The everyday act of sitting is a launch point for considering everyday biases in the exhibit “Like a Good Armchair: Getting Uncomfortable with Modern and Contemporary Art.”
“Chairs and sitting are loaded with significance and layers of privilege and the expression of different identities,” said Sam Adams, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.
The idea for this exhibition took root right around the time Adams started work at the Allen last May when the museum acquired two new chairs.
“I started thinking about ableism, sit-ins, racism, ageism, manspreading, the way that sitting is a gendered act, and how each of these chairs in our collection — or portraits of images of sitting — spoke to those wider histories,” Adams said.
A blue bench within the exhibit by artist Shannon Finnegan, for instance, critiques the design of museums with text on the bench reading: "This exhibition has asked me to stand for too long. Sit if you agree."
“In fact, a stipulation of us acquiring that is that it remains on view as seating and that it doesn't substitute previous seating, but it adds to the seating,” Adams said.
From photographs of civil rights sit-ins to Andy Warhol’s brightly colored silkscreens of an electric chair, Adams, along with curatorial assistant and Oberlin student Fudi Fickenscher, compiled a wide-ranging exhibit. One of Fickenscher’s contributions to the exhibit included adding in more depictions of sitting in Asia.
“There’s a tradition in Asia of sitting on the floor on mats, and that is how we connect with the earth,” Fickenscher said. “I really was hoping to see more of that represented.”
In addition to seated Buddha figures in the exhibit, a color woodblock print by artist Ebina Masao shows royal figures sitting in court in Asia.
Exhibits like this one aim to support teaching at Oberlin as well. Three portrayals of reclining women created by three different male artists during and between WWI and WWII are grouped together for their similarities.
“All three artists are thinking about these contorted bodies that are so anxious and so frightened,” Adams said. “I think it captures this sense of unease.”
“Like a Good Armchair” is on view through July 16 in the Ellen Johnson Gallery at the museum.
