Art review: A professor’s legacy on view in Oberlin

Sometimes as a teacher at a college or university, you do your work, you conduct your research and you still are not entirely sure what it was all for. Did you have an impact on your students? Did your research make an impression in your field? Sometimes it’s hard to gauge and can leave you feeling a little unsure of yourself.

There are also times you when run into former students in some faraway city at a conference or an exhibition, and get a taste of the life they’ve pursued that you’ve helped shape in some way. There is a camaraderie and deep understanding in those moments that keeps you going and helps you to constantly rediscover the love for your chosen field.

Ellen Johnson worked at Oberlin College for nearly 40 years. During her time there, first as an art librarian, and later as a professor, she championed modern and contemporary art. This Is Your Art: The Legacy of Ellen Johnson — on view in the gallery named for her — shows more than 50 paintings, sculptures, objects, and works on paper that, the college states, “became part of the Allen’s permanent collection through Johnson’s prescience, intelligence, persistence, and generosity, as well as through the admiration and magnanimity she engendered in artists and patrons who knew her.”

The show is a tour de force of well-known art, especially from the time period Johnson taught. She “often told students in her contemporary art course, ‘This is your art,’ insisting that they investigate the sometimes obtuse (and frustrating) art of their own time before it had been digested and normalized by art history.”

Portrait of Ellen Johnson by Alice Neel greets you as you walk into the gallery, a gift from the artist in honor of Johnson’s retirement in 1977. It’s a charming work, full of the texture and the unique uses of color that has made Neel famous. Johnson is seated in the portrait, and her personality and sense of style really comes through.

Robert Morris’ Untitled is a large work made of felt, 144 by 72 inches, that hangs on the wall. Morris was working as a minimalist sculptor at this point in his career, and in 1967 he started working with industrial felt. This work, a rectangle twice as high as it is wide, has been cut into eight equal strips. It’s hung so that gravity and the shape of its space have an effect on the piece, giving it a special form.

Agbatana III by Frank Stella is an acrylic on canvas reminiscent of the type of work that has been part of the bedrock of this artist’s career. Using a large rectangle as a base form that has been cut in half-rounds, often multiple times, and then overpainted in sections, Stella creates often bright pieces that reference time, architecture, mathematics and a special understanding of color.

Johnson championed young artists and gave many of them exposure through her curatorship of the Allen’s well-known “Young Americans” series. She helped establish artists like Frank Stella and Claes Oldenburg, who has a large sculpture permanently on view on campus.

There are a couple of Oldenburgs in this exhibit; one of them, Soft Toaster, is a small sculpture made of vinyl, kapok, cloth and paint on wood. It’s a great example of how Oldenburg changed people’s perspective on what sculpture can be. Perhaps best known for his large public works, he also created soft sculptures of everyday objects.

Through her work to help bring young artists’ work to the world, and through her insistence that students investigate the art being made in their time, Johnson helped to foster understanding of artwork that might not have been brought to the forefront. Her legacy for her students and the artists she championed is clear.

Contact Anderson Turner at haturner3@gmail.com.