Holy Cross’ Cantor Art Gallery to Feature Selections from the Gallery’s Permanent Collection

WORCESTER, Mass. – The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery at the College of the Holy Cross will present Recent Acquisitions: Selections from the Permanent Collection - Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery from Sept. 28 to Nov. 5. Works are by Robert Beauchamp; Peter Grippe; Florence Grippe; Solomón Huerta; Timothy A. Johnson; Terri Priest; Mehdi Saghafi; Juni Van Dyke and 19th and 20th century Indonesian textiles from the Anne and John Summerfield Collection. A reception will be held Oct. 20, from 5 to 6 p.m.

Four gallery talks in conjunction with the exhibits will be held at the Cantor Art Gallery:

* Oct. 19, noon - 1 p.m. Anne Summerfield, Ph.D. and John Summerfield, Ph.D. "Introduction to the Indonesian Textile Study Collection at the Cantor Art Gallery." The Summerfields curated a major exhibition of West Sumatran, Minangkabau ceremonial textiles at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History in 1999, and edited the accompanying book Walk in Splendor, Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau (UCLA, 1999). The Summerfields have been engaged in the study of Indonesian textiles for more than four decades and have generously made a major gift of several Indonesian textiles to establish a new Southeast Asian textile study collection at the Cantor Art Gallery.

* Oct. 20, 4 - 5 p.m. Susan Rodgers, Ph.D., professor of anthropology, College of the Holy Cross, "Textiles that Talk: An Anthropological Way of Listening to Holy Cross’s New Study Collection on Indonesian Textiles"

* Oct. 24, noon - 1 p.m. Roger Hankins, director, Cantor Art Gallery, "Florence Grippe and Peter Grippe: The Personal and the Political"

* Oct. 26, noon - 1 p.m. Maurice Geracht, Ph.D. professor of English, College of the Holy Cross, "Robert Beauchamp: Images of the Self, 1960’s - 1990’s"

In 1983, the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Art Gallery was established at the College of the Holy Cross as both a changing exhibition space and through the gifts of many significant sculptures from the collection of B. Gerald Cantor and later the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, as a collection of art to serve as a resource to the college and Worcester community. During the past 22 years the art gallery has continued to receive numerous gifts of contemporary and historical artwork from alumni, friends of the college, as well as other artists.

Over the past two years the Cantor Art Gallery has received a series of more than 20 works on paper and canvas created between 1964 and 1994 by Robert Beauchamp (1923 - 1995). A selection of seven of these works will be included in this exhibit.

In the late 1980’s, the Cantor Art Gallery organized a one-person exhibition of bronze and direct plaster sculptures by New York artist and former Wellesley College professor Peter Grippe. That exhibition was titled Monument to Hiroshima and it included a group of figures Grippe sculpted in the 1960’s which were inspired by John Heresy’s 1949 book, Hiroshima (Vintage, 1989). In memory of her late husband, the artist’s wife, Florence Grippe, recently donated to the Cantor a series of Grippe’s works which were part of that 1986 Cantor Art Gallery exhibition. Also included will be an extensive collection Peter Grippe’s working models or maquettes executed between 1934 and the mid 1980’s. Florence Grippe, also a significant artist, was known for her ceramics she produced in the late 1940’s through the 1960’s, and the Cantor will be showing two of these works which she also donated to the gallery.

A recent donation by artist Terri Priest, a 1965 painting from her Organic Interaction Series, will be shown. Priest, an active Worcester artist, first became recognized outside central Massachusetts in the mid 1960’s while she was producing a significant series of geometric abstract paintings inspired by her involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960’s.

A group of recent gifts of works on paper will also be shown: a 2004 print by Los Angeles-based artist Solomón Huerta; a series of Polaroid photographs by Worcester artist Timothy A. Johnson; and large format photographs by San Francisco Bay area artist Mehdi Saghafi, who has photographed miles of isolated waterways and agricultural lands of the Sacramento River Delta area.

Selections from the Permanent Collection will also introduce a recent major gift to the Cantor Art Gallery from the collection of Anne and John Summerfield. The Summerfields, a husband and wife team of collectors and scholars, donated contemporary and antique textiles from a wide range of Indonesian islands: gold-thread silk songkets from Sumatra, batiks from north coast Java, and handspun cotton cloths from Flores, Sumba, Lembata and Tanimbar. These extraordinary cloths have been brought to Holy Cross explicitly as a study collection. They are a carefully chosen, representative range of Indonesian textiles that will henceforth be available for research and study purposes by students and faculty in such fields of Asian Studies, anthropology, history, art history, studio art, religious studies and Asian music and dance.

Gallery Information

The hours for the Cantor Art Gallery are Monday - Friday, 10 a.m. - 5p.m., Saturdays 2 - 5 p.m. The gallery is closed Oct. 10. Located in O’Kane Hall, 1st Floor, College of the Holy Cross, 1 College Street, Worcester, MA, 01610. Admission to the gallery is free. Public parking is located on Linden Lane, gate 2, off College Street.

For more information, call the Cantor Art Gallery at 508-793-3356 or visit the Gallery’s Web site at: www.holycross.edu/departments/cantor/website/index.html.