OBERLIN, OH.- The Allen Memorial Art Museum (AMAM) at Oberlin College presents Out of Albion: British Art from the Allen Memorial Art Museum. The exhibit is on view in the museum’s John N. Stern Galleries through December 23, 2008.

The exhibition encompasses over seven centuries of British art from the AMAM collection, including 13th-century illuminated manuscripts, William Hogarth’s witty “moral progresses,” the Pre-Raphaelites of the Victorian age, Henry Moore’s undulating forms, and Bridget Riley’s Op Art abstractions. With attention to their social and cultural context, Out of Albion showcases over 100 objects in varied media and charts the rise of a national school, the birth of photography, the emergence of modernism, and the country’s rich traditions of history painting, satire, portraiture, and landscape.

Artists such as Vanessa Bell, William Blake, Julia Margaret Cameron, Henry Fuseli, Richard Hamilton, William Morris, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and J.M.W. Turner elucidate what Nikolaus Pevsner famously defined in 1955 as the “Englishness” of English art. Far from parochial, however, the powerfully imaginative works on display also attest to Britain’s significant artistic influence beyond its own borders.

This exhibition was organized by Colette Crossman, AMAM Curator of Academic Programs, with Elizabeth Koehn (OC ’09).