This exhibition celebrates one of The Trout Gallery’s most generous donors: art historian, curator, educator, and Dickinson College alumnus Eric Denker ’75, PhD. Since his graduation from Dickinson College fifty years ago, Dr. Denker earned his doctorate from the University of Virginia, worked as a Senior Lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and served as the Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Over the decades, The Trout Gallery has received nearly 900 objects from Dr. Denker. The breadth of Dr. Denker’s giving not only reflects his own passions as a collector, but he also leaves a significant imprint upon the community by fostering a deeper understanding of the arts across time periods and cultures.

This cohort of senior studio art majors works with a range of materials and diverse subject matter, but when working together to come up with a title, they all found a connection to memory. Whether a memory of something abandoned, treasured, desired, missed, or uncertain, Cat Acosta, Trudy Chung, Mbhali Edwards, Laila Gwathmey, Sophie Habecker, Geoffrey Ogenrwot, John Park, Sophie Phillips, Emma Rizzella-Roberts, and Alex Snyder have worked through their own processes and ideas connected to this theme during their yearlong senior seminar. As they created in their individual studios, the students would convene every week to critique with one another, collectively understanding that with their established trust they would be able to provide crucial critical feedback to each other.

The exhibition celebrates the extraordinary resources that are “near at hand” at Dickinson College. From the Gallery’s vaults to the professors’ studios, the student co-curators examine how a diverse array of historical objects – including Neolithic stone tool fragments, an Ancient Roman paver, and prints by modern artists Georgia O’Keeffe and Andy Warhol, among others –compare to the subjects, themes, and styles of the faculty artwork. A full-color catalogue with curatorial essays is available. Student curators: Vivian Anderson, Molly Cicco, Phoebe French, McKenna Hillman, Katie Marthins, Sophy Nie, Ava Nienstadt, Cat Orzell, Lily Swain, Grace Toner, and Liam Walters Studio Art Faculty: Todd Arsenault, Andy Bale, Anthony Cervino, and Rachel Eng

The title of this exhibition is borrowed from a small drawing by Isabel Bishop (American, 1902-1988), who is best known for depicting working women in the 1920s and 1930s. Following Bishop's interest in progressive representations of gender and sexuality, this exhibition considers how women artists challenged conventions and faced issues of sexism, racism, and identity in their work. On display are works by artists Käthe Kollwitz (German, 1867-1945), Louise Nevelson (American, 1899-1988), Françoise Gilot (French, 1921-2023), Adrian Piper (American, b. 1960) and Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960), among others, on loan from the Reading Public Museum.

This exhibition celebrates the legacy of David Driskell’s groundbreaking 1976 exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art, which provided audiences with a remarkably comprehensive survey of significant works, broke cultural barriers, and had an enduring impact on generations of artists. Featured artists include Margaret Burroughs, Elizabeth Catlett, Allan Rohan Crite, Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, Hale Woodruff, Alma Thomas, William Henry Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Dox Thrash, and Clementine Hunter, among others. The exhibition will not be a reconstruction of Driskell’s Two Centuries, but rather will celebrate Driskell’s championing of Black art, history, and culture. This is one in a series of American art exhibitions created through a multi-year, multi-institutional partnership formed by the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the Art Bridges Cohort Program.

Growing up in a working-class Jewish family on the Lower East Side of New York City, American artist William Gropper (1897-1977) spent his career denouncing and satirizing corrupt politicians, bourgeois capitalists, and power-hungry dictators in his artworks and commercial illustrations. The title of this exhibition is borrowed from his painting William Gropper’s America: Its Folklore (1946), a whimsically didactic map of the U.S. that illustrates legendary and historical figures, from Molly Pitcher to Johnny Appleseed. After prints of this painting were distributed widely by the U.S. State Department, Gropper was subpoenaed by Senator Joseph McCarthy, accused of Communist backing, and subsequently blacklisted. While this exhibition includes one mythological man from Gropper’s American Folklore Series – Joe Magarac of Pittsburgh, who could bend steel with his bare hands – other works on display provide a broader picture of Gropper’s America. Throughout this diverse selection of prints, drawings, and paintings, Gropper reflects on his personal background and political struggles to call out oppression and injustice.

Over a year-long seminar, senior studio art majors engage in sustained and critical studio inquiry that results in the creation of ambitious and cohesive bodies of artwork, a selection of which are included in the end-of-year thesis exhibition. Under the collective direction of Dickinson’s studio art faculty, the students develop individual projects made in a variety of media, but share a commitment to the investigation of conceptual, material, formal, historical, political, and aesthetic concepts in their scholarship. The 2024 Dickinson Art Studio Majors were Carson Arp, Jess Berghofer, Dominique Dorian, Naim Ezekiel, Kai Lemis, Joshua Manzo, Devin Rossi, Eden Sanville, and Ian Spurrier.

Dickinson College students in the Art History Senior Seminar curated an exhibition and wrote a scholarly exhibition catalogue for selected paintings by Louisa Chase (1951-2016), on loan from the gallery Hirschl & Adler Modern in New York City. In collaboration with Eric W. Baumgartner, ’79, a Dickinson College Art History graduate and Senior Vice President and Director of American Paintings and Sculpture at H&A, the students examined how Chase explored a variety of pictorial techniques and visual styles in her Neo-Expressionist paintings. Chase’s work is represented in the permanent collections of many prominent museums, including the Whitney Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.