Year of the Collection: spring–summer 2019 exhibitions

Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois has designated 2019 the Year of the Collection. KAM’s spring-summer exhibitions celebrate the depth and breadth of the museum’s art collection.

From Hand to Hand: Painting and the Animation of History in Northern India
February 28–May 12, 2019
This exhibition features works from KAM’s collection of exquisite paintings predominantly from Rajasthan and the Punjab hills, in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent.

Many of these works were commissioned by royals of the Rajput or Hindu, princely courts that came under the suzerainty of the Mughal Empire between the late 1500s and 1800s. Especially prevalent are images drawn from the great Hindu epics in which stories of love, longing, and devotion are recounted through the deeds of Hindu deities and their avatars on earth.

From Hand to Hand explores the performative dimensions of these evocative paintings. The exhibition’s related programming asks more broadly how these works narrate themselves into the contemporary politics of place and identity in South Asia today.

Curated by Allyson Purpura, senior curator, curator of Global African Art with research assistance from Yutong Shi and Samit Sinha

Emphatic: American Painting from the Collection
February 28–May 12, 2019
Through composition, subject matter, and paint application—along with such tools as an implied grid, arresting color, and brushwork—artists in the second half of the twentieth century engaged profoundly with the materiality of paint and its potential to convey both grandeur and intimacy.

Drawn from KAM’s collection and including artwork by Sue Coe, Louise Fishman, Leon Golub, Robert Indiana, Annette Lemieux, David Park, Mark Rothko, Hedda Sterne, and Purvis Young, this exhibition features works that offer resolute statements on the physical and emotional significance of painting. Their emphatic tones resonate despite—or because of—the artists’ great ambivalence towards the representability of history, violence, and desire.

Curated by Amy L. Powell, curator of Modern and Contemporary Art

Blue and White Ceramics: An Enduring Global Obsession
August 30, 2018­–August 31, 2019
Blue and White explores the technological advances, trade networks, and shared aesthetics that sustain a global appetite for blue-and-white ceramics. The exhibition centers on Chinese blue-and-white porcelain, which has been collected and emulated around the world since the Yuan Dynasty, as well as the many ceramic traditions inspired by these wares. Even as new types of decoration were developed over the centuries, blue-and-white never went out of fashion.

The exhibition includes American, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Japanese, Mexican, Swedish, and Turkish ceramics from the Ming Dynasty to the present day.

Curated by Maureen Warren, curator of European and American Art

About Krannert Art Museum
Krannert Art Museum (KAM) promotes a vibrant exchange of ideas in the visual arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The museum’s rich permanent collection contains more than 10,000 works of art dating from the fourth millennium BCE to the present, representing a broad range of cultures and varied modes of artistic expression. For more information, contact kam-info [​at​] illinois.edu.

Exhibition Sponsorship
Krannert Art Museum exhibitions and programs are made possible in part by a major grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency.

From Hand to Hand: Painting and the Animation of History in Northern India is co-sponsored by the India Studies Fund, administered by the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Illinois, and Krannert Art Museum.

Blue and White Ceramics: An Enduring Global Obsession is co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian & Pacific Studies at Illinois and Krannert Art Museum.