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About the Research Lab

Well, this is different. No exhibition? Why?

A teaching museum, the CWAM’s primary mission is “ . . . to support and enhance the College’s goals of teaching, research, service, and global engagement through exhibitions, scholarship, and collection preservation.” While the CWAM achieves this through a variety of methods, the most in-depth object-based teaching takes place within course-embedded, student-curated exhibitions. Saints, Relics, and Images is the seventh such teaching exhibition undertaken by the CWAM in collaboration with faculty since 2010, and is the first in which objects have been brought in on loan from other collections for the purposes of research and exhibition.

How long will the gallery be a research lab, and when is the exhibition?

From January 23–March 8, 2018, students in Associate Professor of Art History Kara Morrow’s Medieval Art seminar will have class and do close looking of the materials in the gallery. During this period the CWAM staff will post updates about what the students encounter during the research phase both in the gallery and on the CWAM’s Facebook page. The exhibition opens on Tuesday, April 17 with a reception from 6:30-8:00 p.m. during which the student curators discuss their work.

About Saints, Relics, and Images: The Art of Medieval Devotion

Throughout the Middle Ages, saints served as exemplars of faith. From their position in the Court of Heaven, they interacted with the corporal world, their power made manifest in their bodily remains and associated possessions tucked into parish altars and revealed in distant pilgrimage destinations. Sumptuous reliquaries touted the power of saintly relics. Medieval Christians believed that achieving spiritual illumination was furthered through the commissioning and use of artistic material splendor. As such, luminous glass, precious metals, and ornate surfaces transported worshipers in their devotions enabling interaction with the holy dead.

Saints, Relics, and Images investigates how saints served as exemplars of faith throughout the Middle Ages. The exhibition will explore how artistic material supported spiritual illumination in Medieval Christian beliefs.

Lenders to the Exhibition:

College of Wooster Libraries Special Collections
CWAM Permanent Collections
Kruizenga Art Museum, Hope College, Hope, Michigan
Loyola University Museum of Art (LUMA), Chicago, Illinois
Wright Museum of Art, Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Art Galleries

02/03/2018 7:30 PM - 02/04/2018 12:30 AM Setup and Teardown: Covers - Douglass Hall - Basement (018), Security

1:00 PM-4:00 PM CWAM/ROBYN O'NEIL: WE, THE MASSES - Ebert Art Center - College of Wooster Art Museum

Robyn O'Neil: WE, THE MASSES

January 23-March 8, 2018
Sussel Gallery

(Please note that WE, THE MASSES will be screened four times an hour and starts on the quarter hour.)

Reception & Artist Talk
Thursday, February 8, 2018
6:30-8:00 p.m.
Gallery talk by Robyn O’Neil at 7:00 p.m.

WE, THE MASSES trailer

A self-described “maker of worlds,” Los Angeles-based artist Robyn O’Neil’s wry humor infuses her well-known apocalyptic drawings—ten years of which form the basis for the award-winning short film, WE, THE MASSES, 2011. After attending Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School where she met Irish director Eoghan Kidney, the two teamed up to bring O’Neil’s drawings to life in a thirteen-minute, stop motion animation. The film explores futility, hope, and self-inflicted wounds as it swings between the foibles of human nature and the epic sweep of the natural world. Actions include a sweatsuit wearing man falling out of foreboding grey clouds, fruitless encounters with a group of similarly attired men, and a tsunami that engulfs the encampment. While seemingly a linear narrative, resolution never arrives because, as the artist states, “Endings can be inconclusive, but yet are still called ‘endings.’ They are also starting points; things must end so that something else will happen.”

Supported by a grant from the Irish Film Board, WE, THE MASSES is presented at the CWAM courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, New York. The recently published book, Robyn O’Neil: Twenty Years of Drawing (2017) is available through Archon Projects.

About the Artist

Robyn O’Neil (b. 1977, Omaha, Nebraska) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. She has been had major solo exhibitions at the Des Moines Art Center and at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas. Her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Whitney Biennial (2004), Dargerism at The American Folk Art Museum, New York (2008), and Multiverse: Stories of This World and Beyond at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City (2017). O’Neil is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2008 and the Hunting Prize in 2009. She also hosts one of the highest rated poetry & literature podcasts “ME READING STUFF.”

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