Interested in Borrowing an Exhibition?

The GVSU Art Museum curates innovative, engaging, and relevant exhibitions available for loan to other institutions.  If you are interested in any of the available traveling exhibitions, please review the listings below and reach out to obtain additional information and availability.  Each exhibition requires the borrowing institution to follow museum practices and cover approved transportation, insurance, and a minimal rental fee.

Questions about an exhibition? Contact Curator of Exhibitions and Collections, Joel Zwart: [email protected].

About the Exhibit: Widely regarded as one of the most influential songwriters of all time, Bob Dylan was still relatively unknown in the summer of 1964 when twenty-one-year-old photographer Douglas R. Gilbert photographed him. On assignment for Look magazine, Gilbert spent time with Dylan at his home in Woodstock, New York, in Greenwich Village, and at the Newport Folk Festival in Rhode Island. The photographs, which were never published because the editors declared Dylan “too scruffy for a family magazine,” show the up-and-coming folk singer in casual settings with friends at a pivotal point in his career.

Gilbert’s photographs document an intimate moment in Dylan’s life and a time when his music and career undertook a radical transformation. Drawn from Grand Valley State University’s (GVSU) collection, this exhibition includes a selection of Gilbert’s photographs and proof sheets from that assignment, part of his entire photographic collection that he donated to GVSU in 2018.

Number of Works: 27 photographs and 4 proof sheets (matted and framed - 16" x 20" to 20" x 24")

Panels and Labels: 2 text panels (framed - 24" x 30") and didactic object labels (available digitally)

Hosting Requirements: 50 linear feet, insurance coverage, a facility report, and a loan agreement

Support Materials: Educators' Learning Guide, Online Interview with artist Douglas Gilbert,  Online Exhibition Checklist

Shipping: Travels in crates; the exhibitor is responsible for shipping costs

Fee: $2000 for a 12-week period

About the Exhibit: The landscape of Michigan is unique and varied, sculpted by glaciers thousands of years ago and altered by humans over centuries through various agricultural, urban, and industrial practices. The state is divided into two large peninsulas totaling nearly 60,000 square miles, bordered by four Great Lakes, giving it the longest freshwater coastline in the United States. These two landforms are marked by rolling hills, mountains, fields, forests, dunes, urban centers, and numerous lakes, rivers, and marshes. This incredible amount of land and water, cast across a geologically diverse area, has continued to serve as fertile ground for artistic interpretation of the place many call home.

This exhibition, drawn from the collection at Grand Valley State University, features over 30 artists from the last 150 years. These artists have spent time directly engaging with the Michigan landscape and creating works that reflect their experience. Many have been drawn outside because of the dramatic seasonal changes that impact the color, density, and atmosphere of Michigan throughout the year. Others have sought to portray the intersection of the natural world and human development, focusing on urban centers and evidence of our impact that divides, shapes, and alters the landscape.

Number of Works: 43 works of art (matted and framed - 16" x 20" to 44" x 53")

Panels and Labels: 2 text panels (framed - 24" x 30") and didactic object labels (available digitally)

Hosting Requirements: 50 linear feet, insurance coverage, a facility report, and a loan agreement

Support Materials: Educators' Learning Guide, Online Exhibition Checklist

Shipping: Travels in crates; the exhibitor is responsible for shipping costs

Fee: $3000 for a 12-week period

About the Exhibit: German-born American artist Mathias Joseph Alten (1871-1938) immigrated to the United States in 1889 at the age of seventeen. During this period, the country experienced swift economic and urban growth driven by industrialization and immigration. Alten’s family settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a premier furniture manufacturing center and a desirable location for immigrants in the late nineteenth century. Here, amidst a rapidly changing world, Alten went on to establish a family, home, and studio for the entirety of his career.

Like many American painters of the period, Alten was drawn to the major artistic and cultural centers of Europe and the United States. Beginning in 1898 and continuing over the next four decades, he traveled extensively to pursue artistic training, exhibit his work, and engage with fellow artists. Despite his attraction to distant locales and artistic communities, Alten chose to keep his professional home in the same city and state that welcomed his family during the late nineteenth century. As a result, his work was influenced by the landscapes and techniques he discovered abroad, but remained deeply connected to the rural Michigan landscape widely featured in his paintings.

Over his career, Alten created more than 3,000 works of art, initially influenced by the French Barbizon and Dutch Hague Schools and later by the Impressionism movement. His work embraced a fluid style consistent with an Impressionist-inspired brush, and despite the many changes he encountered, his fascination with quiet places and the old way of doing things prevailed. He repeatedly sought out and celebrated traditional laborers and nostalgic settings even as modernization transformed life in the early twentieth century.

Number of Works: 49 works of art (matted and framed - various sizes) and additional photographs and archival materials

Panels and Labels: 11 text panels (framed - 18" x 18" & 18" x 24") and didactic object labels (available digitally)

Hosting Requirements: 50 linear feet, insurance coverage, a facility report, and a loan agreement

Support Materials: Educators' Learning Guide, Online Exhibition Checklist, Mathias J. Alten: An Evolving Legacy, 2016 publication, Mathias J. Alten Catalogue Raisonné, 

Shipping: Travels in crates; the exhibitor is responsible for shipping costs

Fee: $5000 for a 12-week period

About the Exhibit: Hendrik (Henk) Cornelis Krijger (19 November 1914—27 September 1979) was the son of Protestant missionaries. He was born and raised in the Dutch East Indies, a colony that did not gain independence until 1949 and is now known as Indonesia. As a teenager, Krijger was sent to the Netherlands for his education and began his artistic career before the Second World War. During the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he contributed to works under the pseudonym Lodewijk Brouwer to De Bezige Bij (The Busy Bee), an Amsterdam publishing house illegally founded in 1944 that actively supported the resistance. After the war, he continued to work in the book industry as a graphic designer and illustrator and developed a new typeface - Raffia Initials – recalling the flourish of Baroque typography. 

In 1969, Krijger, a deeply religious man, moved to Chicago, where he served as the lead artist of the Institute for Christian Art (ICA). Plagued with financial difficulties, the ICA failed two years later. Krijger made an ill-fated attempt to revive the arts organization, renamed Patmos Workshop and Gallery, in Toronto, Canada. Krijger became disenchanted with Patmos and in 1973, he returned to the Netherlands, where he died five years later. Nevertheless, his artistic contributions can be witnessed in the work of his colleagues in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands.

Number of Works: 26 works of art (matted and framed - 16" x 20" to 30" x 48")

Panels and Labels: 2 text panels (framed - 24" x 30") and didactic object labels (available digitally)

Hosting Requirements: 50 linear feet, insurance coverage, a facility report, and a loan agreement

Support Materials: Educators' Learning Guide, Online Exhibition Checklist, Blog Holocaust Remembrance Day

Shipping: Travels in crates; the exhibitor is responsible for shipping costs

Fee: $2000 for a 12-week period

About the Exhibit: Fluid or firm, evolving or traditional, apathetic or passionate; gender is expressed by artists in many ways, echoing concepts that vary across cultures and time. Traditionally, the term gender refers to the social and cultural behaviors associated with being a man, woman, or other gender identity. And for as long as artists have visualized the human body, they have contemplated representations of gender, provoking conversations through creative possibilities of the traditional male-female binary and beyond.

Drawn from the Grand Valley State University collection, Beyond the Binary: Artists Illustrate the Complexities of Gender brings together a variety of works that reflect diverse understandings of gender. The pieces prompt questions about the physical representation of the body concerning gender, as well as how gender is deeply tied to clothing, hairstyle, posture, and adornment. This exhibition also coincides with recent growth in artistic expression surrounding gender and a rising acceptance of increasingly fluid notions of gender. Most importantly, it raises questions about how we see ourselves and others in a culture that desires to illuminate our complexity.

Number of Works: 26 works of art (matted and framed - 16" x 20" to 40" x 40")

Panels and Labels: 2 text panels (framed - 24" x 30") and didactic object labels (available digitally)

Hosting Requirements: 50 linear feet, insurance coverage, a facility report, and a loan agreement

Support Materials: Educators' Learning Guide, Online Exhibition Checklist

Shipping: Travels in crates; the exhibitor is responsible for shipping costs

Fee: $2000 for a 12-week period