Alumni featured in the Richmond Center

The Richmond Center for Visual Arts is pleased to announce a new exhibition space dedicated to alumni artwork from the University Art Collection. Located on the first floor of the Richmond Center, the exhibition “Featured Alumni from the University Art Collection” will rotate annually, honoring our alumni and reaffirming our deep appreciation for their gifts to the University and the greater Kalamazoo community.  The inaugural suite of seven artworks includes My Sunny Pathway, a recently donated watercolor by DeVries; an intimate painting titled Other Fish by Mary Hatch; and Into the Blue, one of Eve Reid’s earlier handmade paper pieces.  Exhibited in the Biennale Internazionale Dell’Arte Contemporanea, in Florence, Italy, in December of 2009 and recently donated to the University Art Collection, John Kollig’s Venetian Series #5 hangs as the centerpiece of this new exhibition space. The darker, more dramatic prints and painting by Sy Ellens, James Walker, and Peter Gooch, anchor the wall.

This year the University Art Collection received many wonderful gifts from members of the community and those close to the University.  WMU Professor Emeritus John M. (Jack) Carney announced his donation of 40 paintings by former WMU School of Art professor Dwayne Lowder. Opening to the public on January 11 and on view through March 8, 2020, an exhibition titled I Bet You Wouldn’t Give It to Me Even if I Asked celebrates this gift as much as it commemorates Mr. Lowder’s incredible creative legacy. 

The student art gallery is named for Robert and Eleanor DeVries, who studied at the School of Art and received juried awards for the two acrylic pieces they recently donated to the collection. Permanently installed next to the DeVries Student Art Gallery on the first floor, they are a wonderful addition to the space. We are overjoyed to honor Ellie with this installation.  Ladislav Hanka gifted ten etchings with beeswax embellishments from The Honeybee Scriptures, nine of which we permanently installed on the second floor outside the Frostic School of Art advising office. These works transform the hallway into a space of introspection. Nan Kinney’s generous donation of works from Barbara Rensenhouse’s collection improve the overall breadth and quality of the University Art Collection. The Eve Reid piece included in “Featured Alumni from the University Art Collection” comes from this donation. Always free and open to the public, the Richmond Center for Visual Arts invites you to visit and revel in the beauty of these new additions to the University Art Collection.