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  • Doctoral Student Research: Nancy Karrels Continues Provenance Research, Plans Exhibition at KAM

    Doctoral student Nancy Karrels was recently selected to participate in a German-American provenance research exchange program sponsored by German government agencies. The program is international in scope and will continue her important WWII-era provenance research at Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition, Karrels will curate the exhibition Provenance: A Forensic History of Art in the Kinkead Gallery at KAM from May 2017 through June 2018.

  • Works Progress Administration: Edwin Boyd Johnson

    Edwin Boyd Johnson, born in Watertown, Tennessee in 1904, grew up in Nashville. He first studied art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and later at the National Academy of Design in New York. He worked with watercolors and oils, but is most known for the mural paintings he created during the New Deal. 

    Recently conserved by Chicago-based firm Restoration Division, the artist's Mural Painting had several major issues fixed before being installed in the exhibition Enough to Live On: Art from the WPA.

  • KAM Lighting Renovation Part of Campus-wide Push for Sustainability

    Krannert Art Museum received a $40,000 grant from the Student Sustainability Committee at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which allowed the museum to upgrade lighting to LED which utilizes one tenth of the energy of the previous lighting system. The grant was part of a campus-wide sustainability initiative and reveals the museum's ongoing commitment to stewardship and sustainability.

  • Anne Sautman Wins IAEA Art Educator of the Year

    The Illinois Art Education Association has named Anne Sautman of Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the 2016 IAEA Museum Art Educator of the Year. This award recognizes exemplary contributions, service, and achievements of one outstanding IAEA member annually. The award was presented at the Illinois Art Education Association Conference in Normal, IL on Friday, November 4th, 2016.

  • New Encounters with African Art

    This year, with its adjacent galleries under renovation, Encounters: The Arts of Africa was de-installed in order to protect the objects from the dangers of construction. Upon re-opening, visitors will notice several exciting changes in the Encounters gallery. In the Power of Script section, an Ethiopian healing scroll, borrowed from the Spurlock Museum, was taken off view to “rest” the delicate parchment’s light sensitive pigments. And new to join the exhibition’s Creativity of Power thematic grouping is a brass divination bowl commissioned by members of the Oshugbo society, the transcendent arbiters of justice and morality in Yoruba culture.

  • Krannert Art Museum to Open November 17

    Krannert Art Museum will open new art exhibitions in its renovated main floor galleries on Thursday, November 17, 2016. Exhibitions opening include "Zina Saro-Wiwa: Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance?," "Making and Breaking Medieval Manuscripts," and "School of Art + Design Faculty Exhibition." The Public Opening Reception will feature an opening welcome by Acting Dean of the College of Fine and Applied Arts and Krannert Art Museum Director Kathleen Harleman at 6 pm.

  • Conservation Gives Seventeenth-Century Paintings New Look

    Recent conservation work at Krannert Art Museum was guided by curator of European and American Art Maureen Warren and performed by conservators Barry Bauman, Cynthia Kuniej Berry, and frame conservator Eli Wilner & Co., New York. The paintings conserved and placed on view in the Bow and Trees Galleries include seventeenth-century works by Joos van Creesbeeck, Pieter de Hooch, and a large old master painting by David Teniers II. Work by American painter Ralph Albert Blakelock was also conserved..

  • KAM Exhibition Deals with Borders, Migration, and Human Rights

    Stories of migration, refugees and human rights are frequently in the news, but they rarely focus on Central America. A new exhibition at Krannert Art Museum looks at those issues as they relate to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador – a region known as the Northern Triangle.

    The exhibition, titled “Northern Triangle,” opened Aug. 26 and runs through Dec. 22. It was originally commissioned by Blue Star Contemporary in San Antonio in response to a migration crisis in 2014, when 68,000 unaccompanied children from the Northern Triangle countries were taken into custody trying to cross into the U.S. at the Mexican border. The exhibition examines the visual representations of the region, and it goes beyond the migration crisis to look at the history of U.S. intervention there.

    Members of Borderland Collective – Reed, Duganne, Menjivar and artist Adriana Corral – will be at the U. of I. for a three-day residency Oct. 5-7.  They’ll participate in a dinner workshop at La Casa Cultural Latina from 6 to 8 p.m. on Oct. 5. Corral will be part of a lunch discussion at La Casa on Oct. 6, and Reed, Duganne and Menjivar will give an artist talk at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 6 at Krannert Art Museum.

    In addition to the Borderland Collective residency, a second artist residency Oct. 26-28 will host Jen Hofer and Gelare Khoshgozaran of Antena, a collaborative project that looks critically at language and how art and social justice work are linked. La Casa Cultural Latina will host a dinner conversation from 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 26 with Hofer, a poet, and Khoshgozaran, an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Hofer will give a brown bag lunch workshop at noon Oct. 27 hosted by the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities at Levis Faculty Center. Hofer and Khoshgozaran will give an artist talk at 5:30 p.m. Oct. 27 at Krannert Art Museum.

  • Gallery Conversation to Focus on Crossings and Borderlands

    "Crossings and Borderlands", Krannert Art Museum's first Gallery Conversation of the season, explores the establishment of borders and boundaries and the ways in which they are challenged and crossed. The discussion, moderated by KAM Curator Amy L. Powell and Assoc. Professor of Art History Terri Weissman, will feature U of I scholars in the fields of Anthropology, Urban and Regional Planning, and Asian American Studies. | Presented as part of Borderland Collective: Northern Triangle

  • KAM to Reopen Select Galleries August 22

    Krannert Art Museum will reopen several permanent galleries August 22 and a new temporary art exhibition Borderland Collective: Northern Triangle on August 26, 2016 after the museum's summer-long closure for gallery renovations. The museum will open all renovated galleries and three new temporary exhibitions with a Grand Opening celebration in November 2016.