With an impressive collection permanently on view and new exhibitions opening every semester, the Allen Memorial Art Museum is considered one of the best academic museums in the country. Visit amam.oberlin.edu for details and associated events. RELIGIOUS ART FROM ASIA A new long-term installation of religious art from Asia is now on view at the Allen, bringing together familiar favorites […]
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Art and activism collide in Ahmet Öğüt’s Bakunin’s Barricade at the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio. Part of the 2022 FRONT Triennial, this massive installation remains on view until December 23, 2022 in its North American premiere. Öğüt, a Kurdish-born artist working across media, collaborated with Oberlin College students and museum staff to create an assemblage that questions […]
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As Prussian troops prepared to crush the 1849 socialist uprising in Dresden, anarchist thinker Mikhail Bakunin proposed that paintings from the National Museum be placed in front of the barricades, reasoning that Prussian soldiers wouldn’t dare destroy the works to breach their defenses. Inspired by Bakunin’s never-realized proposal, artist Ahmet Öğüt has created site-specific “barricades” featuring works from museum collections […]
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The year 2019 marks a harrowing anniversary: roughly 400 years ago, Jamestown colonists bought a group of enslaved Africans from English pirates. The twenty to thirty men and women that walked ashore in Virginia in 1619 became the first of 380,000 Africans forcibly taken from their homes and dragged in chains across the Atlantic to North America. From the very […]
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THE REMARKABLE BREADTH of the Allen Memorial Art Museum’s collection shines in three exhibitions that run through late May at Oberlin College. Afterlives of the Black Atlantic presents works from the United States, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa that explore the complexities of memory, identity, and belonging in the wake of the transatlantic slave trade. The exhibition—commemorating 400 […]
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The theme of architecture acts as a common thread binding three Oberlin exhibitions presented by the Allen Memorial Art Museum as part of the FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. The museum’s Ellen Johnson Gallery, designed by Robert Venturi in the 1970s, offered a launching point for New York-based artist Barbara Bloom. Her installation responds to this complex, postmodern […]
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Members of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College have an intriguing privilege: They get to hear pitches from curators, and vote on which works the museum will acquire for its permanent collection. On the evening of May 3, members (and a bevy of onlookers) will gather for the vote, and a party. The Purchase Party is a […]
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Rembrandt’s etchings have long been treasured for their technical innovation and perceptive portrayal of the human psyche. They have figured prominently in many American academic museum collections, in part because they reward intensive study. Lines of Inquiry: Learning from Rembrandt’s Etchings, an exhibition on view this spring at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College brings together 60 prints […]
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“The cause of art is the cause of the people.” Those words, written by William Morris, are a maxim that the Allen Memorial Art Museum has lived by since opening on the Oberlin College campus in 1917. The letters are chiseled into stone above the front doors of the museum building designed by Cass Gilbert. Like its Cleveland counterpart, the […]
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test pit – a small preliminary excavation made to gain an idea of the contents of an archaeological site. Much like an archaeologist, New York artist Fred Wilson has made a career digging to uncover long lost or hidden treasures.[1] Wilson burrows into the conventional Western history of art, mines academic and historical writing, and in many cases, he physically […]
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