Arbus, Frank, Penn: Masterworks of Post-War American Photography comprises thirty-six vintage gelatin silver prints by three of America's leading photographers working in the 1950s and 1960s. The selection of works by Diane Arbus date from 1961 to 1970 and include many of her most celebrated portraits: Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J.; Boy in a Straw Hat Waiting to March in Pro-War Parade, N.Y.C.; and Boy with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. Irving Penn's photographs date from 1948 to 1951, and cover his three most important series from those years: the “Small Trades,” the “Big Nudes,” and the confrontational portraits of the mountain-top inhabitants of Cuzco, Peru. The Robert Franks photos date from 1953 to 1958 and feature some of the key works reproduced in The Americans, arguably the most influential photography book of the past century. Together, these works capture the incipient fissures of Eisenhower-era America across racial, generational, urban/rural, fault lines that were to explode in the decade to follow.

The senior seminar is the capstone experience of the studio art concentration in the Department of Art & Art History at Dickinson College. This exhibition is the culmination of an intensive period of artistic development that spans both semesters of the senior year. During this time, students are pushed to challenge their notions of art and develop a unified body of work that is equally considerate of both technical and conceptual aspects. True to the nature of a liberal arts education, students are encouraged to think across boundaries and draw from four years of rigorous learning and life experience in order to explore the ideas that have captivated them. The title of this year's exhibition, Not in Show, is a reference to all of the work made that will not be seen in the exhibition. The works in the exhibition are the success stories. It took many failed works and a strong sense of resolve in order to get to this point. Specifically, what Not in Show also attempts to address are the unknown aspects in the process of creation, the struggles that take place in and out of the studio, and the moments of surprise discovery and seeming defeat. If the students in the seminar learned anything through the course of the year, it is that any worthwhile endeavor takes much work and persistence. More than leaving Dickinson with a strong portfolio, it is our hope that students leave with a resilience and stubbornness that allow them to work through situations that will continue to confront them both in and out of the studio.

In 2006, I made a body of work specifically about the concept of negotiation. This group of sculptures and drawings were shown in Berlin, Germany. In the catalogue for the show, Pamela Franks, Deputy Director of Collections and Education at the Yale University Art Gallery, provided the viewer with a pathway for interpreting the work. “The genesis of the composition… in these sculptures was a single semicircle with short horizontal elements at either end suggesting platforms for some further exchange. This formal starting point, a two–ended game of balance, is a direct manifestation of the artist’s central conceptual preoccupation in this body of work: the idea of negotiation. The two seats of communication are balanced at either end of a connector that paradoxically keeps the positions apart….The accumulation of individual connecting elements into the overall composition suggests a constellation of relationships with all the negotiable bends and turns, and made or missed connections, of human discourse.” As I took a fresh look at the idea of negotiation, I realized that many of my sculptures reflected a subtle preoccupation with this concept. This show pulls together a broader body of work that considers the many ways that we negotiate. There are pieces from twenty years ago as well as newly developed work. I have used the materiality of the objects to explore the possibility of a larger narrative. I like to think that, through this work, there is an imaginary space between complexity and certainty that establishes a negotiation between objects.

This exhibition considers the interplay between text and image in prints made in France, Germany, and the Netherlands from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Includes works by Albrecht Dürer, Claude Lorraine, Anthony Van Dyck, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Hendrick Goltzius. The exhibition is curated by Dickinson College senior art history majors Dana Angotta, Victoria Cote, Chloe Cunningham, Taylor Evertsberg, Diamond McClintoch, Victoria Schonfeld, Benjamin Slyngstad, and Lauren Wyman under the direction of Phillip Earenfight. The works for this exhibition are on loan from a private collection.

The Ghosts of Our Meat presents more than forty paintings, drawings, and prints by artist/activist Sue Coe. The works address issues of animal rights, cruelty to animals, the meatpacking industry, the ethics of meat consumption, and parallels between the wholesale slaughter of animals and genocide. The exhibition features works from the past twenty-five years including the anti-capitalist Cruel (2011), the haunting You Consume Their Terror (2011), the controversial Auschwitz Begins Whenever Someone Looks at a Slaughterhouse and Thinks “They are Only Animals,” (2009), her clever promotional prints Go Vegan and Nobody Gets Hurt (2010) and Go Vegetarian! (1999), and a series of related works on the theme of buyer’s guilt: Modern Man Followed by the Ghosts of His Meat (1990), El hombre modern seguido por los fantasmas de su carne (2013), and The Ghosts of the Skinned Want Their Coats Back (1998).

The American Civil War witnessed the emergence of a new type of journalist, the “embedded” or “Special Artist.” From 1861 to 1865, Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper, Harper’s Weekly, and the New York Illustrated News sent Special Artists to travel with the Union armies to make drawings of various aspects of warfare, which would serve as the basis for illustrations to accompany news articles. The artists were asked to cover important as well as mundane matters including battles, diplomatic meetings, camp life, discipline within the ranks, and the aftermath of destruction. The Special Artists would add notes and comments to their drawings and send them from the battlefield by train to editorial offices in New York, where teams of engravers would translate the drawings into printing plates. Although the first illustrated newspapers appeared in the 1850s, the Civil War stimulated their subsequent growth and development. At the height of the conflict, weekly circulation reached hundreds of thousands. Without any comparable publication in the South, the New York-based illustrated newspapers, with their overtly pro-Union bias, dominated the new medium. This exhibition presents fifty-one drawings from the Becker Collection and corresponding issues of Leslie’s. Taken together one recognizes the origins of many aspects of modern print journalism—a widely circulated press, illustrated news stories, embedded artists, and their role in shaping public opinion.

Tools in Motion brings together a clever selection of art that incorporates everyday tools and hardware. Drawn from the Hechinger Collection, the works in this exhibition toy with many of the forms and ideas pioneered in Pop Art, but with an ironic playfulness. The works in Tools in Motion demonstrate how everyday tools take on a life of their own when seen from a new perspective, combined with other objects, or presented in conjunction with like works. The exhibition features the work of forty-one artists, including Armand P. Arman, Jim Dine, Jacob Lawrence, Marte Newcombe, Claes Oldenburg, and Maria Porges.

The Benjamin Rush Gallery, located in the Archives and Special Collections of the Waidner-Spahr Library, features Thomas Sully's brilliant portrait of the co-founder of Dickinson College. Painted for Benjamin Rush during the final years of his life, the canvas represents the revolutionary figure seated before a study, amid books, documents, and a distant view of the Pennsylvania Hospital, where he served on the medical staff from 1783 until the time of his death in 1813. The portrait is one of Sully's finest works and reveals the artist's fluid brushwork and command of the leading trends in European portraiture. The work boasts an incomparable provenance, having passed from the hands of the artist to Benjamin Rush and has since remained in the Rush family until its acquisition in 2009 by the Trout Gallery. The portrait is the centerpiece of an exhibition gallery that features a revolving selection of artifacts associated with Benjamin Rush and the founding of Dickinson College.