At Wellesley, getting it down on paper: Three new shows at the Davis Museum highlight the college’s holdings

The largest, ‘Better on Paper,’ indicates what its contents — books, prints, drawings, photographs — have in common

Romano Hänni, "It is Bitter to Leave your Home: A True Story Depicted in Typographic Images," 2017.Wellesley College Special Collections, courtesy of the artist

WELLESLEY — The appeal of “Better on Paper,” the largest of three new shows at Wellesley College’s Davis Museum, begins with such an expansive show having so terse a title. Five syllables for more than 100 works? Now that’s a bargain. What seals the deal is how memorable many of those works are.

“Better on Paper” runs through June 1. Wellesley’s Amanda Gilvin and Ruth R. Rogers curated. Sharing that closing date are “Sovereign Memory: Photography, Remembrance, and Displaced Histories” (not a terse title), and “Nevers in the World” (another five-syllable title), Nevers being a French center of ceramics.

The title of “Better on Paper” indicates what its contents have in common. With the exception of a rather startling inkwell, the items are on paper: books, prints, drawings, photographs. Wellesley acquired them all over the past decade. It’s necessary to specify the college, rather than the museum, since some of the most striking works come from Wellesley College Library Special Collections.

There’s that inkwell, for example. Executed by Frederick Bridges, circa 1860, it’s a reduced-scale porcelain human head, with phrenological markings superimposed. Startling in a different way is Kyle Goen’s “Black Panther Party Stamp Book” (2021). It’s philately as political provocation. The stamps look great, too.

John Pike, "The Land of Matrimony [and] Land of Celibacy: London," late 18th century.Wellesley College Special Collections

The Swiss artist and typographer Romano Hänni’s “It is Bitter to Leave your Home: A True Story Depicted in Typographic Images,” from 2017, has a remarkable title. It’s almost as remarkable as the object’s chromatic delicacy and the material being paper towels. As for titles, that of the fan designed by John Pike, “The Land of Matrimony [and] Land of Celibacy,” from the late 18th century, offers a charming, if opposed, message.

The date that John Hassall’s “Ye Berlyn Tapestrie: Wilhelm’s Invasion of Flanders” was made, 1915, gives a clue that it’s World War I propaganda, which it is. What one would have no reason to expect is that its foldout leaves, some 30 of them, imitate the style of the Bayeux Tapestry. A different invasion is alluded to in Peter Malutzki’s “Some Buildings on the Streets of Kharkiv: Ukraine 2023.” In both title and accordion format, it recalls Ed Ruscha’s landmark creation “Every Building on the Sunset Strip,” from 1966. Museumgoers interested in a compare-and-contrast can do so: The same vitrine contains a copy of each.

Prints, drawings, and paintings make up more than half of the works in “Better on Paper.” Some are by some very well-known artists present (Kiki Smith, Glenn Ligon, Kara Walker). Others are by even better-known artists past (Sonia Delaunay, with a particularly jazzy gouache and pencil; Berthe Morisot; Camille Pissarro). The best-known artist, Rembrandt, is part of a delightful bit of curatorial whimsy. Magdalena van de Passe’s 17th-century engraving “Spring” hangs below the Rembrandt etching, “The Pancake Woman.” The figure in “Spring” is so positioned as to seem to be looking up at the Rembrandt.

Another nifty bit of hanging is that a Lee Bontecou drawing dominated by two black dots should be alongside an Andy Goldsworthy drawing dominated by, yes, a black dot. The Goldsworthy offers an art-historical fillip. The dot looks like the pupil of an eye, and the surrounding hatchwork makes that eye resemble one of Philip Guston’s antic-horrific eyeball paintings. Sue Coe provides a very different visual chiming, this one intentional, in her 2017 “Grenfell Tower (Corporate Murder).” The linocut evokes the terrible fire that year in a London tower block that killed 72 people. Stark, blunt, enraged, the work harkens back to German Expressionism, summoning the spirit of Käthe Kollwitz.

Ming Smith, "Self Portrait, Harlem, NY," circa 1973.Courtesy of the artist and Jenkins Johnson Gallery

There’s a link between the prints/drawings/paintings portion of the show and the photographs, and it’s a surprising one: the legendary dancer Isadora Duncan. She’s the subject of an Abraham Walkowitz watercolor and she’s seen in a photograph with a group of her students — at Ellis Island, no less.

The selection of photographs has its share of famous names behind the camera: Diane Arbus, Weegee, Margaret Bourke-White, Eadweard Muybridge. The most striking images come from others, though. A Ming Smith self-portrait is a marvel of modesty, presenting her face in shadows and emphasizing the architectural ornamentation above her head. Thanks to the vibrant color of its subject, Chloe Dewe Matthews’s “Goldfish on Sale at Nowruz, Ramsar, Iran” would be spectacular even if it weren’t printed so large; but it is, at nearly 42 inches by nearly 33 inches. Spectacular in a very different way is the sheer glum, drab Irishness of Alen MacWeeney’s “Street Vendors of Vegetables, Dublin.” MacWeeney took it in 1963, when the city remained far closer in spirit to the 19th century than to the Celtic Tiger capital it would become.

Sky Hopinka, "This is a mnemonic for Truman Lowe," 2019.Courtesy of the artist and The Green Gallery, Milwaukee

“Sovereign Memory” includes 39 works, most of them photographic and all of them from the Davis’s collection. Jessica Orzulak, of the Asheville (N.C.) Art Museum, curated the show.

Those works are presented as countering what wall text calls the medium’s “darker history as a colonial machine producing images in support of empires.” As technological appendages of Western imperialism go, photography certainly qualifies, even if Maxim guns and aerial bombardment, say, offer far darker histories. Certainly, it’s true that whoever operates a camera holds a position of power, of varying coercive degree, over those that camera is aimed at.

Notable as the show’s polemical armature may be, various works in it are worthy of greater note. Cara Romero’s “Last Indian Market,” a mural-size, modern-day, New Mexican photographic reworking of Leonardo’s “Last Supper,” is alert, alive, and quite funny. The four diptychs from the late Lorraine O’Grady’s “Miscegenated Family Album” juxtapose images of busts of ancient Egypt’s Queen Nefertiti (or her relations) with photographs of O’Grady’s own relations. Past and present are part of every photograph. Here that binary extends to take in history and family, too. Sky Hopinka’s “This is a mnemonic for Truman Lowe” memorializes the Indigenous artist with an arresting play of focus, shape, and picture plane.

Vase and cover, faience, circa 1685.Davis Museum

That there are only 11 pieces in “Nevers in the World” makes all the more impressive the sweep that the show encompasses. Wellesley’s Nicole Berlin, Alicia Bruce, and Yuhua Ding curated. Around the year 800, tin-glazed earthenware — faience — emerged in the Middle East, inspired by Chinese porcelain. Faience spread over the next eight centuries to North Africa, Spain, Italy, and France: globalization on a tabletop and very avant la lettre.

Most of the pieces on display were made in Nevers, in central France, during the 17th and 18th centuries. There are also two Chinese porcelains and a very handsome plate (the delicacy of the colors!) from 17th-century Italy. In their combination of beauty and utility, all are delightful. A vase and cover is also amusing. Meant to hold potpourri, it’s shaped like a keg and has a spigot equivalent. Form follows fragrance rather than function.

BETTER ON PAPER

SOVEREIGN MEMORY: Photography, Remembrance, and Displaced Histories

NEVERS IN THE WORLD

At Davis Museum, Wellesley College, 106 Central St. Wellesley, through June 1. 781-283-2051, wellesley.edu/davismuseum