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.

Across a diverse selection of prints, sculpture, photographs, and drawings, this exhibition presents disruptive combinations of texts and images. Dating from the nineteenth century to the present day, the works on display employ visual and semantic tactics that are surprising, satirical, and sometimes unsettling. Individual objects feature captions, labels, speech banderoles, narratives, poems, as well as words and letters shaped into artful forms. The artworks provoke their beholders to question assumptions, consider difficult truths, and cast a critical eye on the social world.

Italian artist, archaeologist, and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) combined his multi-disciplinary interests to produce dramatic depictions of Roman temples, aqueducts, monuments, and ruins. In the eighteenth century, Piranesi’s prints often inspired travelers to embark on the Grand Tour through Europe. Some tourists then brought home an engraving by Piranesi to commemorate their experiences among these newly excavated sites. Other travelers, such as Commodore Jesse Duncan Elliott (1782-1845), a former Dickinson College Trustee and resident of Carlisle, acquired eclectic collections of antique fragments during their Mediterranean travels. Curated by Dickinson student Emily Angelucci ’24, this exhibition features a wide selection of Piranesi’s romanticized perspectives of Roman ruins alongside Elliott’s artifacts, which include pieces of the Parthenon, sarcophagi, and statuary. Seen in dialogue with Elliott’s antiquities, Piranesi’s prints demonstrate the Grand Tourists’ shared desire for tangible connections to the ancient world.

From sports to hairstyles and tanks to bicycles, this exhibition presents an array of contemporary photography recently acquired by The Trout Gallery. While eclectic in nature, these representations provide provocative investigations of the role photography plays in constructing perceptions of power.