The Evelyn Simon Gilman Gallery
Reception: Sunday, January 22, 2–4 pm
Women of New England:
Dress from the Industrial Age, 1850–1900
Cranberry brocade bodice and maroon silk taffeta skirt, 1880. 1974 gift from Mrs. Fitch Cheney to the University of Connecticut Historical Clothing and Textile Collection. 
As a land-grant university, the University of Connecticut has a long history of acquiring and preserving garments and textiles pertinent to the history of the State of Connecticut. Since 1898, when the Home Economics Department was created, many talented professors and students have worked to amass over 8,000 items, 3,500 of which are garments, making the University's Historical Clothing and Textile Collection the largest such study collection in New England.
Cloth-making in New England had long been the responsibility of women who were central to the region's industrial transformation—as domestic producers of clothing; as workers in the textile and shoe industries; and as consumers and wearers of clothing and fashions. While Boston, New York, and other urban centers supplied capital, manufacturers seeking skilled labor and water-power established textile mills across rural New England, bolstering the economies of Mansfield, Manchester and Willimantic, Connecticut and scores of other settlements.
At the same time Isaac Singer began a revolution in home sewing for women with his design of an affordable sewing machine with interchangeable parts. Singer's sales jumped from 2,564 machines in 1856 to 13,000 by 1860. Women all over New England honed their sewing skills by making Civil War uniforms on their home machines. In 1866 after the end of the Civil War, Ebenezer Butterick began producing patterns for women's fashions in various sizes. Suddenly women, even in the modest townships of New England, could create the latest styles from New York and Paris.
This comprehensive exhibition displays fifty exceptional garments that express the development of women's clothing in New England in the latter half of the 19th century.
Guest curator: Laura Crow, Director of Costume Design, Department of Dramatic Arts and Curator, University of Connecticut Historical Clothing and Textile Collection.
January 17–March 11
The Center Gallery Classical Mythology in Modern and Contemporary Art: Works from the Permanent Collection
Arthur Bowen Davies, The Sirens, ca. 1896, Oil on canvas. Gift of Robert A. Ellison.
Classical mythology has a long relationship with the visual arts, but the representation of myth in painting, sculpture, and print is never simple illustration. The collection of stories and characters that we know from the poetry of classical writers like Virgil, Ovid, and Homer were once the components of the ancient Greek and Roman religion. Early representations of deities stood larger than life in temples as the physical manifestation of the divine presence. Removed from a pagan context in the Middle Ages, classical mythology fueled the imagination of later artists who often conflated classical subject matter with classical style. Even after the taste for classical proportions and for academic art was upset by subsequent artistic movements in the 19th century, classical mythology continued to provide rich thematic material for generations of artists.
This exhibition examines the enduring appeal of classical mythology in the 19th and 20th centuries even for artists with no interest in classicism. Drawing only on works from the Benton’s permanent collection, Classical Mythology in Modern and Contemporary Art demonstrates the myriad uses to which a diverse group of artists have put classical subject matter. Among the artists are Arthur Bowen Davies, George Bellows, Max Slevogt, Heinrich Campendonk, Reuben Nakian, Nancy Goldring, and James Fee. Many of the objects are works on paper though examples of photography, painting, and sculpture with mythological themes are also included.
January 17–March 11
The East Gallery Themes from the Collections: The 16th to the 21st Century
Ercole Bazzicaluva, Tuscan Road with Travelers, pen & brown in over laid paper, ca. 1635. Gift of The Friends of the Museum.
The works chosen for this exhibition fall into thematic groupings that reflect the strengths in the Benton’s collections and relate to a variety of programs on the spring schedule.
Ellen Emmet Rand’s life-size portrait entitled The Singer complements a Sunday afternoon performance of French vocal music on February 19 and Ben Wilson’s 1943 painting Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is meaningful in conjunction with the January 22 musical program Noch frei in der Kunst!
A selection of landscape views from the 19th and 20th centuries comprises another thematic grouping. These works range from the classical, ca. 1810, Borghese Gardens painted by Giovanni Maldurra, to Karl Bodmer’s 1850s naturalistic Barbizon forest on the outskirts of Paris, Stephen Parrish’s charcoal and pencil drawing of the moonlit coast of Marblehead (1880s), and George Bellows vibrantly colored painting of the island of Criehaven off the coast of Maine, ca. 1915.
Romare Bearden, Family, color aquatint and photo-engraving, 1975. The Louise Crombie Beach Fund.
The Benton’s old master collections are represented by a selection of Southern European works dating from the late 16th century to the very early 18th century. Italian and French drawings, French, Italian and Spanish etchings, and Italian sculpture are the principal focus of this group of works. Some are anonymous such as the terra cotta sculptures, but others are firmly attributed to artists like the Frenchman Phillipe Verdier or the Italians Ercole Bazzicaluva and Remigio Cantagallina.
A recently acquired rare and early lithographic figural work from 1952 entitled Despair by the African American artist John Biggers will be exhibited together with a selection of other works by African American artists.
And finally, among the many other new acquisitions included in this exhibition are photographs by Andreas Feininger (1906-1999), who was most famous for his photographs of New York City in the 1940s and 1950s.