Museum Minute

This krater is highly decorated with both designs and figural groupings in the Black Figure technique. It is a complicated process, but put simply, the main decorative elements and figures are painted with a slip that turns black in the firing process. On one side, a wedding scene is painted with bride and groom in a four-horse chariot, accompanied by two women attendants and a musician playing a lyre. One of the attendants holds a torch. The other side has a battle scene, two warriors fight over the body of a fallen third. Again, two female attendants look on.

Greek Artist (6th century BCE)

Emily Kame Kngwarreye was one of the first celebrated female Aboriginal Australian Desert Painters. Entering the national art market well into her seventies, Kngwarreye paved the way for female Aboriginal artists to express women's specific cultural relationship to the Dreaming and their ancestral lands. In My County, Kngwarreye uses a vibrantly colored dotting technique, popularized in Papunya. While only she knows the true stories and secrets that lay hidden within the canvas, all viewers can appreciate My Country for its immensely beautiful and imposing presence.

Emily Kame Kngwarreye

Episode produced by Sydney Pulliam.

Standing at six feet tall, the sculpture “Nullius in Verba III” is intentionally the same height and weight as its sculptor, Steaphan Paton. The metal, diamond-shaped shield, mounted on a long pole, confronts the viewer. The shield’s surface is scratched, evoking the centuries of violence and dispossession faced by Paton’s ancestors. Among closer inspection, however, the sculpture is made from modern materials, asserting that this violence against Indigenous Australians is not an historic anecdote but a contemporary issue. 

Episode produced by Addie Patrick. 

Miss Rhoda Cranston looks out of her portrait and slightly to her left. Painted by John Singleton Copley around 1756, we see the artist relying on current English traditions of portraiture to establish the status of his subject. Copley studied contemporary portraits in England and Europe available to him in Boston through prints and is learning from them trends in both placement and background as well as the necessity of outfitting his sitters in the latest fashions.

John Singleton Copley

In deep reds, pinks, and yellows, Emily Kame Kngwarreye's "Awely" is an embodiment of her connection with her Country. Kngwarreye began painting late in her life, when she was already an elder in her community, Utopia, in Australia’s Northern Territory. The artwork’s title refers to women’s ceremonial knowledge of song, dance, medicine, and designs painted on the body. As Kngwarreye applied heavy blotches of paint to her canvases, she would sing ceremonial songs, replicating the act of painting on skin. In this way, “Awely” is both a painting of Kngwarreye’s homeplace and a conversation with it.

Episode produced by Addie Patrick. 

John Sloan

Hell Hole is a 1917 etching by the American Artist, John Sloan. We see the cramped, claustrophobic interior of bustling bar. We know this is the Golden Swan, frequently referred to by its regulars as the Hell Hole, hence the title of the print.

Located at West 4th and 6th Avenue in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the Golden Swan was frequented by both working class patrons and the artists for whom the area became known in the 20th century.

Diane Arbus

This photograph of gossip columnist Hedda Hopper by Weegee is an example of what he called his distortions. After working as a photojournalist in the gritty Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1930s and ‘40s, he moved to Hollywood where he began photographing celebrities and experimenting with dark room techniques.

Though small, this Cypriot rhyton in the form of a bull has a lot of personality.  He’s a favorite with many visitors to The Fralin Museum of Art, particularly our UVA students. A rhyton is a vessel, usually with an animal head or, in this case, a depiction of a whole animal, that is meant to hold liquid for drinking or pouring. This may have been used in funerary rites or in acts of commemoration.

This powerful self-portrait in The Fralin Museum of Art’s collection is by the French artist, Émilie Charmy. She was influenced by Post-Impressionism and acquainted with the Fauves, both clearly evidenced in her compositional structure, passages of loose brushwork, and choice of strong colors.