On Thursday evening, The Gund unveiled its spring exhibitions, including various pieces that use different materials and mediums to confront pressing environmental issues. Members of The Gund’s team accompanied viewers as they acquainted themselves with the new artwork,  providing thoughtful insights on the pieces and artists that enriched the experience. The featured artists incorporated an interactive approach, calling on visitors to make their own mark on their pieces. This made the exhibitions more engaging while complicating the traditional viewer-artist relationship.

Upon entering the new spring exhibitions, viewers are met with a colossal installment of Phylidda Barlow’s “Eleven Columns,” one part of her exhibition, “untitled: eleven columns; standing, fallen, broken.” These columns are the most physically striking element of all the exhibitions, turning the room into a complex maze for visitors to navigate. Madi Hofstetter ’25, a Gund associate, helped attendees orient themselves in the installation by providing important context about Barlow and her unique creative process. Drawing inspiration from the urban reconstruction that followed World War II, Barlow built the columns from a combination of industrial materials like cement, plaster, foam, wood and fabric. In the group tour, Hofstetter emphasized that Barlow uses an “uncertain and inventive formation, there’s no organized structure like how we normally expect a feature of columns to be.” The exhibition also includes a series of paintings from Barlow’s studio. These colorful and dynamic pieces each depict a sculptural work, highlighting Barlow’s process of turning a conceptual design into a physical installation. 

In the second room, visitors face the more monochrome, environmentally-focused exhibition of the spring series titled “Something Blue.” Each piece of this exhibition centers on the primary theme of icebergs as a representation of climate change. The exhibition’s many contributors provide distinct interpretations of this theme, visualized through their global perspectives. Pieces range from photographs that depicted the melting of glaciers to a dark room filled with a scaled-down sculpture of the iceberg that sank the Titanic. 

One of the most notable pieces in this exhibition is a mural of the Thwaites “Doomsday” Glacier by Claire Greenshaw, which was hand-drawn here at Kenyon. The mural stands out as Greenshaw invites visitors to erase parts of it, representing their shared role in climate change and joint impact on the disappearance of the glacier. Another significant work is a sculpture titled “Star Harvest,” created by Assistant Professor of Studio Art Manami Ishimura. To make the piece, Ishimura encased fragments of ice harvested from Iceland into brass cages. As the ice melted, the water interacted with piles of plaster powder placed underneath the cages, changing the plaster’s form and solidifying the fleeting existence of the ice. During the opening of the exhibition, Ishimura stated, “I’m not going to critique this environmental issue, but I’d like to address the transformation.”

The third exhibition is “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans.” Her collection of works, almost entirely untitled, are wonderfully colorful, symmetrical and spiritual. Her art contains abstracted faces, as well as depictions of nature and wings. This exhibition is paired with handwritten letters by Evans herself, both addressed to a “Sir” or “Mr. Hinshaw.” In these letters, Evans wrote to discuss getting her art into a museum or exhibit. She wrote, “I no they are not like other artis drawings I was hoping someone would [give them a try] […] They very pretty you will not find any like them. […] Please Sir Mr. Hinshaw keep on trying.” A quilt titled “Dancing at the Louvre” (1991) by Faith Ringold hangs alongside Evans’ work. This quilt, which belongs to The Gund’s permanent collection, is part of Ringold’s series “The French Collection,” which follows Willia Marie Simon — a fictional young Black woman — through Paris. In “Dancing at the Louvre,” Willia dances with her friends in front of the Mona Lisa. The quilt’s edges are covered with handwritten texts and a collage of flower patterns. Both Evans and Ringold’s works are intricate, vibrant and expressive of their own lived experiences. 

Last, but certainly not least, is Joan Jonas’ “Rivers to the Abyssal Plain and Wind” featuring a recent collection of drawings as well as a short film created in 1968. “The Wind” takes place on a beach setting and showcases a cast of performers that Jonas directed. As a mixed-media artist, Jonas layered the original footage from her 1968 black-and-white film with colorful clips from a more recent project shot in 2021 at a beach in Nova Scotia. The film’s merging of landscape footage with effortless and graceful performers encourages the audience to contemplate their own relationship with the natural world. As a Gund associate and art history major who completed her senior exercise on Jonas, Rocky Reisz ’25 offered a thorough analysis of the film and its various motifs. Reisz characterized a defining aspect of Jonas’ work: that it “exists within a self-referential universe that does not fit into time.”  

The Gund’s exhibition receptions allow students, faculty and community members to come together and appreciate art while discussing the critical issues that the respective artists tackle. While Barlow’s “untitled: eleven columns; standing falling, broken” and Jonas’ “Rivers to the Abyssal Plain and Wind” will stay up until June 1, “Something Blue” and “The Visionary Art of Minnie Evans” will only be up until mid-April. Also included in the new spring exhibitions are strings of flowers created by elementary age students — a collaboration between The Annex, The Gund and multiple local elementary schools.

During the reception, Daisy Desrosiers, The Gund’s director, highlighted just how much work went into this moment: “This time we pushed ourselves to the next level. These exhibitions took time, energy and creativity to bring together and we are open today.”