 | "Moonlight" by artist Ralph Blakerock is one highlight of the exhibition "To Know the Dark," which opens on Aug. 22. |
From illuminated city streets to moonlit landscapes, hallucinatory visions and nocturnal scenes of soldiers in battle -- the many ways that artists have captured that evocative period from dusk to dawn will be explored in a new exhibition opening on Tuesday, August 22, at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Titled "To Know the Dark: American Artists' Visions of Night," the exhibition features 25 works in a range of media, drawn primarily from the gallery's permanent collection of 19th- and 20th-century art.
"Artists and writers have been inspired -- and occasionally haunted -- by the night since the dawn of history," says Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery. "This special exhibition is a wonderful way to reintroduce some of the gallery's well-known highlights and less familiar works in a new context. We are also delighted with the opportunity to debut several recent acquisitions which further enrich the collection's offerings to gallery visitors and students."
The show was organized by Helen A. Cooper and Robin Jaffee Frank, respectively the Holcombe T. Green Curator and the Alice and Allan Kaplan Senior Associate Curator in the gallery's Department of American Paintings and Sculpture.
Organized thematically, "To Know the Dark" explores the variety of ways that artists have interpreted night both literally and metaphorically. "Artists' visions of night -- offering intimations of suspense, mystery, romance, fantasy, fear, despair and hope -- are as much psychological explorations of the mind as they are transcriptions of the external world," says Frank.
One highlight of the exhibition is "Moonlight" (ca. 1880) by visionary artist Ralph Albert Blakelock, which is on loan from a private collection. The delirious green glow and patterned effects of dark foliage silhouetted against water and sky on a moonlit night can be viewed as a haunting portrait of the artist's own emotional landscape as much as a depiction of a specific place, notes Frank.
Other artists featured in the show include Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Albert Bierstadt, Childe Hassam and Georgia O'Keeffe. Among the new acquisitions that are on display at the gallery for the first time are Oscar Bluemner's watercolor "The Lamp of Sleep" (1927), depicting a snowy landscape illuminated by a full moon; Yvonne Jacquette's "New York Harbor Composite" (2003), a woodcut composed of views taken from the 37th and 81st floors of the World Trade Center; and Robert Adams' photograph of suburban housing from his "Denver, Our Homes" series.
To invite visitors to consider how night has also been interpreted in words, throughout the exhibition there are quotations from literature -- including the poem "To Know the Dark" by Wendell Berry, from which the show's title is taken. It reads: "To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. / To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, / and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings, / and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."
Special programs will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition, including gallery talks by distinguished Yale faculty at 12:20 p.m. on four Wednesdays: Sept. 20, Oct. 11 and 25, and Nov. 8. In addition, the gallery will present a film series featuring experimental works by Stan Brakhage and classic film noir selections Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 16-17, and will host an evening lecture titled "Burning Daylight: Frederic Remington, Electricity and Flash Photography" by Professor Alexander Nemerov at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 19.
"To Know the Dark: American Artists' Visions of Night" is supported by Friends of American Arts at Yale, the Eugénie Prendergast Fund for American Art given by Jan and Warren Adelson, and an endowment made possible by a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Yale University Art Gallery, located at the corner of Chapel and High streets, is free and open to the public Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; and Sunday 1-6 p.m. For further information, visit the website at http://artgallery.yale.edu.
T H I S
'To Know the Dark' exhibit features
American artists' visions of the night
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