The Pruzan Art Center's Goldrach Gallery is located at 238 Church Street in Middletown, between Wesleyan’s Olin Memorial Library and the Frank Center for Public Affairs, and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. during the fall and spring semesters of the academic year. Admission is free.
“Glenn Ligon and Jasper Johns are two of the most influential American artists working in print today,” said Miya Tokumitsu, Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection. “Their work frequently addresses the structures and materials of visual communication, its logic and limits. At a time when we are both overwhelmed with and generating unprecedented amounts of text and data, much of it apparently meaningless yet voraciously surveilled, their work takes on heightened importance. This exhibition is an occasion to study these artists’ sensitive explorations of language and meaning as mediated through print, side by side.”
The Davison Art Collection holds more than 25,000 works of art on paper, including prints, photographs, and drawings. The print collection is one of the foremost at a college or university in the United States. The collection supports teaching and learning in many ways, and was established at Wesleyan University with the founding gifts of George Willets Davison, class of 1892. For more information, please visit www.wesleyan.edu/dac.
EXHIBITION
Reading Signs: Jasper Johns and Glenn Ligon in Print
Wednesday, September 18 through Wednesday, December 11, 2024
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 18, 2024 from 4:30pm to 6pm
Pruzan Art Center, Goldrach Gallery
New location between Wesleyan’s Olin Memorial Library and Frank Center for Public Affairs
238 Church Street, Middletown, Connecticut
FREE!
Throughout their printed works, Glenn Ligon '82, Hon. '12 and Jasper Johns demand and disrupt the act of reading. Both artists frequently discompose the visual elements of language and communication: targets drip and letters smudge. Johns and Ligon exploit the processes of printing—which entail contact and separation, mirroring and reversals—to parse the distances between signs and their meanings, and also to address the mechanics of looking on the part of the spectator. This exhibition will feature etchings and lithographs by both artists as well as screenprints by Johns in the Davison Art Collection.
Curated by the Donald T. Fallati and Ruth E. Pachman Curator of the Davison Art Collection Miya Tokumitsu.
Exhibition will be closed from Friday, October 19 through Tuesday, October 22, 2024; and from Monday, November 25 through Monday, December 2, 2024.
To request high resolution versions of the four exhibition images below, please contact Andrew R. Chatfield, Director, Arts Communication at Wesleyan University at achatfield@wesleyan.edu.
