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Claremont, CA—On Thursday, February 13, the Benton Museum of Art at ����AV will open four new exhibitions for Spring 2025. Jonathan Lethem’s Parallel Play: Contemporary Art and Art Writing and One Last Thing Again celebrate creative collaboration, the return of the object, and the interplay between ideas and material form. Two additional exhibitions are the fruits of the Benton’s mission as a teaching museum: Doubles presents the work of the museum’s AllPaper Seminar, a professional development program for emerging curators, and Black Ecologies in Contemporary American Art originated in a faculty collaboration and two attendant courses at ����AV, with students helping to curate the exhibition and write the exhibition texts. All four exhibitions are open from February 13 to June 29, 2025.

Doubles: Prints and Drawings from the Collections of the Benton Museum of Art and Ian White

For the past three years, the Benton Museum of Art has organized and hosted the AllPaper Seminar, a career development program designed to introduce graduate students and young professionals from all backgrounds to the field of works on paper. In the course of the seminar, AllPaper Fellows enjoy an intensive residency in Claremont, visiting LA-area museums, artists’ studios and organizations, and private collections, all in the service of developing curatorial skills and vision. For Doubles, the final exhibition of the AllPaper Seminar, the Fellows dove into the collections of the Benton and the artist Ian White to explore the classic art historical “compare and contrast” pedagogical method. Emerging with pairs of works that they then organized into theoretical exhibitions, the Fellows selected a sampling of their “doubles” to be presented here, including works by Gerald C. Clarke Jr., Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Kerry James Marshall, Edward Ruscha, Lorna Simpson, and Charles White. The arrangements in Doubles treat themes of cultural stewardship, national identities, environmental concern, and digital programming, offering an energetic display of the often surprising dialogues that surface when two works of art are put in conversation.

Curated by Solomon Salim Moore, academic curator; Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton; and Tristen Alizée Leone ’26, curatorial intern

The AllPaper Seminar was made possible with support from Getty through its Paper Project Initiative. The continuation of the seminar has been supported by the Tavolozza Foundation.

Black Ecologies in Contemporary American Art

Black Ecologies is an interdisciplinary field that explores relationships among Black people, Land, and the environment. It offers a new frame through which to understand pressing issues such as climate change as well as a new basis for anchoring historical narratives of plantation slavery, urban development, and other facets of racial capitalism. The subject of two courses and a speakers’ series at ����AV over the past two years, Black Ecologies is now the theme of an exhibition, co-organized by students and faculty in ����AV’s English department and the director of the Benton. The art on view here was produced by artists active in the United States in the last several decades, including Dawoud Bey, Tony Gleaton, Wardell Milan, Alison Saar, and Kara Walker. In prints, drawings, photographs, film, and sculpture, these works prompt us to consider how Black experience in America has been defined by the natural and built environments we collectively inhabit.

Curated by J Finley, associate professor of Africana Studies at ����AV; Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, Chair of English and E. Wilson Lyon Professor of the Humanities at ����AV; and Victoria Sancho Lobis, Sarah Rempel and Herbert S. Rempel ’23 Director of the Benton Museum of Art and associate professor of Art History at ����AV, with Tristen Alizée Leone ’26, curatorial intern

With contributions by members of the fall 2024 classes Race, Gender, and the Environment, Departments of English and Women and Gender Studies; and Unruly Bodies: Black Womanhood in Popular Culture, Intercollegiate Department of Africana Studies

This exhibition has been supported by the Eva Cole and Clyde Matson Memorial Fund and the Rembrandt Club of ����AV and Claremont. Programs related to this exhibition have been supported by the ����AV English Department.