Claremont, CA—The Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College is pleased to announce four new exhibitions this spring—all on view until July 23, 2023—that showcase both the museum’s permanent collection as well as its commitment to providing mentorship and opportunities for emerging museum professionals:
Through July 23, 2023
Curated by Solomon Salim Moore, assistant curator of collections
This exhibition features more than 50 works drawn from the Benton’s collection that represent the rich hours from dusk until dawn, demonstrating how the night can be many things to different people—a time of solace or anxiety, a playground or prison, a metaphor or a natural phenomenon. To artists, representing night’s velvety, lightless atmosphere can also be a technical challenge. Including such artists as Ansel Adams, Charles-François Daubigny, June Wayne, and Carrie Mae Weems, and amplified by select loans from private collections, Night Contains Multitudes renders anew the supposedly familiar terrain of the night.
April 19–July 23, 2023
Curated by Max Otake, Pitzer College ’23
The result of Otake’s participation in the Benton’s AllPaper Seminar—a professional development program funded in its pilot phase by the Getty Foundation—Unsettled Landscapes brings together prints from the Benton’s collection to explore how artists have represented the tensions that simmer in the American West. In the hands of certain artists, these tensions can be overt; in the hands of others, they appear more subtly. Drawing on but also transcending the conventions of 19th-century landscape painting, the prints on view here offer a complex and nuanced view of the myths of the West.
Stanton Macdonald-Wright: Creation in Three Lines
April 19–July 23, 2023
Curated by Max Uehara, Pomona College ’25
Stanton Macdonald-Wright’s Haiga Portfolio consists of twenty illustrations that accompany the artist’s selection of haiku by six master practitioners of the Japanese poetic form. Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973) completed this portfolio during his residency in the 1960s at a Buddhist monastery in Kyoto, and it is a recent gift to the Benton from the Stanton and Jean Macdonald-Wright Estate. Commentary by Uehara glosses both the prints and the haiku on which they are based.
Michael Menchaca: La Raza Cósmica 20XX
Through July 23, 2023
The 16 screenprints exhibited here by interdisciplinary queer Xicanx artist Michael Menchaca invoke the Spanish casta (caste) painting tradition of 17th- and 18th-century Mexico. These earlier stylized paintings depicted a domestic family portrait of a father, mother, and their (hybrid) offspring, labeled at the bottom with the racial make-up of the child or children. Menchaca’s prints, shown in tandem with the Benton’s Gilded, Carved, and Embossed: Latin American Art 1500–1800, reinvents the genre for today’s “New World” multi-ethnic and fluid identities and use of digital technology. With both humor and trenchant critique, Menchaca explores the systemic oppression at the heart of such representations.
“I am delighted that this slate of exhibitions showcases our permanent collections, including important recent acquisitions as well as treasured gems that are finding a new context through the voices of an array of curatorial contributors,” said Victoria Sancho Lobis, the Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton. “I am especially proud to see so many works on paper take center stage, featuring the impact of our internship program, the AllPaper seminar, and renewed emphasis on Latin American and Latinx art of all periods.”