Two Free Shows on Barlow Road, One Question About the Ancient World

"Students frequently come into the course assuming that they know ancient Egypt because they've been exposed to it so much through popular culture, everything from The Mummy movies to the Ancient Aliens TV show," Megan Paqua told Fairfield University when the museum announced her exhibition. "They're often surprised to discover how much of that cultural context has been filtered through two centuries of 'Egyptomania.'"

That idea of filtering ties together more than one show this fall. Paqua's exhibition, "Hieroglyphs to Hype: The Modern Afterlife of Ancient Egypt," fills the Bellarmine Hall Galleries. A few minutes across campus, "James Welling: Cento" fills the Walsh Gallery at the Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. Both are free, and both close on December 12. The museum lists them as two separate exhibitions. Seen on the same afternoon, they both trace what happens to the ancient world each time a later century copies it.

A Trash Bin and Abu Simbel in the Same Galleries

Paqua is the museum's registrar and an adjunct professor of Art History & Visual Culture. She holds an MA in Egyptology from The American University in Cairo and spent several seasons digging at Tell el-Amarna with the Amarna Project. Her show covers roughly the last two hundred years of Western fascination with Egypt and runs from very high to very low.

The high end is David Roberts' 1849 oil on panel, "The Hypostyle Hall of the Great Temple of Abu Simbel, Egypt," on loan from the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art. The low end is a run of silver spoons, candlesticks and a trash bin, all made in "Egyptianizing" designs. Other lenders include the Wadsworth Atheneum, the Hood Museum of Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, along with artists and private collectors. Rhonda Wall's "Mummy No. 2" comes from the Housatonic Museum of Art. One of the most inviting paintings in the room belongs to the museum itself. Charles-Théodore Frère's "Along the Nile," painted around 1870, shows a sunlit river framed by palms, and it was a 2023 gift from Michael T. Vigario '08.

The most rewarding pieces are the ones that copy a copy. Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos' series "I Want to Look like Cleopatra" works out the cosmetic surgery it would take to turn portraits of the real Cleopatra VII into someone who looks like Elizabeth Taylor. Taylor herself appears nearby in Audrey Flack's photorealist portrait "Lux Eternal," lent by the Estate of Audrey Flack.

Other artists bring the ancient people back into view. Lorraine O'Grady's "Sisters," from the "Miscegenated Family Album," pairs a photograph of the artist's sister Devonia with images of the famous bust of Queen Nefertiti. Sara Sallam's "I Prayed for the Resin Not to Melt" retells the excavation of King Tut's tomb and the later examinations of his remains from the young king's own point of view. Paqua's point, in the university's words, is that enthusiasm for Egyptian symbols contributed to "the erasure of the ancient Egyptian people themselves."

Across Campus, the Copies Are Copied Again

Walk from Bellarmine Hall to the Quick Center and the same question turns from Egypt to Greece and Rome. This time it comes from a working artist. James Welling was born in 1951, and CT Insider reports he was born in Hartford and raised in Simsbury. The Walsh Gallery show is the first American museum presentation of "Cento," with more than 60 recent works from his "Cento" and "Personae" series.

A cento is a poem stitched together from lines of other poems, and Welling builds his pictures the same way. The "Cento" works join fragments of ancient sculpture and architecture with color. The "Personae" works pair photographs of ancient portrait busts with eyes taken from Old Master paintings. He photographs ancient sites in Italy and Greece and antiquities in museums such as the Louvre and the Met. Then he laser-prints the images onto plastic sheets and works over the surface by hand with oil paint, oil sticks and raw powdered pigment. The results fall somewhere between photography, painting and printmaking. Titles in the catalogue include "Portrait of Plutarch," "Fragment of a gold leaf wreath," "Mosaic drinking cup" and "Artemis Rospigliosi. Sandal."

Ten historic plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculpture stand among Welling's prints, chosen from the museum's own collection of more than 100. A plaster cast is itself a copy of the ancient world, made so people far from Athens or Rome could study it. Next to Welling's hand-painted prints, the casts become one more step in the chain Paqua traces in Bellarmine Hall. Welling describes his aim as "reanimating" the men and women of the ancient past. Museum Director Carey Mack Weber called the photographs "aesthetically beautiful but disorienting at times" in the university's fall exhibitions feature.

Why Thursday Evening Works Best

Both galleries are open Tuesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., and on Thursdays they stay open until 8 p.m. Admission is free, and the museum closes on University holidays and in bad weather. For GPS, use 200 Barlow Road. Free parking is in front of both Bellarmine Hall and the Quick Center, so you can park at one building, see that show, and move the car to the other. The galleries are wheelchair accessible by lift. Wheelchairs are available first come, first served, along with moveable stools and large-print exhibition text, and service dogs are welcome. Bellarmine Hall also shows the museum's permanent collection next to the rotating exhibitions.

Several of the evening programs fall on Thursdays. Tonight, Thursday, October 29, at 5:30 p.m., Kate Minniti of the Pratt Institute gives "New Media, Old Tropes? The Rebirth of Ancient Egypt in Video Games" in the Dogwood Room. It's part of the Edwin L. Weisl, Jr. Lectureships in Art History, and it also streams on Arts & Minds Live. With the galleries open until 8, you can see the lecture and still walk through both shows afterward. The university says all of the exhibition's programs are free and open to the public.

Six Weeks Left, in Order

From today to the December 12 closing, the programs move between the Dogwood Room, Bellarmine Hall and the Walsh Gallery, so you can follow the copying theme from Egypt to Rome and back.

Two dates on the list are hard to repeat. Welling himself comes back to the Walsh Gallery twice, on November 7 and December 5, to talk about prints that are having their first American museum showing. The December 3 workshop is the most hands-on program of the season. Andrew Ward introduces the exhibition, and Christopher Smith, an assistant professor of biology who trained as a medical illustrator, teaches the basics of anatomical drawing using the plaster casts on view. It's limited to 25 people. The illustrated catalogue for "Hieroglyphs to Hype" is available in the galleries. Both shows come down after Saturday, December 12.

At Susan Vanech Properties, we follow what's on the walls along Barlow Road as closely as what's on the market, because a free Thursday evening in the galleries is part of what living in Fairfield actually looks like. If you're thinking about your own place in town this season, we'd be glad to talk. Request a confidential valuation.