By
Maggie Burnett
Arizona Summer Wildcat
UA Museum of Art displays the works of 60 renowned artists from its permanent collection
Regardless of the weather, the show must go on - especially when it's a show at the UA Museum of Art.
"Come Rain or Shine: 20th Century American Realism," an exhibit composed exclusively of works from the museum's permanent collection, is now showing at the University of Arizona's Museum of Art.
Among the artists featured in the exhibit are Thomas Hart Benton, James Steuart Curry, Alexander Hogue, Reginald Marsh and Luis Jimenez.
"It includes about 60 different artists, all work that is selected from the museum's permanent collection," Peter Briggs, the museum's chief curator, said. "The exhibit is particularly strong in work from the '20s, '30s and '40s."
Though the work of many of the artists shown has hung at the museum in other exhibits, Briggs said this is the first exhibit that takes a 100-year view of realism in American exhibitions.
"We've not done this before," he said.
The wide variety of artists the museum has in its collection is another aspect of the exhibit that has been played up.
"(The exhibit) highlights the museum's fine collection of American realism, especially from the 1930s on," said Paul Ivey, an associated professor of art history. "We have a super collection here. For a small city like Tucson, it's unbelievable."
"The artists exhibited absolutely define realism over the last century," he added. "That's what so amazing about our collection. Some museums have the same artists we do but we have really good examples."
Realism, by artistic definition, strives to depict the world with photographic accuracy. Yet, Briggs said he tried to move away from this explanation and get into the deeper issues of everyday life.
"I wanted to chip away at the notion that that's what realism needed to be and deal more with the notion that realism may also be about, in a stronger way, depicting the more essential content of everyday life," Briggs said. "Everyday life is what people do from the time they wake up until they go to sleep - working, political demonstrations, eating their food, riding a bicycle. It's not about abstract notions."
Ivey agreed, adding that American realism is different from other artistic genres in that it is less abstract and looks inwardly at society.
"There are a lot of different styles of realism. This exhibit is about the 'reality of the society' or how society perceives itself or better yet, how artists perceive the society they're painting in."
Though the museum typically hosts exhibits from around the world during the year, Briggs said it is not uncommon for the museum to pull from their permanent collection for summer exhibitions.
"You can typically see these works during the year in other contexts (in the museum)," he said. "But it's been our practice to curate a show from the museum's permanent collection for the summer."
When designing the exhibit, Briggs said he looked to "combine thematic juxtapositions with chronological ones," but the final format of the exhibit boiled down to what the museum had to work with.
"There's a lot of different approaches to what may or may not be realism," he said. "In terms of deciding, it had to do with the quality of artwork, relevance of artwork to exhibitions, what we had duplicates of and trying to get a breadth chronologically. Those were some of the main criteria that went into the selection."
Because Briggs only had a specific selection of works from which to choose, he said he ran across minor limitations but nothing which prevented him from creating a powerful exhibit.
"The world has boundaries - not everything is available to you at any one time," he said. "To dwell on what you don't have is to dwell on a fantasy. I try not to deal with that. I take the universe that I have and try and interpret it."
