Verso University Presents: Art Tour at the Bruce Museum

Meeting time: Sunday, August 17 2:00-3:00 pm

Meeting place: Visitors' Entrance, Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich

Enjoy a Sunday afternoon docent-led tour with a focus on the Isamu Noguchi metal sculpture show and the Jeremy Frey indigenous weaving exhibit. Some of the museum’s noteworthy pieces from the permanent collection will be highlighted during the tour as well. Consider avoiding traffic and taking the train from Westport. (The Bruce Museum is only a seven-minute walk from the Greenwich Train Station.) Arrive early and have lunch at the museum café or at one of the popular restaurants on Greenwich Avenue across from the train station. Meet the tour guide at the main entrance at 2:00 pm.

Registration Fee: $15 (Fee includes admission and tour.) Register now! Space is limited.

Isamu Noguchi: Metal the Mirror

While the renowned sculptor Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) is best known for his work in stone, he consistently explored new materials and methods during his wide-ranging career. He first experimented with aluminum in the 1950s and later with galvanized steel, creating a series of twenty-six sculptures in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles in 1982–83. In this body of work, each sheet of metal is cut with a plasma torch and then dipped into boiling zinc, resulting in sculptures that are subtly patterned and highly reflective, resembling pebbles in a stream or the epidermal layer of skin.

Writing about the unique materiality of his sculptures, Noguchi described metal as a mirror in opposition to “stone [as] depth.” His galvanized steel sculptures achieve formal unity while also exploring conceptual dualities between the traditional and modern, fine art and design, and industry and nature. As a Japanese American artist working in the United States, Noguchi negotiated his own feeling of in-betweenness throughout his oeuvre. The galvanized steel editions synthesize this dual aspect of his identity, utilizing steel—a distinctly American material—while also integrating the Japanese craft of origami through cut and folded metal shapes.

Featuring a selection of nine galvanized steel sculptures, the exhibition is organized into thematic groupings that underscore the paradoxes of the artist’s work in metal. In the first, Noguchi imparts inanimate forms with human qualities, complicating the relationship between flesh and steel, body and mirror. Man-made material is transformed into representations of mountains, fruit, and sky in the second grouping, reflecting Noguchi’s belief that, in modernity, industry and nature are intertwined. A final trio of works reveals Noguchi’s ongoing interest in abstraction, bringing theoretical and spiritual ideas, weight and weightlessness, and past and present into visual dialogue. Through these sculptures, Noguchi explores ways of belonging in between such imagined oppositions. Indeed, the polished steel surfaces entangle objects, spaces, and people in a network of cast reflections, inviting visitors to contemplate Noguchi’s life, his practice, and themselves.

Jeremy Frey: Woven

The first major retrospective of the artist’s work, Jeremy Frey: Woven presents a comprehensive survey of Frey’s prolific career spanning more than two decades. A seventh-generation Passamaquoddy basket maker and one of the most celebrated Indigenous weavers in the country, Frey learned traditional Wabanaki weaving techniques from his mother and through apprenticeships at the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance. While Frey builds on these cultural foundations in his work, he also pushes the creative limits of his medium, producing conceptually ambitious and meticulously crafted baskets that reflect not only his technical skill as a weaver but also his profound ecological knowledge of and connection to the Passamaquoddy ancestral territory of the Northeastern Woodlands. His work relies heavily on natural resources from the region—notably black ash—many of which have come under threat due to climate change and invasive species. Frey’s work takes on new stakes against these looming environmental crises, celebrating an endangered art form and preserving its legacy for future generations.

Featuring over fifty baskets made of raw materials such as sweetgrass, cedar, spruce root, and porcupine quills, Woven also offers visitors an opportunity to reflect on the cultural agency and resilience embedded in Frey’s practice. Bringing his engagement with new materials and forms to bear on his work across video, installation, and print, Frey seeks to honor his ancestors, relatives, and future generations, weaving together past and present to uplift viewers through the power and beauty of his ever-evolving vision.

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Verso University is the Library’s lifelong learning and education initiative, serving up year-round offerings of classes, workshops, and lectures designed to further education and learning. Offerings run the gamut of educational opportunities, ranging from one-time lectures to ongoing courses to classes that meet weekly or perhaps monthly.

Verso University programs are made possible by the generous support of the Nancy J. Beard Lifelong Learning and Education Fund.

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