BIRTHDAY SUIT SELECTIONS FROM RUTGERS— CAMDEN COLLECTION OF ART
Stedman Gallery, January 14 – February 16, 2019
BIRTHDAY SUIT The Stedman Gallery opened in 1975 as part of the newly constructed Fine Arts Building on the Rutgers-Camden campus. The Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art was established at this time with an endowment from the A. Weir Stedman Family. Through purchases and donations of artwork, the collection has grown and serves as a visual arts resource for the campus, the city and the region. Thematic exhibitions of work selected from the collection are curated and shown on a regular basis.
Rutgers-Camden hosted its first Southern New Jersey Artists exhibition, highlighting artists who lived and/or worked in the eight counties of southern New Jersey. This series continued through 1994 and works by notable regional artists were acquired for the collection, including Al The collection has several areas Corpus, Pedro Fuller, Melanie of concentration including: works Guernsey, Karen Smith, Shelley on/of paper by contemporary Thorstensen, and Wendell White. American artists; works by artists living and/or working in southern In this way, the Rutgers-Camden New Jersey; and works purchased Collection of Art has grown to 550 as purchase prizes from the pieces and includes work by such annual Rutgers-Camden Senior renown artists as Jennifer Bartlett, Thesis exhibition. More than half Salvador Dali, Helen Frankenthaler, of the works are on and/or of Leon Golub, Ben Kamihira, Glenn paper, but also includes two- and Ligon, Yvonne Jacquette, Marisol, three-dimensional works of art in Robert Rauschenberg, Larry a variety of media. Rivers, George Segal, and Victor Vasarely. Many of the works from When Rutgers-Camden hosted the collection are placed in public its first juried biennial Rutgers spaces on the Camden campus National Drawing exhibition in and made accessible to the 1975, it began to award purchase general public. prizes and accession works into the Collection. This competition Many generous people & continued through 1996. In 1984, organizations continue to donate
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Many generous people & organizations have & continue to donate work to the Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art.
work to the Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art, including Zola Bryen, Eleanora L. Cheney, Olga B. Moore, Marilyn Arnold Palley and Reese Palley, William Speiller, Patricia and Paul Stankard, Roberta K. Tarbell, The George Segal Foundation, and Fran and Ellen Zinni.
New Jersey artist Ben Jones in Spring 2018, the Stedman Gallery conceived of Birthday Suit, an exhibition that celebrates the human body. Many of the pieces in the show had rarely been displayed, but the generous donation of Dr. Miller and Mr. Bixler spawned this exhibition that shows the wide variety of ways in When Dr. John Charles Miller which the depiction of the body and Mr. Robert E. Bixler donated finds expression. a watercolor by the renown
COLLECTING John C. Miller I purchased my first painting, a colorful streetscape signed S. Nesbitt, from a street vendor in Barbados. I searched thrift shops for artwork that I could purchase with my limited student budget. Hoboken, New Jersey was full of baptism and confirmation certificates in multiple languages. I still purchase street art, most recently from art students on the Malecon in La Habana, Cuba.
As I gaze around our condo, the works of Ben Jones, Senga Fittz, Nicholasa Mohr and Louis Cicotello stand out. I donated a Ben Jones watercolor to the Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art. A 1970s print by Brooke Larsen is also being exhibited in the Stedman Gallery. The work of landscape photographer Joel Sternfeld dates from when we were colleagues at Stockton State as initial faculty. The collection of some 12 of his photographs are in my daughter’s house in Oregon. He regularly gave me a print when he published a new collection. Travel and residency abroad inspired other purchases: ceramics from Turkey and prints from Colombia, alejibres and pottery from Mexico. In Colombia where I have worked intermittently since the 1970s,
I loved the National Museum Gallery where Luis Caballero and Leonardo Da Vinci inspired us. I was lucky to acquire a Caballero after his death from his sister. Folk art has always interested me: papercutting from India, puppets from Rajastan and functional Mexican wooden toys. Much of that work has been given to museums in Colorado. Our bedroom is a tribute to the Southwest and the time we have spent in Colorado. On the earthy dark brown bedroom walls, we have hung the work of Mick Weber, that of an unknown artist purchased at the Colorado State Fair, and photographs purchased at the renown Santa Fe Art Fair. Then there are the photographs of Robert Bixler, my husband, which come from India, Japan, Malaysia,
Thailand and Colombia. Large and smaller photographs surround us in Cape Coral. Friends, other cultures, and the geography of memory mark my collecting
Biographical Note Born in Camden, John C. Miller received his BA in Humanities from Rutgers-Camden in 1959. He earned his MSed from Southern Illinois University in 1961. That year he received the first of 5 Fulbrights, that one taking him to the Universidad Central (Venezuela). His trip was inspired by a Rutgers study abroad to Argentina in the summer of 1959. He pursued an MA in Spanish and French at the University of Maryland and began a fulltime teaching career in 1964 at Allegheny College. Having received his MA in 1965, he began a doctorate in Modern Languages at Middlebury Language School. In 1968, a second Fulbright allowed him to go to Spain. He completed his doctorate in 1970 and he began his university teaching career. In 1987, he moved to the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, where he served as department
chair. He retired in 2005 as Professor Emeritus of Languages and Cultures. John C. Miller and his husband of 37 years, Robert E. Bixler, have contributed a significant number of artworks to the Rutgers-Camden Collection of Art and have funded a Rutgers Camden Scholarship, the John C. Miller scholarship for first generation college students. Mr. Miller attended Rutgers Camden as a first generation college student with a State Scholarship tuition grant.
Funding for this exhibition has been made possible in part by an award from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts; The Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation; Subaru of America Foundation; Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and Dr. John Charles Miller and Mr. Robert E. Bixler.