The salon-style exhibition “Where Ideas Begin” features a gallery wall filled from floor to ceiling.
In celebration of The Gund’s 15th anniversary, Kenyon’s contemporary art museum has assembled an exhibition that spotlights its permanent collection, bringing a diversity of modern and contemporary artists into conversation with each other.
The salon-style exhibition, “Where Ideas Begin,” welcomes visitors with a gallery wall filled from floor to ceiling, gathering together artwork from across the world and across time in ways that encourage juxtapositions and new associations.
And so Ansel Adams’ 1941 photograph “Moonrise over Hernandez, New Mexico” hangs next to the 2017 nighttime landscape “Untitled #25 (Lake Erie and Sky)” by Dawoud Bey, an influential African American photographer who was a visiting professor of art at Kenyon from 1994-95.
Nearby, American Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1987 still life “Irises” is displayed next to “Shroud 4, The Rhône Glacier,” a 2018 photograph by Simon Norfolk, a British artist who was born in Nigeria.
“We’re trying to accomplish a lot of things with this,” said Jodi Kovach P’25, the Pamela and Christopher Hoehn-Saric Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Education. “It’s to highlight and celebrate the way that the collection has grown over the past decade and a half. Just looking at the wall when you walk in, you see such a wide range of styles, of mediums, of artistic voices, of narratives of modernity and contemporary experience.”
The Gund — Kenyon’s free, nationally accredited, world-class contemporary art museum — opened in 2011 as a place to teach, learn and experience modern and contemporary art on campus. It was designed by and named for the late Graham Gund ’63 H’81, who, with his wife Ann, donated works of art to help establish its permanent collection. In 2023, it expanded its programming space by opening The Annex in downtown Mount Vernon.
The museum’s current acquisition strategy prioritizes adding voices from women and artists who are outside of North America and focusing on nontraditional media, Kovach said. This is reflected in the exhibition, which includes textile work by Claudia Alarcón and Silӓt, a collective of 100 Indigenous women artists from Argentina, and a paper cutting from South Korean artist Haegue Yang.
Overall, there are 552 items in The Gund’s permanent collection, many of which are used in Kenyon classes as part of interdisciplinary lessons. Women and nonbinary artists make up more than 40 percent of those in the collection, something that very few museums can claim, according to Robin Goodman, exhibitions and collections registrar.
Among the 73 pieces on display in “Where Ideas Begin” is work by Ann Hamilton, a Columbus artist known internationally for her large-scale multimedia installations. She has nine photographs from her “body object” series on view and will give a lecture on campus Oct. 24 as part of The Gund’s 15th anniversary program and coinciding with Kenyon’s upcoming Women’s Conference.
Hamilton is just one example of what makes The Gund’s collection so distinctive: its commitment to a more expansive and inclusive understanding of art that is matched by an extraordinary depth and quality of work, according to Daisy Desrosiers, who curated the exhibition and who until this past June was the David and Francie Horvitz Family Foundation Director and Chief Curator of The Gund. Earlier this year Desrosiers was appointed the Britton Family Curator-at-Large, North America, at Tate Modern; she will remain the curatorial and strategic lead for The Gund moving forward.
“Ohio-born and raised, yet internationally renowned, Hamilton is represented in the collection in numerous ways,” Desrosiers said. “Her presence reflects the kind of relationship we hope to cultivate with artists and their work — one that can deepen and grow over time. This is what makes the collection so unique and so additive to the Kenyon experience: it gives students and our broader community the opportunity to encounter exceptional art while also seeing how a collection can evolve, respond and remain intellectually alive.”
Faith Ringgold’s “Dancing at the Louvre (The French Collection Part 1: #1)” from 1991 is an artwork in the exhibition that may be familiar to many. The quilted and painted piece, depicting a Black family in the famous museum, is one of 250 items that American high school students study as part of AP Art History courses and was the subject of a recent video by Smarthistory. (“Dancing at the Louvre” will be leaving in October for an exhibition in Brussels.)
Among the more recent items to join the collection is “Mirror Pieces Installation II” by Joan Jonas, which The Gund co-acquired in August with the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, located on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Jonas appeared there on Sept. 10 in conversation with Desrosiers.
Another piece on display has a direct connection to the College. “Arc/k,” a 2026 painting that is more than 13 feet long, was created by Emily Kraus ’17. The alumna visited campus in the spring and was shortlisted in 2023 for the John Moores Painting Prize, one of the most distinguished prizes in the United Kingdom. To paint, she uses a unique, custom-built apparatus that pulls canvas through rollers.
“The fact that she is such an accomplished artist, that her work fits within our collecting priorities, and that she is an alumna really makes the addition of her work extra special to the collection,” Kovach said.
For visitors who visit “Where Ideas Begin” and want more, a collection catalog is in the works that will feature 60 pieces from The Gund’s permanent collection, along with essays on some of the art and interviews with artists, including Kraus and Jonas.
“Where Ideas Begin” runs through July 11.
