Two-Eyed Seeing: Contemporaneous Pasts and Futures at the Blaffer Art Museum

Founded in 1973, the Blaffer Art Museum—then known as the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Gallery—was home to the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Collection, a robust collection of European paintings from the sixteenth through early-nineteenth century. In 1979, the Blaffer Foundation re-acquired the collection and moved it to the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. At the occasion of the Blaffer Art Museum’s fiftieth anniversary, artworks and objects from the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Collection are presented alongside contemporary artists who have previously shown work at the Blaffer over the museum’s fifty-year exhibition history, such as Bennie Flores Ansell, Debra Barrera, Michael Ray Charles, Mel Chin, Matt Manalo, and Gabriel Martinez.

The exhibition weaves together cultural and artistic approaches by drawing from the practice of two-eyed seeing, referred to as etuaptmumk by First Nations people in the Mi'kmaw language, of looking with one eye toward Indigenous ways of knowing, and the other eye toward European knowledge and worldviews. The practice of two-eyed vision is informed by the early history of art collecting, the role of “cabinet of curiosities,” and the study of nature through art. Thus, this way of seeing simultaneously makes visible the influence of historical European art while raising key considerations about what—and who—is missing, omitted, rewritten. Two-eyed vision as a practice enables art museums to honor the past while looking toward the future. Through the lens of two-eyed seeing, contradictions and multivalent worldviews coalesce through the ability to see historical and contemporary artworks with manifold vision.

Two-Eyed Seeing: Contemporaneous Pasts and Futures at the Blaffer Art Museum is organized by Erika Mei Chua Holum, Cynthia Woods Mitchell Assistant Curator, and Claudia Middleton Moreno, University of Houston Art History Fellow, as part of the 50th anniversary of the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. The exhibition is generously supported by the Kress Foundation.