Awards

Exhibitions

Lianna Hamby ‘17, Hannah Lehman ‘17, Mary Thompson ‘19, and Sarah Johnson ’19 curated an exhibition of paintings from the University of Puget Sound collection of Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943) featuring images of different U.S. National Parks by the Tacoma artist.  The exhibition celebrated both the centennial of the creation of the National Park Service and the longstanding connection of Hill’s works with the Art Department and Kittredge Hall; Professor emeritus Ron Fields worked extensively with the paintings and archival material and wrote the foundational book on the artist. This student-curated exhibition proposed that Hill’s paintings sought to preserve an untouched (and uninhabited) vision of the National Parks – one in which viewers and visitors could inscribe their own experiences.  Research projects from Museums and Curating in the Twenty-First Century: History, Theory, and Practice (Art History 380, fall 2016) provided background material for the exhibition.

Curated by Puget Sound students Sandra Brandon ’19, Lee Nelson ’19, and Sarah Laurie Johnson ’19, the second show is titled Traversing the Urban Landscape Through the Floating World of Japanese Prints. Featuring a selection of Japanese Ukiyo-e prints by artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858), the show illustrates the role of cities and surroundings in people’s lives.

The exhibition “reveals how depicting the ‘urban landscape’ for the burgeoning middle class was revolutionary, and how that revolution and the artist’s style ricocheted around the world up to the present day,” says Johnson.

The exhibition will be the first time Puget Sound’s Hiroshige prints have been on display in Kittredge Gallery since they were donated by Magdalena Maher Shelton to the university in 1999.

Photo: Clear Weather after Snow at Nihonbashi Bridge, ca. 1839-42, Edo Period, Polychromatic woodblock print; ink and color on paper, 24.2 x 36.7 cm, University of Puget Sound Collection