Guilford College Art Gallery

03/25/2025

Spring is here and Guilford's senior art majors are creating amazing works for their thesis show. Save the date: April 11 from 5 - 7 p.m. in Founders Hall.

11/30/2023

Permanent Collection Spotlight
Joyce Treiman (May 29, 1922 – June 2, 1991).
(photo courtesy of icollector.com)

As the fall 2023 semester comes to a close, let's take a look at one of the artists in Guilford College’s permanent collection: Joyce Treiman.

Here’s a great excerpt from the Bates Museum of Art on the artist (bates.edu).

“Treiman was known for injecting nineteenth-century French painting into twentieth-century Modernism. She was influenced by Edgar Degas’s steep planes, Pierre Bonnard’s use of color, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s theatricality. Treiman worked against the grain of the popular 1940s American form of Abstract Expressionism to instead reference the hazy brushstrokes and realism of French Impressionism. Her paintings reveal her acute observation and attention to human behavior, humor, compassion, anger, fear, and despair.
Treiman’s paintings of Jokers became a recurring motif once she received a diagnosis of lung cancer, shifting from portraits of the bourgeois to morbid and perverse scenes of death. In Joker and Me, she paints herself as a leading performer on stage while her co-star, The Joker, dances front-and-center. The contrast in mood between the two figures could not be more pronounced with Treiman’s child-like frown. Her work is psychological and autobiographical while also containing elements of the surreal and whimsy.
Treiman attended Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, and then the State University of Iowa under influential painter Philip Guston. During World War II, she worked as a commercial artist until she became successful enough for gallery exhibitions and later moved to Los Angeles. Today her work is owned by prominent institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”

The Guilford College Art Gallery has a few works by Treiman that showcase more of her abstract skills as well. We're very grateful to have works from a renown female artist of the modern era. If you're interested in seeing these specific works, please send us a message!

06/29/2023

NEW POP UP ALERT. The Guilford College Art Gallery is proud to exhibit student work made over the past 30 years. The works include printmaking and painting in a variety of techniques. Stop by the first floor at Hege to take a look at the selections.

04/05/2023

Instructor Tamara Vaughn’s Modern Art History class journeyed to Hege for 2 viewing sessions this spring semester. Their selections included inspirations from Modern Art History in a Hege Library alcove. Students were assigned to visually analyze the pieces in groups, think about conceptual interpretations, and discuss conclusions with the class. Here are some feedback comments from students:

“I enjoyed hearing the different perspectives and background knowledge and the broad range of art styles.”

“I really liked the pairings, I think they were good [pieces].”

Make sure to make one final trip over to Hege Library to see the other works in alcoves before they are replaced next semester!

03/30/2023

Mark your calendars for the Guilford College Art Department's 2023 Thesis exhibits! Ezra Wilson's and Julian Stokes' work will be open for viewing from 8 am - 10 pm on campus from April 7 - May 12th in Founders Hall. The opening reception will be held on April 7th from 5 - 7 pm. Come support our students and their work.

03/22/2023

Join us in supporting the Guilford College Art Gallery and Permanent Collection for Guilford Madness!

Through Permanent Art Collection and exhibitions connected with courses and student curricular engagement across the disciplines, the Art Gallery supports the academic endeavors of Guilford College by enhancing creativity, critical thinking, and visual literacy through art. Connecting art collections to campus teaching and learning in support of meaningful and inclusive visual encounters. The Art Gallery is valued as an interdisciplinary intellectual and visual campus resource.

Go to go.guilford.edu/give2artgalend to contribute to this enriching and uniquely Guilford space.

03/14/2023

Here at the Guilford College Art Gallery we were thrilled to host the centennial meeting of the Guilford College Art Appreciation Club. The organization’s original founder: Helen Binford made an “appearance” with her portrait sitting in on the meeting as well as examples of work from the collection used for education. Special thanks to Theresa Hammond and Judith Weller Harvey for speaking about the collection, its history, and its contributors. Another special thanks to the Art Appreciation club for coordinating the meeting as well as refreshments.

02/15/2023

Celebrating Black History Month
In celebration of Black History Month, the Guilford College Art Gallery has pulled works from the permanent collection showing black joy to be displayed for the month of February inside the main gallery. The selections are from Susan Mullally Clark and Margaret Boylan Smoot.
Susan Mullally has photographed multiple faculty and alumni of the past here at Guilford College. She is also the portrait photographer of "Hope & Dignity, Older Black Women of the South" by Emily Wilson, published by Temple University Press in 1983 and 1993. Her work addresses ideas of class, race, value, ownership, cultural identification and faith.
Margaret Boylan Smoot partnered with her husband Alex Smoot, in the photography series titled 1937 Bostians Alley series. The Salisbury Post described the photographs as “The [photographs]...reflect the people and the way of life of Bostians Alley, an impoverished community in downtown Salisbury bordered by North Main and Church streets and Franklin and Cemetery streets, which was torn down in the late 1940s. The overall tone of the photographs is not the somber one, one might expect during the depths of the Great Depression, instead children are laughing and dancing, young men and women are captured with an air of pride and enthusiasm, and the elderly look on with caring and contentment. It is apparent from these pictures that Bostian's Alley was a vibrant and dynamic place in spite of the challenges faced by those who called it home.” – Salisbury Post

02/09/2023

02/09/2023

Permanent Collection Spotlight
Hiroshige (1797 – 1858)

Guilford College’s collection of Hiroshige’s work, as well as other Ukiyo-e artists, is on display for the Spring 2023 semester in the center atrium gallery of Hege Library’s first floor.

Utagawa Hiroshige, born Andō Tokutarō, was considered to be the last great master of Japanese Ukiyo-e printmaking. Ukiyo-e is a Japanese tradition of woodblock printing that was prolific from the 17th-19th centuries. Ukiyo-e was an entire production, with the artist creating the original artwork, the carver carving, the printer transferring the work onto paper, and the publisher distributing and advertising the works. The main subject matter of Ukiyo-e was that of the bustling pleasure districts of Japan that the merchant class newly afforded. The pride of Japanese landscapes was also a featured subject matter of the prints.

Hiroshige’s most famous works focused on Japan’s natural landscapes, a distinct choice in subject matter for the time. Some of our personal favorites come from the series 53 Stations of the Tokaido in which Hiroshige depicts the Tokaido, or Eastern Sea Road, once the arterial highway of Japan connected the Shogun’s seat of power in Edo (current day Tokyo) with the imperial capital of Kyoto.

Originally working as a fire marshall, Hiroshige pursued art during his leisure time, eventually apprenticing under the artist Toyohiro. As he began his artistic career outright, he developed his signature soft, romantic style of landscape printing. He also acted as a mentor to a few young printmakers who took on his name. Though he had an extremely successful career and produced hundreds of prints, he struggled financially his entire life. He eventually left society to become a Zen Bhuddist monk in 1856, a couple of years before his death.

01/12/2023

Permanent Collection Spotlight
Josef Albers (1888-1976)

Josef Albers is one of the artists from the permanent collection whose work will be on view for the spring semester in Hege Library’s atrium galleries. Learn more about Albers’ impressive career and lasting impact on art education here.

Born in Germany, Albers began his career as an elementary school teacher. In 1920, he joined the Bauhaus art school and excelled in creating assemblages. In 1925, he married Anni Albers, a fellow revolutionary artist and his longtime collaborator. In 1933, the Aberses made the decision to flee Germany as Na**sm grew; Anni was a Jewish woman. They made their way to the United States where Josef was offered a job at the newly founded Black Mountain College in North Carolina, despite him speaking very little English. The experimental school offered Albers a chance to bring his unique artistic perspective to a new generation of artists. In 1950, after Black Mountain had closed its doors, Albers began teaching at Yale University, where he began his famous Homage to the Square series.

Albers worked in many different mediums, including painting, sculpture, and printmaking. He is most known for his mastery and knowledge of color and use of simple shapes to create dynamic abstract images.

"As basic rules of a language must be practiced continually, and therefore are never fixed, so exercises toward distinct color effects never are done or over. New and different cases will be discovered time and again.” - Josef Albers

“...Good teaching is more a giving of right questions than a giving of right answers.”
― Josef Albers, Interaction of Color

A majority of the selections of Josef Albers in the Guilford Art Gallery were donated by the Benfey family. A great reference for context of how the work connects with both Albers, and Guilford is detailed in Christopher Benfey’s book Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay. Linked here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/303776/red-brick-black-mountain-white-clay-by-christopher-benfey/