Overview

Vanishing Point: Wellin Commissions and Collaborations
Curated by Tracy L. Adler
September 2028 – June 2029

Vanishing Point: Wellin Commissions and Collaborations presents a selection of works created through partnerships between the Wellin Museum and an international roster of contemporary artists. Since its founding in 2012, the Wellin has approached working with living artists as an opportunity to engage students, faculty, and community members, and more broadly to demystify the activities of the museum. The resulting original commissions have been informed by the environment in which the works were created. Artists have conceptualized work that responds specifically to the museum’s mission—to engage constituents on and off campus using art as a lens through which to see the world. 

This exhibition offers a rare opportunity for the Wellin to display select works of art that together tell the story of the museum, its history of commissioning, and the ongoing development of its collection. Several artworks are large-scale and therefore seldom on view. Vanishing Point will include notable commissions, among them the original video by Jeffrey Gibson entitled I Was Here produced for the 2018 show Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day, Yashua Klos’s mural When the Parts Untangle made in collaboration with Hamilton students for the 2022 exhibition Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR, sculptural reliefs created by Michael Rakowitz for the 2021 exhibition Michael Rakowitz: Nimrud, and Donté K. Hayes’s suite of ceramic sculptures made in 2022 as part of the Wellin’s Creative Commission series. Through these works and those by artists who have engaged with the Wellin over the last fifteen years, Vanishing Point offers a look back at the museum’s distinctive history of ambitious creative collaborations.

The Wellin is a teaching museum that supports learning using a variety of approaches with education at its center. True to that mission, Vanishing Point will feature interactive elements and educational prompts designed by Wellin Museum student docents as the conceptual and literal core of the exhibition. The title “Vanishing Point” is inspired by the construct of single-point perspective, a Renaissance artistic development that revolutionized the pictorial representation of depth of field and receding space. It also infers the prospect of what exists beyond the visual picture plane, or the world outside that which is depicted. This exhibition will examine the stories behind the works of art on view and the spirit of collaboration in which they were created. Whether it’s how a work joined the institution’s holdings, a resulting commission, or a story about the impact of its development on an artist’s practice, Vanishing Point endeavors to unpack the lives of artworks and their origins.

Image Credit: Yashua Klos collaborating with Hamilton students on the creation of the mural When the Parts Untangle featured in the Wellin Museum exhibition Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR, 2022. Photo by Janelle Rodriguez.