GREENSBORO, NC.- The Weatherspoon Art Museum at UNC Greensboro shared new exhibitions this summer. The Eye and the Ear: Animations by Mary Ellen Bute (May 14–September 10, 2022) and Bestiary: Animals as Symbols and Metaphors (June 11–December 3, 2022).

From the mid-1930s to mid-1950s, artist Mary Ellen Bute produced more than a dozen pioneering animations that sought to allow viewers to see sound. Born and raised in Texas, Bute left home at sixteen to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Frustrated by the limitations of working on canvas, she learned stage lighting at Yale University before moving to New York where she forged collaborative relationships with innovators across professional fields and disciplines in the pursuit of presenting music through moving images.

The Weatherspoon’s presentation of Bute’s animation The Eye and the Ear celebrates the launch this fall of a new Bachelor of Fine Arts Concentration in Animation offered by UNC Greensboro’s School of Art.

Finally, two of the Weatherspoon’s galleries will be awash with an array of creatures this summer. No cause for concern, however, as this menagerie consists solely of two- and three-dimensional representations of familiar animals, many of which are quite benign and intriguing. Drawn from the museum’s collection and arranged by species, Bestiary is a contemporary look at the old bestiary tradition. Both a literary and illustrative genre that originated in the ancient world, bestiaries served as a kind of natural history, cataloging known and mythological animals as well as providing moralizing allegories. The tradition continues in artwork by modern and contemporary artists—the work in this exhibition ranges in date from 1880 to 2015—who likewise use the appearance and habits of animals to comment on human behavior.