Berea College Art Collection

Much of Pablo Picasso’s work dealt with moving away from standard academic art forms. This textile was designed in 1956 by Pablo Picasso for Fuller Fabrics’ Modern Masters print series. The Modern Masters series included textile designs by Picasso, Míro, Warhol, Léger, Dufy, and Chagall. The textiles were sold both for clothing and for furnishings, [...]

An influential American Expressionist, Robert Motherwell was a printmaker and editor. He attended the California School of Fine Arts, received his BA in Philosophy from Stanford, and his Ph.D. from Harvard. Later, he studied at Columbia University. It was while at Stanford that Motherwell first encountered Modernism through his study of Symbolist literature. His fascination [...]

Arthur Wesley Dow was a prodigious artist and influential art educator near the turn of the century. He taught design, photography, painting, pottery, and printmaking for over thirty years at the Pratt Institute, Columbia Teacher’s College, and the Art Students League in New York City. Born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, Dow maintained a studio there staring [...]

Carlos Cortez Coyle attended the Berea Foundation School. Although he drew as a student he did not devote concentrated time and effort into his art until 1929. Coyle was an avid journaler, and from his diary we know that the beginning of his artistic career coincided with the death of his mother. In his paintings, [...]

This piece of Dingware was manufactured in Dingzhou, Hebei Province at the height of the Northern Song Dynasty. Dingzhou was a ceramic capital of the Northern Song dynasty, and Dingware was highly prized for its elegance. Before the Song Dynasty Imperial court fled south, Dingware was the tableware for aristocratic families and the Imperial court. [...]

This textile, created in the Kuba Kingdom of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, shows off the complexity of design that the Kuba Kingdom was known for in their textiles. The Kuba Kingdom was  highly prosperous, uniting 19 different ethnic groups between the early seventeenth century and mid-nineteenth century. The cloth had [...]

Murals have long been celebrated as an effective way to build public morale. During the Great Depression, the federal government hired artists to embellish existing public buildings to present an image of American dignity. Long was commissioned to do work in several courthouses, post offices, and federal buildings in Kentucky. This study is for a [...]

Cindy Sherman is most known for her experimental portraiture and reappropriation of female stereotypes found in film. She typically uses herself as a model for her photographs, assuming multiple roles as hairdresser, director, and costume designer. Sherman is very concerned with women’s roles in culture, and how women have been silenced. In this photograph, Sherman [...]

Since the mid-1950s, Jasper Johns has reworked key motifs—flags, targets, maps, the alphabet, and numbers—in a serial fashion, exploring the impact of changes in color, scale, sequence, and medium. Johns favors subjects that “the mind already knows” but overlooks due to constant exposure. The subject of the series this piece is a part of, therefore, [...]

Doris Ulmann was known for her photographs of Appalachian people, often hard at work. When Ulmann came to the Berea area, she saw Appalachians working their crafts in traditional ways that were very foreign to her industrial, Northern background. These men chaining a warp are performing a key step in one of Appalachia’s quintessential crafts. [...]