Resurfaced: Selections from the Permanent Collection

10/6/2022 - Spring 2023

Bacon Gallery

As part of the ongoing care for the works in the Museum’s collection, the exhibitions staff is reorganizing storage space and beginning to digitally document works to make them accessible online. This initiative offers a glimpse into the process of maintaining the collection and an opportunity to present selected pieces that have not been shown in several years.

Permanent collections in museums are shaped in many different ways. The overwhelming majority of the Erie Art Museum’s collection was built by John Vanco, executive director emeritus, during his fifty years leading the organization. When he started his tenure in 1968, there were 65 works in the collection. With the sale of one of those pieces, a collections fund was created to purchase other works (beginning with renowned Erie artist Joseph Plavcan) and grew to include 8,000 objects. Shaped by his interest in developing traveling exhibitions to earn income for the Museum, the collection spans a wide range of genres from American ceramics of the Arts and Crafts movement, to comic book art, op art, basketry, and contemporary paintings from the mid 20th to early 21st centuries.

Many of the works in Resurface came from the family of one gallerist, Ivan Karp, who ran OK Harris Gallery in the Soho neighborhood of New York City. When Karp was invited to be the juror for Erie Art Museum’s 73rd annual Spring Show in 1996, he began a decades-long friendship with Vanco that resulted in 77 works being gifted to the Museum. The Erie-based writer and activist James D. Baldwin contributed 370 works that elevated the collection, including Maria Montoya Martinez’s and Pauline Martinez’s black-on-black ware and John Silk Deckard’s shaped painting, Birthmark.

Though Resurface was not developed with a specific theme in mind, the surfaces of the paintings and patinas of the sculptures have a unifying effect. Half Twins by Michael Shemchuck, is made from oil, gypsum, graphite on panel and reflects the self-taught artist’s experience in faux finishes for interior design. Wynooche by Dan Douke used trompe-l’oeil painting on a shaped canvas to convincingly mimic cut steel. The metallic feel to these paintings have a synergy with Leonard Urso’s hammered copper Sleeping Beauty and Oded Halahmy’s cast bronze Pomegranate in Jerash. The use of written language or symbols emphasizing the flat plane of the painting can be found in several pieces including The Dream by Patrick Thorne, Panacea by Bill Fisher, and Manoscritto by Alessandro Algardi.

Collections form the foundation of any museum. In exploring our own, we discover not only the history of the EAM, but how the Erie community is connected to regional, national and international artists and cultures. We invite you to investigate this selection, read into the works, and peer beyond the surface. What you find may surprise you.

Special thanks to John Vanco and intern Haley Fabich for contributing to the oral history of the Museum.