Peter Halley, "Core," 1991. Silkscreen with lithography on Coventry Rag paper. Collection of the Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.Works from the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s permanent collection, selected by fresh eyes for their use of color, will be on exhibition at Abroms-Engel Institute for the Visual Arts.
This year, past exhibitions and works from the permanent collection have been highlighted as part of AEIVA’s 10th anniversary commemoration. When AEIVA’s newest staff member, Curator Hannah Spears, was invited to select a show from the permanent collection, she knew she wanted to present works that would be in dialogue with solo exhibitions by artists Manjari Sharma and Odili Donald Odita also on display this fall.
As she was familiarizing herself with Odita’s work, she was struck by the idea that his use of color takes on social and even political significance.
“I didn’t immediately understand how, since the work he’s best known for is very abstract,” Spears said. “But I had this question in mind as I was looking through our collection. And so, I started to see how color has its own way of signifying things on its own. I wanted to home in on that in this show by selecting works in which color kind of outpaces line in terms of its significance to the piece.”
In his book “Chromophobia,” David Batchelor talks about how, throughout art history, color has been considered subordinate to line, relegated to the realm of the superficial or inessential, often through associations with femininity, foreignness, queerness, infantilism or pathology, Spears says.
“But from roughly the middle of the 20th century to the present, there’s been a shift — now color is embraced and celebrated in art,” she said. “I wanted to examine how artists’ use of color in this period reflects broader shifts in society, in technology, and in visual and material culture more generally.”
“Outside Lines: Selections from the Permanent Collection” looks to changes in technology and industrial processes in works by Sheila Mae Pinkel, William Cushner, Peter Halley and others; the turn to everyday objects and materials in works by Sam Gilliam and Willie Cole, reflecting the democratization of art in this period; and social shifts reflected in work by Jiha Moon and Sally Mann for instance, whose work explores questions around femininity. Other artists included in the exhibition are Joseph Albers, Tomory Dodge, Howard Finster, Pamela Jorden, Sharon Louden, Odili Donald Odita, Letitia Quesenberry, Sonja Rieger, Bob Thompson and Juan Uslé.
AEIVA and Sidewalk Cinema will co-present a film series on Mondays in October, followed by discussions facilitated by UAB film professor Gareth Jones. The films belong to a genre of Italian thriller-horror movies from the 1960s and ’70s known as giallo — the Italian word for yellow — in reference to the trademark yellow covers of pulp novels popular in Italy beginning in the 1930s.
As an extension of “Outside Lines,” AEIVA will co-present a series of four films with Sidewalk Cinema on Mondays in October, followed by discussions facilitated by UAB film professor Gareth Jones. The films belong to a genre of Italian thriller-horror movies from the 1960s and ’70s known as giallo — the Italian word for yellow — in reference to the trademark yellow covers of pulp novels popular in Italy beginning in the 1930s.
Spears joined AEIVA in February 2024. She organized the 2024 graduating BFA exhibition in partnership with UAB’s Department of Art and Art History. She is currently working on a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Alex Chitty opening January 2025, as well as next summer’s Alabama Triennial exhibition with guest curators Bet Elliott and Sydney A. Foster, among other projects.
Previously, Spears was associate curator at JOAN, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles with a focus on emerging and underrepresented artists. There she curated or provided curatorial support on numerous exhibitions and projects by artists including Yalda Afsah, A.K. Burns, Nour Mobarak, Steffani Jemison, Pippa Garner and Peggy Ahwesh. She holds a Master of Arts degree in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, and her writing on art has been published in Burnaway, Temporary Art Review and X-TRA, among other publications.