New Exhibitions At The Benton Museum
Seeing Truth: Art, Science, Museums, and Making Knowledge
January 17 - March 10, 2023
Seeing Truth: Art, Science, Museums, and Making Knowledge seeks to challenge audiences to see art, science, and truth anew in this political moment.
Truth has always been a slippery idea, but today it seems like “truth” is harder to grasp than ever. In the midst of all the data, all the noise, all the images, how can we find our truth? Where should we go to find the truth? Whose truth should we believe?
These are the questions at the heart of Seeing Truth, an exhibition that considers how science, art, and museums have collided to produce, and sometimes distort, truth and knowledge. The exhibition borrows items from UConn collections, including the Benton Museum; Archives & Special Collections, UConn Library; and Biodiversity Research Collections, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and places them in dialogue with “instigator” objects from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. These objects, including scientific equipment, historic expedition films, and educational dioramas, provoke us to think critically about how knowledge is visually constructed. The exhibition asks us how we know what we do about the universe, our world, and the people that live around the globe. How much of that knowledge—that truth—is art or science? How can we use art and science together to find better truths?
Seeing Truth is generously supported by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation and curated by Alexis L. Boylan, Director of Academic Affairs, UConn Humanities Institute and Professor of Africana Studies and Art and Art History.
Raid the Archive: Edwin Way Teale and New Works
January 17 to March 10, 2023
Raid the Archive is an exhibition of selections from the Edwin Way Teale Papers and new works by participants in Art 5383, Special Topics in Studio Art. Teale was an American naturalist, writer, and photographer awarded the inaugural Pulitzer Prize for nature writing in 1966; Teale’s papers are preserved by Archives and Special Collections, University of Connecticut Library. During the fall of 2022, graduate students, guided by Professor of Art Janet Pritchard, undertook a semester-long project to curate an exhibition from this collection augmented by visits to his home, Trail Wood, in Hampton, Connecticut, now a Connecticut Audubon Sanctuary. Each artist created new work responding to curiosity, research, and discoveries. The course reimagines the Raid the Icebox exhibition from the RISD Museum in 1969–70, in which RISD staff invited Andy Warhol to curate a show from their collection and make new work in response. Raid the Archive begins the 25th-anniversary celebration of the Teale Lecture series at UConn.
Student Curators: Mahsa Attaran ’25, Amira Brown ’25, Monica Hamilton ’25, Hanieh Kashani ’25, Anna Schwartz ’25, and Noah Thompson ’24.
THE WILLIAM BENTON MUSEUM OF ART
University of Connecticut
School of Fine Arts
245 Glenbrook Road
Storrs, CT
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For more information, contact: The Benton Museum at 860-486-4520