Art
Contact
Department Chairs:
Art History: Bonnie Cheng
Studio Art: Johnny Coleman

Administrative Assistant:
Jamie Jacobs

Department Email:


Phone: (440) 775-8181
Fax: (440) 775-8969

Location:
Art Building 2, Room 166
91 N. Main St.
Oberlin, OH, 44074

Facility & Resources

Facility & Resources

Allen Memorial Art Building

Located at: Allen Memorial Art Building
87 North Main St., Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

The Department of Art occupies two buildings adjacent to the Allen Memorial Art Museum. In the 1937 wing (designed by founding museum director Clarence Ward) are the Fisher Hall student art gallery, art history classrooms, painting and silkscreen studios, and the Visual Resources Collection. Another wing, designed by Robert Venturi as part of a 1976 expansion, houses an extensive art library, seminar room, and studios for photography, digital media, drawing, and sculpture.



Allen Memorial Art Museum

Located at: Allen Memorial Art Museum
87 North Main St., Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

Located at: Allen Memorial Art Building
87 North Main St., Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

Museum collections here rank Oberlin within the top five college-based art museums in the United States. Entering the museum's main rotunda, you will see paintings by Cezanne, Modigliani, Picasso, and many other 20th-century masters. With more than 12,000 objects, the museum provides an overview of the history of art from a variety of cultures. Particularly strong are its holdings of European and American paintings and sculpture from the 15th century to today.



Clarence Ward Art Library

Located at: Allen Memorial Art Building
87 North Main St., Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

A visual feast for those who love art and the creative process, the Art Library has more than 100,000 books, exhibition catalogs, and bound periodicals, as well as about 250 journals. The collection covers architecture, painting, sculpture, prints and drawings, new media, photography, and the decorative arts.



Ellen Johnson Gallery

Located at: Allen Memorial Art Building
87 North Main St., Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

Exposure to great works of art is an essential aspect of a liberal arts education. The museum has an active schedule of changing exhibitions from its permanent collection and on loan from other important museums. Through May 2009, the Ellen Johnson Gallery features works from the museum’s modern and contemporary collections, ranging from Claude Monet’s Wisteria to a recently acquired sculpture by Tim Hawkinson.

See the AMAM’s current exhibitions.



Weltzheimer/Johnson House

Located at: Weltzheimer-Johnson House (Frank Lloyd Wright House)
534 Morgan St., Oberlin, OH 44074-1097

Designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1948, the Weltzheimer/Johnson House is the first Usonian house in Ohio. Usonian refers to a group of about 50 Wright homes designed for middle-class Americans following World War II - typically small, single-story dwellings without garages, L-shaped to open into the landscape, and environmentally conscious with flat roofs and large cantilevered overhangs for passive solar heating and cooling, naturally lit clerestory windows, and radiant floor heating.



 
News

Art History Professor Receives NEH Fellowship, Franklin Grant, and Residency in Florence

May. 04, 2011

Christina Neilson, Assistant Professor of Renaissance and Baroque Art History, has been awarded two prestigious fellowships and a grant in support of her research on the mixed media works of Andrea del Verrocchio, an artist best known as Leonardo da Vinci’s teacher.


Photography Professor Named 2011 Guggenheim Fellow

Apr. 08, 2011

The Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has named Pipo Nguyen-duy, associate professor of art and photography at Oberlin College, a 2011 fellow in creative arts. The foundation recognized him for his body of work titled East of Eden: Vietnam, a series of staged, large-scale, color photographs that explore hope and renewal 30 years after the Vietnam War.


Student artists compete at MoCA

Dec. 08, 2010

Oberlin College is known for creativity and artistic talent, and recently this artistry has found a home at Cleveland’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA). Oberlin students participated in two art competitions at MoCA, Another Vibrant “Fight,” and the Student Slideshow at MoCA, where Oberlin swept the awards.


Juxtapose This: Oberlin’s Masterworks at the Phillips

Sep. 15, 2010

When you and I decide to renovate our kitchens, we don’t have the luxury of putting our best appliances and nicest knife set on display over at a friend’s house while the cabinets get installed and the floors are torn up. But, when you’re a museum under renovation, that’s exactly what you do. With its space full of sawdust and plaster drippings, Oberlin College’s Allen Memorial Art Museum decided to lend some of its best-known works to the Phillips Collection. The resulting show, “Side by Side: Oberlin’s Masterworks at the Phillips,” takes 25 pieces from the Allen’s collection and puts them in conversation with one 40 from the Phillips’.........


Two Art Majors are awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship

Apr. 29, 2010

Lisa Chung, Oberlin College The Medium and the Message: Mapping Electronic Art Around the Globe Brazil, China, Japan, Germany, Netherlands A mixed culture of idealism and skepticism has long surrounded popular views of technology. Yet it is important to remember the human aspect: technology inherently contains the imperfections and idiosyncrasies of the people who created it. I intend to spend my Watson year immersed in electronic art, attempting to find out who is actively shaping technology and our experience and perception of it. I plan to find technologically-based artists, participate in sharing artistic ideas, and be an active part of a community that exists both locally and internationally. Maia Brown, Oberlin College Sumud with Tzedek: Can Ireland and South Africa Inform Palestine-Israel? Ireland, South Africa Ireland and South Africa have become iconic of “conflict resolution.” Their oft-studied political development can overshadow the underlying process of grassroots reconciliation. Inherent in that process are narratives of remembrance and profound reimagining. Working with NGOs focused on reconciliation, I hope to explore their successes and limitations; collaborating and collecting oral histories, I seek to engage with participants’ ongoing understanding of what enables an end to violence—understandings that might be applied to peace initiatives in the Middle East. http://www.watsonfellowship.org/site/fellows/10_11.html