Three exhibitions to open at UB Anderson Gallery

The UB Art Galleries is gearing up for the summer season with three new exhibitions opening June 8 at the UB Anderson Gallery.

An opening reception for all three will take place from 6-8 p.m. June 8 at the gallery.

‘Alberto Rey: Lost Beauty I’

“Lost Beauty I” will showcase painter, writer and filmmaker Alberto Rey’s “The Extinct Birds Project,” including paintings and ceramics by Rey, as well as extinct bird specimens, videos and audio recordings from the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, N.Y.; the Macaulay Library in the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University; and the Buffalo Museum of Science.

“Lost Beauty I” is the first part of the UB Art Galleries’ collaborative project with the Buffalo Museum of Science, which will present “Alberto Rey: Lost Beauty II,” the second part of the collaboration, in summer 2020. That exhibition will include a new body of site-specific work based on the museum’s vast collection of artifacts and specimens collected since the early 1800s.

In addition to his artistic pursuits, Rey is a fly fishing guide, distinguished professor, and founder and director of a youth fly fishing program. His work has examined environmental issues for the past 20 years.

“Lost Beauty I” is on view through Aug. 11.

‘Sam Richardson: Intimate Landscape’

Known for his landscape sculptures made of plastic and resin, Sam Richardson (1934-2013) helped initiate new ways of thinking about landscape art in the late 1960s and 70s. Stripped of roads, buildings, debris and any sign of human interference, Richardson’s landscapes push the viewer into a quiet zone of tranquil free association; it’s a place that may seem familiar, but is also non-specific enough to create a space for one’s own experiences.

Featuring paintings, sculpture, watercolors, graphic works, archival materials and miniature models from the artist’s large-scale temporary public art pieces, “Intimate Landscape” expects to provide new context to the artist’s impact on contemporary landscape art and reintroduce people to his essential work.

This exhibition includes work from the UB Art Galleries’ permanent collection, along with significant loans from Sam Watts, Richardson's grandson, and the David K. Anderson Grandchildren’s Trust: Horace and Holiday Anderson.

Generous support for the exhibition and catalogue is provided by the family of Sam Richardson. The exhibition is curated by Robert Scalise, acting director of the UB Art Galleries, and Sam Watts. The accompanying exhibition catalogue features an essay by Theodore Triandos, visiting lecturer in the Department of Art.

“Intimate Landscape” is on view through Aug. 25.

‘Art and Artifact’

“Art and Artifact” showcases the most recent of an ongoing series of student engagements with the objects in the gallery’s Cravens Collection. Throughout the 2019 spring semester, graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Anthropology’s Museum Management course partnered with fourth-graders from Bennett Park Montessori to study the diversity of indigenous North American material culture in the collection.

The objects selected for study, which varied in their temporal and geographic origins, provided opportunities to practice careful, hands-on observation and facilitated conversations about the storytelling capacity of objects.

The exhibition, staged in the gallery’s Collaborative Classroom, brings together the fourth-graders’ colorful interpretations of these objects, and the UB students’ investigations of the objects’ cultural, material, aesthetic and functional histories.

The project is supported by the Cravens Foundation Endowment. Read a UBNow story about the spring 2018 collaboration.

“Art and Artifact” is on view through Aug. 25.

All three Anderson Gallery exhibitions are free and open to the public.

The UB Anderson Gallery is located at 1 Martha Jackson Place, off Englewood Avenue near the South Campus. Hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday.