Explore ‘Traveling Museums & Other Curiosities’ at River Campus Art Gallery
01/23/2017

“Traveling Museums & Other Curiosities: The Work of Jeffrey Abt” will be on display in Southeast Missouri State University’s River Campus Art Gallery Feb. 6-24. An opening reception is scheduled for 5-7 p.m. with an Artist Talk at 4 p.m. Feb. 3. This show displays a series of collapsible museums and drawings and focuses on visual culture and how viewers experience art. “My work focuses on the visual culture of museums with a particular emphasis on the ways museums inadvertently resist viewers, museums as machines for study and reflection, and museums as sites of transience evident in the presentation of traveling exhibitions,” Abt said. Abt is a professor in the James Pearson Duffy Department of Art and Art History of Wayne State University. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Drake University, and he studied at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Jerusalem before completing a Master of Fine Arts at Drake. Abt pursued curatorial and exhibitions work at the Wichita Art Museum, the Special Collections Research Center of the University of Chicago, and the University’s Smart Museum of Art, before coming to Wayne State. He’s an artist and writer, his artwork is in museums and corporate collections throughout the United States, and he has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in America and abroad. Abt’s writings include the books “A Museum on the Verge: A Socioeconomic History of the Detroit Institute of Arts, 1882-2000” published by Wayne State University Press in 2001 and “American Egyptologist: The Life of James Henry Breasted and the Creation of His Oriental Institute” published in 2012 by the University of Chicago Press. He is also a co-editor of the Museum History Journal. The River Campus Art Gallery is located on the first floor of the historic Seminary Building in Room 106. River Campus Art Gallery hours are 1-5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 1-7 p.m. on First Fridays. All gallery exhibitions, events and talks are free and open to the public. For more information, contact Gallery Coordinator Justin Miller at rcgallerycoordinator@semo.edu or (573) 651-2865.