By Jesse Dutton-Kenny
In October of 2020 Jesse Dutton-Kenny visited the Mills College Art Museum to research 39 baskets from Northern California Indigenous communities in the collection. This research project was sparked after Jesse saw a Pomo basket from the collection on display in the Slide Space 123 gallery in February of 2020. She began looking through the baskets in the MCAM online collection and found a few from Northern California that were almost certainly caps but had been misidentified as bowls. …
Our friends at the De Young Museum on conserving The Hero on loan from MCAM for the Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power: 1963–1983
The Hero cuts a striking figure in it’s own right. It just needed a little freshening up. The painting, by enigmatic artist Phillip Lindsay Mason (see Post: Search Terms: Looking for Phillip Lindsay Mason), initially arrived at MCAM in rough condition. Housed in our storage facilities for the past several decades, it’s been a long time since it’s seen the light of day. MCAM loaned the painting to the De Young…
Finalist for an essay contest held in conjunction with Mother and Child in the Fine Arts (1940), an exhibition featuring a collection of artworks on the same theme, which were thereafter donated to the museum by Mrs. M. C. Sloss.
Over Summer 2019, MFA candidate and MCAM’s publicity assistant, Yetunde Olabgaju, took over the museum’s Instagram to solicit information on the whereabouts of Phillip Lindsay Mason, an Oakland-based artist, prolific in the 70s, whose work is currently receiving a resurgence of attention. The following is a reposting of Olabgaju’s effort.
Dear friends, Yetunde here again with some report backs on my findings surrounding a piece in our collection called The Hero by Phillip Lindsay Mason. When I first saw this painting, it was out in the Mills College Art Museum’s collection room, propped against a wall. It was being pulled…
Essay by Chloe Champion from the exhibition catalog for You’re Seeing Less Than Half the Picture which featured works from MCAM’s permanent collection curated by students from Mills College’s Museum Studies workshop. The exhibition was on view from Decmber 2017-May 2018.
Transgressive, in your face, and controversial — there’s no doubt that Judy Chicago was a pivotal trailblazer during the feminist art movement of the 1970s. Although she is most popularly known for her 1974–79 installation The Dinner Party, Chicago’s work traverses many modes of execution and material, consistently focusing on her idea of central-core imagery and the visibility of…
We invited our student Collections Assistants to produce an exhibition from our archive for Museum Records & Research, a site for inquiry and file-storage. Gray Paper, Evil Faxes presented photos, notes, and leftover artifacts found deep within MCAM’s archives that would normally be disregarded.
MCAM: First of all, why did you call this exhibition Gray Paper Evil Faxes? Why are the faxes evil?!
Carmen Wiley: A long time ago someone decided to label a folder “Gray Paper” and “Evil Faxes”. Somehow the labels ended up together and floated around the archive for awhile. …
Tim Kopra combines archival materials and environmental samples from Mills College campus in order to discover fresh applications for physical and historical data.
We consume information in a variety of ways, pushing through the constant encroachment of media and compartmentalizing the ubiquitous digital channels we monitor daily. For his residency at Museum Records & Research, artist and researcher Tim Kopra repurposes historical data from the Museum’s archive and environment into functional products for the contemporary consumer.
TELL ME ABOUT IT
For Tell Me About It, an MCAM staff member asks an art historian about one item in the Collection they want to know more about. In this edition, program director Jayna Swartzman-Brosky, asked Professor Emerita of Asian Art History, Carver Professor in East Asian Studies, Mary-Ann Milford about Tsukioka Yoshitoshi’s, 100 Aspects Of The Moon, The Midnight Moon At Mt. Yoshino: Iga No Tsubone.
Tell me about the artist.
Yoshitoshi (Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1839–1892), was one of the last great Japanese woodblock print designers who worked in the Ukiyo-e (Floating World) style that prevailed in the city of Edo (Tokyo) during the Shogunate Tokugawa Period (1600–1852)…
Jamie Harper
“There’s something out there you know.” The little group sat huddled tight around a pitiful fire lit inside a shallow tin can. The wind howled, whipping through the slanted glass shards of the windows and the gaping cracks that spiderwebbed through plaster and brown-shingle walls. The once vibrant colors of the murals on the walls dimmed by age and ash, plaques of laminated squares of information ripped down, their edges black where someone tried to burn them for warmth. The fire’s dim light flickered and sputtered, only serving to deepen the shadows that filled the rest of the…
A Museum Records & Research Project by Ellis Martin.
CONTACT? looks at the threshold of the archive. Both the archive in its concept and Mills College Art Museum’s.
Museum Records + Research becomes the site of this installation. It is an installation with archival images and conceptual graves (plexi, pink wood). The archive becomes the mediator between time and history, author and influence, as Ellis Martin connects the contemporary queer to Sophie Calle’s The Graves, exhibited at MCAM in 1992, alongside her relationship to artist Hervé Guibert during the same period. …
Mills College Art Museum
Oakland, CA
