The Zimmerli Drawing Society for Adults

Ongoing
Time: 10:00am

The second and fourth Saturday of each month between October and December, and February and April.

In the Italian Renaissance, drawing or disegno was considered the underpinning of great painting and the essential means of expressing an artistic idea. While much contemporary art eschews drawing, it never ceases to be a fundamental tool of human perception, and knowledge, akin to writing itself. Now the Zimmerli offers advanced and beginning artists an opportunity to draw, both from the live model and the museum’s vast collections. Each session is overseen by master artist Elizabeth Hutchinson. Meetings will take place twice a month between October and December and February and April. Members will each receive a set of drawing pencils when they join. While the museum will also provide drawings boards, a live model and professional instruction, participants must bring their own drawing pads and portable easels. For more information on this unique program, call 732.932.7237 ext. 615. Fee: $75, Limit: 15 members.

Inspired by Literature: Art and Fine Books

Eisenberg Gallery
Nov 21, 2008 - Jul 05, 2009

The Limited Editions Club, which was founded in 1929, is one of America’s finest publishers of artist-illustrated limited edition books. Exploring the inspiration of great writers on contemporary artists, this exhibition will feature a selection of recent Limited Edition Club publications, including Willem de Kooning’s Seventeen Lithographs for Frank O’Hara (1988); Robert Motherwell’s lithographs for the Octavio Paz Suite (1988); Sean Scully’s color intaglios accompanying excerpts from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1992); Edward Ranney’s photogravures for Heights of Machu Picchu (1999); Dean Mitchell’s colored etchings inspired by the writings of Maya Angelou (2003); and photogravures by Duane Michals inspired by the writings of Constantine P. Cavafy (2003). These publications, and others also on view in the exhibition, were recently donated by Sidney Shiff to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in honor Ralph Voorhees, a longtime friend to the museum and Rutgers University. The exhibition’s curator is Marilyn Symmes, Director and Curator of the museum’s Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts.

Admission:
$3.00 per person for adults who are not members of the museum. Entrance to the museum is free at all times for members, all children under 18, and Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff with a valid I.D. In addition, the first Sunday of each month will be free to all.

Museum Hours:

Picture Play: Illustrations Made for Young Booklovers

Roger Duvoisin Gallery
Sep 02, 2008 - Jan 11, 2009

Images made to delight the very young as well as the young at heart selected from the Rutgers Collection of Original Illustrations for Children’s Literature include works by Frank Asch, Maginel Wright Barney, Tony Chen, William Pène du Bois, Roger Duvoisin, Shari Halpern, Catherine Stock, Ward Schumaker, and Art Seiden. The illustrations explore various themes beloved of young children include counting, rhymes and games, animals, fantasy, and images from everyday life.

Cheerful, witty illustrations by Catherine Stock for Trot Trot to Boston enliven a collection of play rhymes for very young children and their parents and caregivers to enjoy together. Ward Schumaker’s preparatory drawings for Toddler Two-Step offer a dynamic visual interpretation of a counting rhyme that is also a dance.

Art Seiden’s precise, detailed illustrations of vehicles for All Kinds of Trucks appeal to children who love all things with wheels, while illustrations by Tony Chen for The Cosy Book and by Shari Halpern for What Shall We Do When We All Go Out? celebrate the joyful activities of everyday life. Illustrations by Maginel Wright Barney for Thumbelina, by William Pène du Bois for Otto at Sea, and preparatory gouache paintings by Roger Duvoisin for a little boy was drawing explore imaginary worlds in which the hero, with whom the child may identify, may be tiny, gigantic, or cast in an unusual new role. In these fantasies, the hero always possesses special qualities that allow him or her to transcend the environment.

While the illustrations exhibit diversity in style and medium, each artist employs composition and color to appeal to very young audience and express the varied texts in vibrant visual images.

Hands-on activities provided in the gallery allow visitors to express their own creativity.

Admission:
$3.00 per person for adults who are not members of the museum. Entrance to the museum is free at all times for members, all children under 18, and Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff with a valid I.D. In addition, the first Sunday of each month will be free to all.

Museum Hours:

A Group of One’s Own: Women’s Visual Arts Organizations in America

Sep 14, 2008 - Jan 07, 2009

This exhibition will present a selective historical survey of organizations and groups that represented, promoted and displayed visual art by women in the United States. The organizations to be featured had memberships comprising women artists -- often professional, sometimes “amateur,” -- who created visual art in many media, including both the fine and applied arts. Significant institutions and exhibition spaces that showed art exclusively by women will also be represented. As a whole, the exhibition will offer visual art and related textual and documentary materials, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, on groups that sought to showcase the achievements of women in the visual arts, and attempted to correct the difficulties frequently faced by women in gaining recognition and equity in museums, art schools, and the marketplace.

Among the groups represented are: The National Association of Women Artists (founded in New York City), The Sketch Club of San Francisco, the Women’s Building at the 1893 Chicago Columbian Exposition, Women Painters of Washington (Washington State), Moore College of Art and Design (Philadelphia), A.I.R. Gallery (New York), and Womanhouse (Los Angeles).

Admission:
$3.00 per person for adults who are not members of the museum. Entrance to the museum is free at all times for members, all children under 18, and Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff with a valid I.D. In addition, the first Sunday of each month will be free to all.

Selections from the Limited Editions Club:
A Contemporary Prints and Photographs Donation in Honor of Ralph Voorhees

Eisenberg Gallery
Daily, Nov 21, 2008 - Jul 05, 2009

The Limited Editions Club, which was founded in 1929, is one of America’s finest publishers of artist-illustrated limited edition books. Exploring the inspiration of great writers on contemporary artists, this exhibition will feature a selection of recent Limited Edition Club publications, including Willem de Kooning's Seventeen Lithographs for Frank O'Hara (1988); Robert Motherwell's lithographs for the Octavio Paz Suite (1988); Sean Scully's color intaglios accompanying excerpts from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1992); Edward Ranney's photogravures for Heights of Machu Picchu (1999); Dean Mitchell's colored etchings inspired by the writings of Maya Angelou (2003); and photogravures by Duane Michals inspired by the writings of Constantine P. Cavafy (2003). These publications, and others also on view in the exhibition, were recently donated by Sidney Shiff to the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in honor Ralph Voorhees, a longtime friend to the museum and Rutgers University. The exhibition's curator is Marilyn Symmes, Director and Curator of the museum's Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts.

Admission:
$3.00 per person for adults who are not members of the museum. Entrance to the museum is free at all times for members, all children under 18, and Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff with a valid I.D. In addition, the first Sunday of each month will be free to all.

Museum Hours:

The Appointing Gesture:
The Worlds and Images of Dmitry Prigov

Lower Dodge Galleries
Daily, Sep 20, 2008 - Jan 18, 2009

Poet, novelist, sculptor, draughtsman, musician, video and performance artist, thinker and one of the most resonant and reasoned voices of a generation writ large, Dmitry Aleksandrovich Prigov (1940-2007) wore many hats in his lifetime, becoming a permanent (and, with his untimely passing, irreplaceable) fixture of the Moscow art world from the 1970s on. Having defined his own existence as the “life-long artistic Project DAP,” he contributed an entirely distinct body of work to Moscow Conceptualism. It encompassed a broad visual and intellectual span between almost irreconcilable poles. At one end of the spectrum, there is his wry deconstruction, in which the ideology permeating Soviet life as transparent language is given physical form, made into images that renders it palpable, visible, and vulnerable. At the other end, there is a profound engagement with the metaphysical, the transcendental, and the trans-epochal, which he created as a contemporary, friend, and member of the Sots-Art generation. The systematic thinker in Prigov was ever keen to uncover the deep cognitive structures and patterns that give individual lives their shape and order, while always allowing for a something that may exist beyond the limits of any system.

This exhibition brings together on a small scale many of the diverse elements of Prigov’s oeuvre, and strives to give a non-Russian-speaking audience insight into his vision of a vast world that had for its epicenter the turbulent cultural upheavals of the late- and post-Soviet Russia. Works presented include drawings, texts, visual poetry, objects, video, and photographic documentation.

Admission:
$3.00 per person for adults who are not members of the museum. Entrance to the museum is free at all times for members, all children under 18, and Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff with a valid I.D. In addition, the first Sunday of each month will be free to all.

Museum Hours:

Performing the Archive:
Collective Actions in the 1970s-80s

DuBrow Gallery
Daily, Oct 25, 2008 - Apr 12, 2009

In the totalizing media environment of the late-Soviet era, many artists from the Moscow underground sought alternative ways of being seen and heard. Samizdat poetry, performances, and self-curated archives are only a couple of the strategies unofficial artists employed in the search for new spaces of artistic practice. In their “trips outside the city,” the Collective Actions group - a key grouping within the Moscow Conceptualist circle - invited audiences to travel to the fields outside Moscow to witness performances in the landscape. Documenting these performances through sound, photography, and video, the group kept a running record of its activities, and such factographic material was supplemented by interpretive essays and transcripts of group discussions – all of which was brought together in the folders of the Collective Actions archive. The present exhibition focuses on the first two decades of the group’s activities, introducing viewers to rare video footage of early actions as well as other materials from the archive. By representing key actions through related documentary and discursive materials, the exhibition proposes a re-performance of these actions for a contemporary audience.

Admission:
$3.00 per person for adults who are not members of the museum. Entrance to the museum is free at all times for members, all children under 18, and Rutgers University students, faculty, and staff with a valid I.D. In addition, the first Sunday of each month will be free to all.

Museum Hours:

Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat

Presented by Middlesex County's Plays-In-The-Park
Friday, December 26, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Saturday, December 27, 2008 at 7:00 PM
Sunday, December 28, 2008 at 2:00 PM
Location: State Theatre
Tickets: P $6.00; A $6.00; B $6.00; C $6.00

A holiday tradition for our 14th year, JOSEPH 2008 promises to be better than ever! For those who have never seen it, and for those who wish to see it again, we'll see you at the State Theatre this holiday season.

Every December Plays-in-the-Park moves from its home in Edison and travels to New Brunswick, lock, stock and camels, to do our annual production of JOSEPH at the delightful State Theater.

Michelle Massa will direct and choreograph the show, with musical direction by Anthony Di Dia.

Billy Piscopo will once again take his place in the title role as “Joseph” and Katie Riley will reprise her role as “Narrator” and Dan Cook will take the stage "Potiphar". The remaining cast is filled with both alumni from past productions and new faces.