Art Exhibits

To Be Sold: Virginia and the American Slave Trade

On View from September 8 to December 10, 2021
Charles B. Wang Center Theatre Gallery

To Be Sold: Virginia and the American Slave Trade examines the American slave trade before the Civil War through the works of British artist Eyre Crowe (1824–1910). Crowe sketched scenes of this inhumane commerce that he would later develop into a series of illustrations and paintings, including his well-known Slaves Waiting for Sale (1853). 

The exhibition is organized into three sections: (1) “The Slave Trade and the Rise of Abolitionism,” which explores the slave trade in the Atlantic; (2) “Eyre Crowe and His Paintings,” which looks at Eyre Crowe’s works and how the iconography of abolition art evolved; and (3) “The Memory of the Slave Trade,” which examines the role of visual culture and the language of abolitionism in the transatlantic world. 

Audiences can view Crowe’s paintings in detail via video and streaming and listen to oral histories from formerly enslaved people recorded by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930s. 

To Be Sold is curated by Maurie D. McInnis, president of Stony Brook University. The exhibit is based on her book, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (University of Chicago Press, 2012). 

The exhibition was first organized by the Library of Virginia with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this exhibition do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. 

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Faculty Artist Spotlight: Howardena Pindell

On view through October 30
Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, 1st floor Staller Center

The Zuccaire Gallery is proud to present our first Faculty Artist Spotlight featuring the work of Howardena Pindell. Two pieces by this internationally-acclaimed faculty artist will be on view from October 4 through 30, 2021, as part of the Presidential Inauguration celebration of Stony Brook University's President Maurie McInnis.

Distinguished Professor Howardena Pindell has taught at Stony Brook University’s Art Department since 1979. Her powerful work has been exhibited extensively, including a recent major museum solo traveling exhibition entitled Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen.

Pindell often employs lengthy, metaphorical processes of destruction/reconstruction. She cuts canvases in strips and sews them back together, building up surfaces in elaborate stages. She paints or draws on sheets of paper, punches out dots from the paper using a paper hole punch, drops the dots onto her canvas, and finally squeegees paint through the “stencil” left in the paper from which she had punched the dots. The artist’s fascination with gridded, serialized imagery, along with surface texture appears throughout her oeuvre. Even in her later, more politically charged work, Pindell reverts to these thematic focuses in order to address social issues of homelessness, AIDs, war, genocide, sexism, xenophobia, and apartheid.

Image: Howardena Pindell, Mother: Umbra Penumbra, 1997, mixed media on canvas, 51 x 95 ½ inches. Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

Learn More at the Zuccaire Gallery

 

Dos Mundos: (Re)constructing Narratives features 12 artists of diverse backgrounds whose work explores issues of immigration, cultural identity and community through photography. They center stories at the fringe of public attention: hidden sanctuaries, subcultures, painful identities, far-away homes, spirituality, transcendence, broken promises, and all too easily ignored social ecologies.

The exhibition considers the contemporary duality of traditions and culture in immigrant and ethnic communities, revisiting the challenges of systemic exclusion from the mainstream that artists of color faced then and continue to face today.

Image: Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, Maajeida, 2020

Learn More at the Zuccaire Gallery