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The William Benton Museum of Art is a member of the Connecticut Art Trail, a partnership of fifteen world-class museums and historic sites across the state. Click here to sign-up for the Art Trail’s e-newsletter, announcing updates on packages, events and exhibitions at member museums.

January 21–March 14
Reception: Friday, January 29, 5–7 pm
From Amazing Stories to Weird Tales: Covering Pulp Fiction

Pulp magazines, named for their low quality pulpwood paper, were a popular form of leisure reading in America from the 1920s until the late 1940s. Sold mainly at newsstands, their covers were carefully designed with bold primary colors and dramatic compositions to seduce passers-by with a glimpse into the sensational stories within. Over fifty oil paintings on which these flashy covers were based are included in this exhibition. Like the pulp magazines themselves, the original pulp illustrations were considered of no value and the majority of them discarded in the decades after their production. They have since becomes the objects of great devotion among collectors and fans. The works in this exhibition are from the collection of Robert Lesser, on loan to the New Britain Museum of American Art. Mr. Lesser is one of the most avid collectors of pulp memorabilia.

The paintings in this exhibition date to very grim times in America, the years of the Great Depression and World War II. As cover art, they were crucial to pulp magazines’ appeal as a cheap escape from harsh day-to-day realities, a thrilling journey away from the mundane. They were an alternative to the more mannered mainstream publications, the "slicks," with their soothing vision of apple pie America in the vein of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers. In the pulps, gratuitous sex and violence prevailed, as the paintings illustrate.

With the proliferation of specialized pulps beginning in the 1930s, readers were invited to "pick their poison": westerns, science fiction, mystery, fantasy, and horror among others. Genre-oriented pulp publications helped form visual and narrative conventions that carried into later pop cultural phenomena such as B-movie science fiction, film noir, comic books and Hollywood renditions of pulp heroes Tarzan and Zorro. For example, Dime Detective was instrumental in establishing the formula for the "hard-boiled" detective in fiction and film. The publication of Amazing Stories was critical in the formation of science fiction as a recognized literary and pictorial type.

Aside from the popular romance genre that targeted young women, the majority of pulp magazines catered to male audiences. Their covers featured dramatic moments in the adventures of square-jawed heroes, brutish villains of every type, and young damsels at the pinnacle of distress and in various states of undress. To a contemporary viewer, some imagery translates as delightfully na?ve while other depictions reflect deep-seated racial prejudice and misogyny. In either case, the paintings provide fascinating insight into the fantasies and fears consumed by millions during a period of great turmoil in America.

The paintings in this exhibition are on loan from the Robert Lesser Collection of Pulp Fiction Covers, a promised gift to the New Britain Museum of American Art.

January 21–March 21
Reception: Friday, January 29, 5–7 pm
The Old and The New: Recent Acquisitions and Works from the Collections

Whenever possible, art from the collections is used as the basis for a thematic exhibition or, in this case, is exhibited to highlight the Benton’s variety of works. The Museum actively collects through gifted art and purchases made from acquisition endowments. The selection chosen for this exhibition is a combination of old works and new, those that are familiar and those that are unfamiliar but are now part of the museum collections.

March 25–May 9
Reception: Thursday, April 1, 5–7 pm
CounterMart, An Installation by Abby Manock

In CounterMart, artist Abby Manock utilizes juvenile color schemes and rudimentary forms in her installation of a convenience store counter in the style of a children’s television show set. It is a scene from the artist’s video Counters brought to life and available for visitor interaction. In Counters, on view within the installation, the artist repeatedly performs brief vignettes centered on production, transportation and exchange in a crayon-color world littered with hand-drawn smiley faces. Despite the cheerful veneer, a slightly sinister element pervades the environment as a voiceover counts to five again and again in a mantra-like fashion. Abby Manock's work combines drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and video in order to explore the tension between idealized childhood visions of the world and adult angst concerning social and political realities. She has exhibited her work in as varied venues as The Deitch Projects Art Parade in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Manock is based in Brooklyn, New York.

March 25–May 9
Reception: Thursday, April 1, 5–7 pm
Poem & Picture

Poem & Picture features the collaborative visions of twentieth-century artists and poets, works that combine the disciplines of art and poetry in a way that each is complimented and enhanced by the other. They are poems and pictures intended to be experienced together, whether they are bound side-by-side in a limited edition book or as image and script integrated into a single work. Included in the exhibition are pages from the Russian literary avant-garde book Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) (1914) by Olga Rozanova and Kazimir Malevich. Selections from 21 Etchings and Poems (1960) present collaborations by Willem De Kooning and Harold Rosenberg, Peter Grippe and Dylan Thomas, and Franz Klein and Frank O’Hara. The Ariel Poems (1927-1954), a collection of limited edition illustrated poems, is represented by T.S. Eliot and E. McKnight Kauffer, and D.H. Lawrence and Althea Willoughby, among others.

April 1–May 9
Reception: Thursday, April 1, 5–7 pm
The 2010 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition

This celebration of the creative talents of the Class of 2010 in the Master of Fine Arts program in Studio Art showcases the works of Lauren Laudano (sculpture), Kasey Lindley (painting and multi-media installation), Katie Mansfield (photography, sculpture), Owen McKenzie