Ellsworth Kelly, Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium, 1980Saratoga Springs, N.Y. - The Tang reopens to the public on Saturday, July 10 (nearly 16 months after being open only to the Skidmore campus). Here are the major exhibitions opening starting Saturday through spring 2022.

Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards, July 10 to November 28, 2021

Ellsworth Kelly: Postcards is the first survey of collaged postcards created by Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015), one of the most important American artists of the 20th century. From 1949 to 2005, Kelly made hundreds of postcard works that show a playful, unbounded space of creative freedom. The exhibition presents 150 of these works, many of them on loan from the Ellsworth Kelly Studio in Spencertown, New York. The exhibition is part of All Together Now, a regional collections sharing project organized by the Tang Teaching Museum with support from the Henry Luce Foundation.

On the web: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/275-ellsworth-kelly-postcards

High-res images: https://skidmore.box.com/s/sm6yg766l3f8zf43izg94ck8hxy7cwjs

Opener 33: Sarah Cain — Enter the Center, July 10 to January 2, 2022

Opener 33: Sarah Cain—Enter the Center is a survey of work by acclaimed Los Angeles-based artist Sarah Cain, who explores and expands upon traditional ideas of painting, often modifying canvases by cutting and braiding, painting on all sides, and adding talismanic objects. Enter the Center will feature site-specific work in which Cain paints other surfaces, including couches and the gallery floor.

 On the web: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/278-opener-33-sarah-cain-enter-the-center

High-res images: https://skidmore.box.com/s/0188wt386pi0ide22hmhzg4041jte79n

Elevator Music 41: Laura Ortman—Dust Dives Alive, July 10 to October 10, 2021

Elevator Music 41: Laura Ortman—Dust Dives Alive presents the artist’s eponymous sound work, created in July 2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with a new visual installation in the Tang Teaching Museum’s elevator. In the sound work, originally commissioned by ISSUE Project Room as part of the Isolated Field Recording Series, Ortman layers and collages her home-recorded experimental music—most prominently featuring the violin—with the buzzing of neighbors, subways, streets, rain, birds, and other sounds of city home life. The sounds fall in and out of harmony, blending and clashing on a journey variously soothing, challenging, melancholic, and hopeful. As we emerge into post-pandemic excitement and hustle, the installation encourages us to slow down, remember, and reflect, to continue to see and hear all that surrounds us—especially the constant hums, whether from neighbors or nature, that create an aural backdrop for our lives. By bringing those noise bleeds to the forefront, Dust Dives Alive broadens the instrumental possibilities of experimental music as it considers the role of sound as a means for human connection.

On the web: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/361-elevator-music-41-laura-ortman-dust-dives-alive

Lauren Kelley: Location Scouting, October 16, 2021, to September 10, 2023

Conceived and designed for conversation, dialogue, study, and contemplation, Location Scouting is the fourth exhibition in a series that invites an artist to re-imagine what a community space in the museum can be. Artist and curator Lauren Kelley reshapes the Tang Teaching Museum’s mezzanine by combining meditations on travel with snapshots of everyday life in her drawings, sculpture, and stop-motion animation videos. Using plasticine, toys, and souvenirs, Kelley’s videos conjure worlds that are malleable and unfixed, inhabited by robust protagonists whose quirks stem from efforts to correct the asymmetrical relationships they encounter. Accentuating the off-kilter, Location Scouting speaks to the shifts and rifts inherent in navigating today’s post-pandemic landscape.

On the web: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/360-lauren-kelley-location-scouting

Opener 34: Ruby Sky Stiler, January 29, 2022, to May 15, 2022

A solo exhibition by Ruby Sky Stiler will feature new relief paintings, site-specific line sculptures, furniture-sculpture, and more. Drawing from the techniques and language of classical antiquity, Art Deco illustrations, and twentieth-century abstraction, Stiler’s sculpture and wall-based works often take shape as archaeological reconstructions; man, woman, and child figures, amphorae, and mosaic patterning are all repeating motifs. While much of the artist’s visual language is rooted in the ancient past, the materials she uses are distinctly contemporary. These include resin, plaster, hot glue, stained wood, and air brush. With this play of authenticity and materials, Stiler constructs a historical narrative of her own that interweaves high and low, past and present, the authentic and the reproduced.

On the web: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/287-opener-34-ruby-sky-stiler

Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science, January 29, 2022, to June 12, 2022

For centuries, fiber arts have influenced practical, theoretical, and pedagogical areas of the sciences as diverse as digital technology, mathematics, neuroscience, medicine, and more. Radical Fiber: Threads Connecting Art and Science explores this relationship through contemporary art and historical artifacts centered on four key themes: the empirical, the artificial, the body, and the brain. A celebration of interdisciplinary creativity and collaborative learning, Radical Fiber foregrounds each work as at once fine art, process-driven craft, and scientific tool, complicating existing frameworks across fields. 

Radical Fiber will feature a new artwork created by amateur and professional makers around the globe: the Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef, part of the worldwide Crochet Coral Reef project by Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring. The Saratoga Springs Satellite Reef draws on the long historical connections, especially in the United States, between fiber practice and community building and will connect hobby crafters, art professionals, novice crocheters, and students from Skidmore, broader Saratoga, and global communities.

On the web: https://tang.skidmore.edu/exhibitions/286-radical-fiber-threads-connecting-art-and-science

About the Tang Teaching Museum

The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College is a pioneer of interdisciplinary exploration and learning. A cultural anchor of New York’s Capital Region, the Tang’s approach has become a model for university art museums across the country — with exhibition programs that bring together visual and performing arts with interdisciplinary ideas from history, economics, biology, dance, and physics, to name just a few. The Tang has one of the most rigorous faculty-engagement initiatives in the nation, and a robust publication and touring exhibition program that extends the museum’s reach far beyond its walls. The Tang Teaching Museum’s award-winning building, designed by architect Antoine Predock, serves as a visual metaphor for the convergence of art and ideas. The Tang closed to the public in March 2020, due to the coronavirus, though it remained opened online and opened to the Skidmore campus community. July 10, 2021, marks the museums official reopening to the public. The Tang is a Blue Star Museum and welcomes active military and their families. Museum hours: Thursday to Sunday, Noon to 5pm. http://tang.skidmore.edu

Media contact:

Michael Janairo

Head of Communications | Tang Teaching Museum

mjanairo@skidmore.edu | 518-580-5542

 

Image Caption: Ellsworth Kelly, Cincinnati Riverfront Stadium, 1980, 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches, collection of Jack Shear, copyright Ellsworth Kelly Foundation