Current Exhibitions


Turn the Pages Slowly
Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Haggerty Collection

August 22-December 7, 2008

This exhibition, drawn primarily from the Haggerty’s permanent collection, features rare books and manuscripts from the 14th through 20th centuries. Focusing on devotional texts, the exhibition includes a 19th century Koran, medieval Books of Hours and antiphonals (choral books). Individual leaves from French, English and Italian breviaries, Bibles and Books of Hours are highlighted, as well. The exhibition also includes facsimiles of medieval Haggadot.

The elaborate illustrations, illuminations and calligraphy found in these early texts remind the contemporary reader of the laborious processes involved in ancient bookmaking. In addition to the preparation of parchment, the formulation of pigments and the binding of pages, there was also the grueling work of the scribe:

“The labor of the scribe is the refreshment of the reader: the former weakens the body, the latter profits the mind. Whoever you may be, therefore, who profit by this work, do not forget the laboring one who made it, so that God, thus invoked, will overlook your sins. Amen. Because one who does not know how to write thinks it no labor. I will describe it for you, if you want to know how great is the burden of writing: it mists the eyes, it curves the back, it breaks the belly and the ribs, it fills the kidneys with pain, and the body with all kinds of suffering. Therefore, turn the pages slowly, reader, and keep your fingers well away from the pages, for just as a hailstorm ruins the fecundity of the soil, so the sloppy reader destroys both the book and the writing. For as the last port is sweet to the sailor, so the last line to the scribe. Explicit, thanks be to God.”*

An essay by Dr. Wanda Zemler-Cizewski (Associate Professor, Department of Theology, Marquette University), will accompany the exhibition. Dr. Zemler-Cizewski has done extensive research on the Haggerty’s collection of manuscripts. Books have generously been loaned to the Haggerty for this exhibition from UWM’s Division of Archives and Special Collections and Nashotah House.

*Comments by the scribe Florentius of Valeranica (10th century)

Leaf from a Breviary
Italian, 15th century
Ink, gold leaf, tempera on parchment
72.17
Haggerty Museum of Art
Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Joan Pick

Turn the Pages Slowly: Rare Books and Manuscripts from the Haggerty Collection exhibition catalogue PDF




Old Masters from the Haggerty: Re-seeing the Collection

Ongoing

This exhibition features nine larger scale works from the Haggerty Museum of Art’s permanent collection of Old Master paintings. Marquette University has had a painting collection since the late nineteenth century that continues to grow in both size and quality. Old Masters at the Haggerty focuses on select examples of late Renaissance, Baroque, and Mannerist religious paintings from Europe. These nine works are part of a collection of over 100 Old Master paintings.













Circle of Lorenzo Sabatini (Italian, 1530-1576)
The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Alexandria
Oil on panel
Museum Purchase, The David C. Scott Foundation Fund, 2003.5








stop.look.listen: an exhibition of video works

October 23, 2008 – February 22, 2009

In the short history of video art, there have been two primary modes of expression, “feedback” and “immersion.” Early closed-circuit video feeds were used as an electronic mirror, instantaneously reflecting whatever came into the camera’s gaze. More recently, there has been a shift as many contemporary artists use a more cinematic, “immersion”–style approach in installations with one or more projected images. This exhibition considers the connections between these two prevalent expressions in video from the last fifteen years, focusing on works that have a significant relationship between sound and image and those that are purposefully silent. Using examples of work by fourteen artists from around the world, the exhibition will show that a response to the moving image can occur on many sensory levels within both “feedback” and “immersion” practices; many of the works try to break down the traditional opposition between viewer and viewed by emphasizing a more inclusive interaction. Artists represented in the exhibition include Janet Biggs, Burt Barr, Johanna Billing, Slater Bradley, Mircea Cantor, Patty Chang, Amy Globus, Jesper Just, Mads Lynnerup, Christian Marclay, Rodney McMillian, Anri Sala and Salla Tykkä.

stop.look.listen. was organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University and curated by Andrea Inselmann, curator of modern and contemporary art. Ms. Inselmann will present the opening gallery talk on Thursday, October 30th at 6 p.m. in Cudahy 001, the lower level auditorium (1313 Wisconsin Avenue at 13th Street) followed by an opening reception at the museum. The presentation and reception are free and open to the public.

Mads Lynnerup, one of the artists featured in stop.look.listen., will be in residence at the Haggerty Museum of Art from November 9th through November 14th. On Wednesday, November 12, Lynnerup will be the guest speaker for UWM’s Artists Now! series. Lynnerup’s lecture You are the Artist, You Figure it Out, will be presented at 7 p.m. in the Peck School of the Arts Lecture Hall, located at 2400 E. Kenwood Blvd. on the UWM campus.
The lecture is free and open to the public.

The exhibition and catalogue were organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY. They were realized in part with financial support from the Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, the Fifth Floor Foundation, the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. The exhibition was funded in part by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Additional support for the exhibition was provided by Hermès. The catalogue was partially funded by Cornell's Atkinson Forum in American Studies Program.

Presentation of this exhibition at the Haggerty Museum of Art and additional programming were made possible by The Royal Danish Embassy, the Marquette University Andrew W. Mellon Committee Fund, the Emmett J. Doerr Endowment Fund, the Nelson Goodman Endowment Fund and the Wisconsin Arts Board.

JANET BIGGS (American, b. 1959)
Predator and Prey, 2006
Two-channel video installation, shown on eight Plasma screens
Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery, New York