AT THE ALLEN / SPRING 2023 / 7 ON VIEW / EDUCATION HALLWAY / JAN 25–AUG 20 THE LANGUAGE OF THE STREETS Last fall, Michelangelo Lovelace’s These Urban City Streets sparked conversations about place and belonging through its honest and loving depiction of inner-city Cleveland. In Lovelace’s painting, vibrant signage animates streets full of faceless people, bringing them to life through the energy of the text. This exhibition responds to Lovelace by looking at how we engage with the words that surround us, whether that be advertising copy created for commercial gain or emotion-based human language. Four artworks by David Drebin, Walker Evans, Jenny Holzer, and Ernest C. Withers help us become aware of the conversations happening silently around us through the language of the streets. Organized by Julia Alexander (OC 2022), Curatorial Assistant in Academic Programs. wreckage of colonization and the flourishing of ancestral traditions in the diaspora. AndyWarhol’s candy-colored prints of an electric chair offer a meditation on capital punishment and the sensationalization of news imagery. Frank LloydWrightdesigned stools from theWeltzheimer/Johnson House serve both as seating in the gallery and an iconic example of midcentury design with a rich Oberlin history. Regular visitors and alumni may be familiar with chairs in the Allen’s collection by artists such as JimDine, Scott Burton, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Other artworks featured in the exhibition, such as a multipart sculpture by the Cuban artist José Bedia, have never been displayed in an exhibition at the Allen. These works will be shown alongside new acquisitions in the Allen’s growing decorative arts collection by Art Deco designer Gilbert Rohde and the contemporary artistdesigner Norman Teague. Developed in conversation with current Oberlin students and faculty, this exhibition presents the seemingly ordinary act of sitting as an unsuspecting expression of privilege and identity. Like a Good Armchair invites visitors to move beyond the passivity in Matisse’s claim that art should offer relaxation, and instead investigates the generative thoughts and feelings evoked by the experience of discomfort. Organized by SamAdams, Ellen Johnson ’33 Assistant Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Fudi Fickenscher (OC 2023). Opposite: Jess T. Dugan (American, b. 1986), Caprice, 55, Chicago, IL, 2015, from the portfolio To Survive on this Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, 2018. Archival pigment print with text (interview). Richard Lee Ripin Art Purchase Fund, 2019.7.9A-B. Left: JimDine (American, b. 1935), Hanging Chair #2, 1960. Oil on three-legged chair with pieces of jewelry, purse, undershirt, plastic and string. Gift of TomWesselmann, 1972.90. Above: Ernest C. Withers (American, 1922–2007), Daddy, I Want To Be Free Too: WilliamEdwin Jones pushes daughter Renee Andrewnetta Jones during protest march on Main Street, Memphis, August, 1961, from the portfolio I am a Man, 1961. Gelatin silver print. Oberlin Friends of Art Fund, 2004.6.3.
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