Expressionism and Abstraction: from Scholars’ Rocks to Contemporary Art, Wednesday October 21st @ 5pm

During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom, and each one will be approximately one hour. Watch a live recording of the event on youtube.

 L to R: Timothy Springer with his Scholar’s Rock, Mark Cooper “Stone Soup IV,” Laura Moriarty “A Unitary Phenomenon”

“Expressionism and Abstraction: from Scholars’ Rocks to Contemporary Art”

Wednesday Oct 21st @ 5p with special guest, Nancy Berliner, Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA (see her recent “Art for this Moment” blog post about “ Scholars' rocks, https://www.mfa.org/article/2020/taihu-rock) Tim Springer, scientist, entrepreneur and rock collector, and two artists in the show: Mark Cooper and Laura Moriarty. This talk will focus on the history of collecting these prized stones and their expressive aesthetics in calligraphy, painting and sculpture including contemporary art. Each guest will address how they first discovered Scholars ’ rocks and viewing stones and what influence they have on their practice/artwork. 

Dr. Nancy Berliner is the Wu Tung Senior Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Mass. She is the curator of the largest and most significant gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy in the MFA’s history from Wan-go H.C. Weng. Dr. Berliner is the former Curator of Chinese Art at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM), where she conceived and developed the landmark Yin Yu Tang House project, which brought a 200-year-old rural Chinese merchant home to the Peabody Essex Museum. In 2010, she curated at PEM the much-lauded exhibition Emperor’s Private Paradise, Treasures from the Forbidden City, which traveled from PEM to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Milwaukee Museum of Art. A native of Boston, Dr. Berliner received her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard University, and completed additional studies at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing. She is fluent in Chinese.

Timothy Springer, PhD, is a renowned scientist, entrepreneur and rock collector. He is an immunologist at the Harvard Medical School, and Professor of Medicine at the Boston Children’s Hospital. A recent winner of the Gairdner Prize for his discovery of integrins, a class of transmembrane receptors. As an entrepreneur, he was a founding investor of Leukosite. Recently, he co-founded a pair of Boston startups that have gone public- Scholar Rock and Morphic Therapeutic. His current philanthropic venture is Institute for Protein Innovation, which is advancing the field of protein science. Tim’s passion for rock collecting is connected to his ongoing research of protein molecules. Tim finds a connection between the bizarre shapes of Scholars’ rocks that have been hollowed out by water or wind to reveal the inner strength of the rock and the molecular structure of complex proteins.

Mark Cooper is an internationally recognized artist known for large-scale and site-specific installations. His has won Artist Fellowships through the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and a Gund Travel Grant for research in Japan and Korea. In 2013, he was a Foster Prize Finalist at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA.

Mark Cooper had major exhibitions at the National Museum of Fine Arts Hanoi, Vietnam, (2015), the University of Fine Arts (Hanoi, Vietnam 2015), the Doris Duke Mansion Museum (2015), the Yuan Art Museum (Beijing, China 2016) the Kemper Museum , Kansas City (2016). He has participated in group shows at the Whitney Museum at Philip Morris, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Museum, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Peabody Essex Museum, the DeCordova Museum, the City Museum of Paris, France, and the Westlicht Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Laura Moriarty makes process-driven sculpture and works on paper whose forms, colors, textures and patterns result from the same processes that shape and reshape the earth: heating and cooling, erosion, subduction, friction, enfolding, weathering, slippage. Born in Beacon, New York, Laura Moriarty received training through an apprenticeship in hand papermaking (1986-1990), and is otherwise self-taught. 

Moriarty's work is held in many permanent collections, including The New York Public Library, the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History and the Progressive Art Collection. Laura’s honors include an Individual Support Grant from the Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation, a residency at the Baer Art Center in North Iceland, and two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants. She is the author of an artist’s book, 'Table of Contents', self-published in 2012.