Two new exhibitions that opened in February at the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art on the campus of State Fair Community College will remain on view through May 26.
“The Sum of Its Attributes: The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection” and “Archie Scott Gobber Repeats Himself: A Survey of Works 1992-2012” is one exhibit.
Dorothy and Herbert Vogel began collecting the work of emerging artists in 1962, eventually assembling a collection of more than 4,000 examples of cutting-edge art by more than 177 artists.
In 2008, with the help of the National Gallery of Art, the Vogels launched a national gifts program, Fifty Works for Fifty States, which distributed 2,500 works from their collection throughout the nation, with 50 works going to a selected institution in each of the 50 states. Daum Museum was the Missouri designee. This exhibition celebrates the 50 paintings, sculptures and works on paper the Daum received as a beneficiary of the program.
The Vogels primarily collected minimal, conceptual and post-minimal art, but they also acquired works of a figurative and expressionist nature. The Daum’s collection features works produced from 1965 to 2001 by 27 artists, including Stephen Antonakos, Will Barnet, Robert Barry, Lisa Bradley, Charles Clough, Dan Graham, Lucio Pozzi, Edda Renouf, and Richard Tuttle.
Tuttle, a celebrated post-minimalist artist, is the best-represented artist in the Vogel’s collection, which is reflected at the Daum by the inclusion of eight distinct groupings of more than 50 of his ethereal and poetic watercolors.
Living on Dorothy’s earnings as a librarian while devoting Herbert’s postal-worker salary to art purchases, the Vogels followed two rules: the art they collected had to be affordable and had to fit into their small Manhattan apartment. These stipulations helped shape the impromptu visual character of much of their collection, which includes studies and sketches as well as highly finished works of art.
“Archie Scott Gobber Repeats Himself” features a combination of wit, intellect and artistry in his use of text in his paintings, sculpture and works on paper. Inspired by strategies of commercial signage and advertising, Gobber’s word play ranges from the nostalgic to the punning, political and cryptic.
This retrospective exhibition comprises 26 compositions ranging from the early 1990s to the present. The artworks include a series of large-scale enamel paintings on canvas and sculptural assemblages in addition to intimate ink and pencil drawings.
The unifying theme of the survey is Gobber’s exploration of the visual and semantic possibilities of text combined with image. He exploits his audience’s expectation of legibility and meaning by employing familiar-seeming images, logos and font styles. In Gobber’s hands, the well-known graphics of the supermarket shelf, the roadside billboard and even the comic strip become vehicles for spot-on sendups of the evening news, dizzyingly cryptic word puzzles or laugh-out-loud provocations centered on cultural icons.
Gobber, originally from Warrensburg, is a Kansas City-based artist. His work has been exhibited in the area since the late 1990s, and has been featured in numerous publications including Art in America, Artforum, New American Paintings, Review, and The Kansas City Star. Public collections housing Gobber’s work include Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Spencer Museum, and the Belger Foundation.
He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Kansas City Art Institute and is represented by Dolphin Gallery in Kansas City.
Museum hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 1-5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. The museum is closed Mondays. Admission is free. For more information, call (660) 530-5888 or visit the Web site at www.daummuseum.org.
