This exhibition brings together works by global contemporary artists who draw inspiration from the natural world and work in a variety of media, including painting, photography, assemblage, and video.

Participating artists include Brandon Ballengée, Frances Gallardo, Jane Hammond, Damien Hirst, Jill Hotchkiss, Amer Kobaslija, James Lavadour, Debora Moore, Jordan Nassar, Ruben Ochoa, and Sarah Ann Weber.

This exhibition was organized by the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens.

Image:
View of Outside: In in the Joan Wellhouse and Martin Stein, Sr. Gallery courtesy of Douglas J. Eng Photography.

American Made: Paintings and Sculpture from the DeMell Jacobsen Collection surveys two centuries of American creativity. Though many of the objects from the DeMell Jacobsen collection have been on view at other museums, ranging from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, this is the first exhibition featuring a comprehensive collection of works from the collection.

The exhibition begins with Colonial-era portraits by masters, such as Benjamin West, Thomas Sully, and Sarah Miriam Peale, and then moves on to highlight the development of mid-19th-century landscape painting. Viewers will discover works depicting the United States from coast to coast by artists, including Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper Francis Copsey, and even a monumental arctic scene by William Bradford.

In addition to landscape paintings, the exhibition includes still lifes and genre scenes — two other types of paintings that became popular in the 19th century. Included in the exhibition are enticing images of fruits, flowers, and other delights by Severin Roesen, John Francis, Charles Ethan Porter, Elizabeth Williams, and Adelaide Coburn Palmer. Trompe l’oeil (“fool the eye”) still lifes by masters, including William Michael Harnett, John Haberle, and John Peto, will also be on view.

Charming and moralizing genre scenes, often packed with fascinating narrative detail, include masterpieces by Elizabeth Jane Gardner Bouguereau, Seymour Guy, and Daniel Huntington.

The American experience in Europe is also represented, as many artists from this country traveled abroad to seek training and patronage in the decades leading up to the 20th century. Striking canvases by Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and their fellow overseas travelers, will be included in the exhibition.

American Made was curated by Todd Herman, Ph.D., President and CEO of The Mint Museum; Kevin Sharp, Director of the Dixon Gallery and Gardens; and Jonathan Stuhlman, Ph.D., Senior Curator of American Art at The Mint Museum.

Image:
John F. Francis (American, 1808-86). Strawberries and Cakes, 1860, oil on canvas. Courtesy of the Thomas H. and Diane DeMell Jacobsen PhD Foundation.

Maia Cruz Palileo: Days Later, Down River navigates themes of migration and the persistence of tacit knowledge in the face of assimilation. The works on view map an archival, geological, and spiritual topography of the Palileo family’s homeland—the Philippines—and are inspired by their recent residency at the University of Michigan, which houses one of the largest collections of Filipino artifacts outside of the country. Building off their past research at the Newberry Library in Chicago and their personal family archive, Palileo explores the Bentley Historical Library’s photographic archive of Frank C. Gates, a professor of botany at the University of the Philippines (1912-1915) and objects from the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology’s Philippines collection. By incorporating research from these various archives, their paintings recontextualize stories, portraits, and images to resuscitate and remove from the exploitative gaze of the ethnographic image.

While at the archive, Palileo discovered photo albums of Mount Makiling and Mount Banahaw, dormant volcanoes in the Laguna region of the Philippines. Each mountain is a birthplace of legend; Mount Makiling is the home of the protective spirit Makiling, whose legend was written about by national hero José Rizal, and Banahaw is a sacred mountain for spiritual pilgrimage. These albums served as a portal into the artist’s familial relation to this land, making connections to artifacts in their personal collection of family photographs, blessed amulets, and oral histories. As with volcanoes, they propose history as a site where perceived extinction and dormancy can be uncovered to reveal activity and potential. Memorializing the legacy of invisible histories, dense layers of foliage reveal mysterious figures shrouded by overgrowth and shadow. Parasitic liana vines further complicate the canvas. Native to tropical forests, these rapidly expanding woody vines are increasingly shady, choking rainforest trees, and competing for resources. Palileo renders the liana’s proliferation, interlacing the visible and invisible through layers of paint, echoing the selective means through which history is presented.

Translating these historic documents into a creative medium, Palileo cuts out archival images and reassembles them into panoramas where figures occupy mirrored and layered landscapes, offering new dimensions that intertwine ancestry, flora, and fauna. Transferring collaged black-and-white photographs into a vibrant palette, they pollinate a reimagined terrain in paint—an act of becoming where brush strokes render their homeland anew with self-possession and agency.

Program Sponsors

• Carmina and Philipp Aldana

Image:
Maia Cruz Palileo (Filipinx American, b. 1979), After Wandering for Much Time, 2023, flashe and oil on canvas, 84 x 96 in., From the collection of Madhavan and Teresa Nayar. Courtesy of the artist and Monique Meloche Gallery.