ROBERT CLEVELAND       

Arm Chair, 1992
steel

Collection of the Longwood Center for the Visual Arts
The Jack Blanton Collection
Gift of Jack Blanton
2010.41.6

Collector Jack Blanton purchased this work from an exhibition at Virginia Commonwealth University. Initially, Blanton had provided a purchase award for the 1992 student exhibition at VCU’s Anderson Gallery. The New York juror for the exhibition had a very specific point of view about art and made his selections solely in that vein. In protest, the faculty and students mounted a “salon des refusés” (French for “exhibition of rejected objects” and referring to the famous Salon des Refusés of 1863, at which the Impressionists mounted their own exhibition after being denied inclusion in the official Paris Salon). The VCU version, held in the sculpture department, was called “Salon to Yo Moma” (referring to both the cutting slang term “yo momma” used as a retort to insults, and MoMA—the Museum of Modern Art in New York). Blanton selected this piece from the refusés show, in support of the protest. The name of the work is, of course, a take-off on the word armchair; Arm Chair is composed of arms but has no arms.