Exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art Explores Travel, Trade, and Transportation Around the World
Published: May 7, 2021
Even in the digital age, access to affordable, reliable, and safe transportation is vital to life. Transportation—beginning with our feet—supports all travel and thus all trade, which includes securing food for survival, access to work and connections to communities that are necessary to thrive.
Ways of Seeing: The Art of Travel, Trade, and Transportation is an exhibition that brings together over seventy objects from BMA’s permanent collection to explore subjects of traveling for both pleasure and necessity. The exhibition opened in April and will remain on view throughout 2021.
The exhibition features both artists who traveled to foreign lands and those who stayed closer to home. Each generated aspirational and enjoyable imagery for the armchair traveler—often their intended audience. Within the exhibition, the joys of leisure travel are contrasted by the more poignant aspects of necessities of travel—for economic opportunity, military service, fleeing hardship or being transported against one’s will. Localized and globalized trade in prized goods such as silver, ivory, tea, tobacco and glass have a lasting and complicated legacy of beauty and tragedy. These works of art provide room for reflection on the costs and benefits of travel, trade and transportation.
The exhibition is displayed in two rotations and artworks are drawn entirely from the Museum’s permanent collection, many of which have never before been exhibited to the public. Nearly all media is represented, ranging from acrylic, ink, oil, and watercolor paintings, to woodblock prints, etchings, lithographs and aquatints. Not only drawings and photographs, but also quilts, weavings, jewelry, sculptures and decorative arts in glass, ivory, and cloisonné will be displayed. Works range in date from the 2nd to the 20th centuries and feature works by artists from: China, Côte d’Ivoire, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mali, Navajo Nation, Scotland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the United States of America—including a number of Alabama artists.
Ways of Seeing: The Art of Travel, Trade, and Transportation is the fifth iteration of the BMA’s Ways of Seeing series that explores themes, perspectives, and ideas from across the Museum’s global art collections.