg's Currents, an in-depth look at avant-garde artist Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1970 series of politically charged screen prints, is on view from June 26–September 19, 2021.  In 1970 Rauschenberg superimposed stories, headlines, advertisements, and images clipped from newspapers and tabloids to produce Surface Series from Currents: eighteen large-scale screen prints that reflected the strident social and political change of the period.  The series is both a technical feat of modernist printmaking and a chance to peer inside Rauschenberg’s time capsule and witness the cacophony of violence, warfare, and political backlash that defined world events of the time.

Organized by guest curator Calvin Brown, the exhibition also features two original collages on loan from the Rauschenberg Foundation as well as sixteen related works from the Loeb’s collection by artists such as Kurt Schwitters, Lee Friedlander, Walker Evans, Ray Johnson, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol.

Photo Currents: Media, Circulation, Spectacle, is on view upstairs in the Hoene Hoy Photography Gallery from July 10 – October 10, 2021.  In light of the radical transformation of popular media with the rise of the internet, citizen journalism, and social media, this exhibition considers photography’s role as a mediator of collective experiences and memories of historical events.  Ever since its invention almost two centuries ago, photography has turned newsworthy events into consumable spectacles.  The exhibition considers how photographs create and circulate media spectacles. As we witness the ever-increasing power of images to verify and manufacture truth, we are challenged to consider our relationship to modern media as consumers, citizens, and humans. Included are works by Burton Berinsky, Billy Name, Andy Warhol, and Garry Winogrand, among others.  The Hoene Hoy Photography Gallery was established through an endowment given by Anne Hoene Hoy, Vassar alumna, class of 1963.  The space is dedicated to showing selected works from the Loeb’s collection of almost 5,000 photographs.

Tilled Fields, a solo show by New York sculptor Harry Roseman, who taught at Vassar for 40 years, is featured in the Project and Focus galleries from July 3–September 12, 2021.  The exhibition engages viewers with eighteen striking drawings on paper and cloth by New York sculptor Harry Roseman.  Completely independent from being made in preparation for other works of art, the drawings provide surfaces onto which Roseman cultivates his fantastic, patterned arenas of line.  The exhibition presents recent works as well as earlier drawings and “sculpture-drawings” made since the 1980s when he began teaching studio art at Vassar.

Hudson Valley History Reimagined: Vinnie Bagwell's Portraits of Enslaved Youth, a commemoration of Juneteenth and a celebration of the emancipation of those who were enslaved in the United States, is on view in the Loeb’s new In the Spotlight space from June 5–September 5, 2021.  In an effort “to raise consciousness, to spark intrigue, to foster dialogue,” Yonkers-based artist Vinnie Bagwell’s bronze statues of African youth pay tribute to people separated from their families and their homes and sold into slavery in a foreign land.  A slide show of a local family album reminds us that Black families not only worked the land but were owners of farmland nearby.  Works on paper from the Loeb collection are included as a backdrop for the often-untold stories of African families and their descendants.

The In the Spotlight space is dedicated to special projects that show how the Loeb is expanding beyond its traditional practices of research, display, and interpretation.  Support for In the Spotlight is provided by Mary Ellen Weisl Rudolph ’61, P ’98 and James N. Rudolph P ’98.

Time Capsule, 1970: Rauschenberg's Currents is supported by the Milton R. Bellin Estate Fund.

Tilled Fields is sponsored by the Evelyn B. Metzger Exhibition Fund.

About the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center was originally established in 1864 as the Vassar College Art Gallery.  The current 36,400-square-foot facility, designed by Cesar Pelli and named in honor of the new building's primary donor, opened in 1993.  Vassar was the first U.S. college founded with an art museum as a part of its original plans, and at any given time the galleries of the Loeb feature works from its extensive collections.  The Loeb's collections chart the history of art from antiquity to the present and comprise over 22,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and ceramic wares.  Notable holdings include the Warburg Collection of Old Master prints, an important group of Hudson River School paintings given by Matthew Vassar at the college's inception, and a wide range of works by major European and American 20th-century artists.

Admission to the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is free and all galleries are wheelchair accessible.  The Loeb is now open to the public every day (except Monday) from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m.  The Loeb is located at 124 Raymond Avenue near the entrance to the Vassar College campus. parking is available on Raymond Avenue. Directions to the Vassar campus in Poughkeepsie, NY.

The Art Center is also accessible via the Dutchess County Public Transit, Bus Route L.  For additional information, the public may call (845) 437-5632 or visit fllac.vassar.edu.

Land Acknowledgement

We acknowledge that Vassar stands upon the homelands of the Munsee Lenape, Indigenous peoples who have an enduring connection to this place despite being forcibly displaced by European colonization.  Munsee Lenape peoples continue today as the Stockbridge-Munsee Community in Wisconsin, the Delaware Tribe and the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, and the Munsee-Delaware Nation in Ontario.  This acknowledgment, however, is insufficient without our reckoning with the reality that every member of the Vassar community since 1861 has benefited from these Native peoples’ displacement, and it is hollow without our efforts to counter the effects of structures that have long enabled—and that still perpetuate—injustice against Indigenous Americans. To that end, we commit to build and sustain relationships with Native communities; to expand opportunities at Vassar for Native students, as well as Native faculty and other employees; and to collaborate with Native nations to know better the Indigenous peoples, past and present, who care for this land.

Vassar College is a coeducational, independent, residential liberal arts college founded in 1861.