By day, Jean-Marc Fontaine is a molecular biologist, and by night and weekend, he is an artist. He spent his childhood and youth in Normandy, France, and his dream of becoming a scientist grew together with his imagination and passion for oil painting and drawing. After moving to the US in 1998, Fontaine became fascinated with sculpting. This self-taught artist explores funny and familiar subjects, with close attention to details in human anatomy. Viewers will meet French, Belgian, British and American characters. Fontaine hopes that “…these cartoon characters will bring a smile to patients (children and adults, alike).”

Elizabeth Busey has been inspired by global travel to explore the forces that shape our world – growth, pressure, erosion and decay. Through this exploration, she highlights patterns from many disparate perspectives in order to celebrate their universality in the natural world. Her work is created by printing multiple layers of ink onto cotton rag paper, where a single linoleum block is gradually reduced with each color layer. Busey is a primarily self-taught printmaker who produces her work in Bloomington, Indiana on a press made of recycled steel.

Traditional kunqu, a genre of classical Chinese theatre, comes alive in the large scale photographs of Xu, Zengquan. The viewer experiences the personalities of the characters and the spirit of the dance, opening a window into traditional Chinese culture and history. Now a local practicing engineer, Xu was born into a family of 10 brothers and sisters, in Jiangsu, China, and discovered his passion for photography in his teens. His work has been published by the Smithsonian Institution. Gifts of Art is pleased to present this exhibition in partnership with the U-M Confucius Institute.

Valerie Mann has been showing her work professionally throughout the US and in Canada and Germany for 23 years. She grew up on a large family farm in Indiana, went to University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana to earn a BFA in painting, then to MSU to earn an MFA in sculpture. Now working and teaching in Ann Arbor, Mann’s use and study of tools inspired this body of work. Used every day and sometimes taken for granted, tools are indispensable in the making of art. These favorite tools are beautifully designed and well-thought out for their specific job.

Darryl Baird is Associate Professor of Art at U-M Flint in graphic design and photography. This body of photographic work is a series of highly magnified plant sections offered as homage to natural life cycles and the inherent potential for beauty in mature forms. These images are a means to explore the cycles of all living things and a way to find understanding through the process. For this series, Baird used antique lenses and the now discontinued Polaroid Positive/Negative 55 film. His work is included in the collections of the Detroit Institute of Art, Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas and U-M Museum of Art in Ann Arbor.

This year, Gifts of Art celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Employee Art Exhibition! This eagerly anticipated annual event showcases the exceptional talent and creativity of the people who work at the University of Michigan Health System, and for the first time this year, family members too! There are ribbon awards for Best in Category and Best in Show, and a People's Choice award will be determined by the votes of visitors to the exhibit. Winners will be announced at the Artist Reception and Award Ceremony on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012 from 11:45 a.m.-1:00 p.m. in the exhibition gallery, which will be hosted by Dr. Ora H. Pescovitz, Executive Vice President for Medical Affairs.

The exhibit "Translating Homer: from Papyri to Alexander Pope" includes papyri and early printed books illustrating how the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems originally composed in the oral tradition, were first written down, edited, and eventually translated into the main European languages. This journey of transmission and interpretation throughout the centuries ends with the first editions of Alexander Pope’s renderings of the poems.

Visitors to the exhibit will hear a series of readings from the poems in the original Greek and in several other languages, including Latin, English, Dutch, and Spanish.

The exhibit is part of the LSA Fall 2012 theme semester, Translation.

This is the inaugural exhibition of a new series of exhibitions to be curated by UM faculty. Entitled Flip Your Field, this series asks these guest curators to consider artwork outside their field of specialization from UMMA's renowned collections to challenge their own thinking as well as that of UMMA's audiences. Celeste Brusati, Professor of History of Art, Women's Studies, and Art and Design, an expert in the visual art and culture of the Netherlands from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, has gathered a compelling group of images by such titans of twentieth-century abstraction as Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró, Robert Motherwell, and Antonio Tàpies, as well as works by many other unexpected artists.

This exhibition is made possible in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Judith Turner is a noted American photographer whose subject matter is mostly architecture. Turner's training as a designer allows her to visually understand an architect's intention and to reveal it in compositions that she constructs and edits through her camera work. Her photography can be seen as a metalanguage of architectural intention and as an artistic expression that is inseparable from the representation of the built work. Turner's signature style consists of highly abstract black-and-white compositions that play with the ambiguity of light, shadow, and tonality to heighten the aesthetic character of her subject matter and reveal visual relationships not readily apparent. This exhibition will present approximately forty photographs spanning Turner's three-decade career.

This exhibition is made possible in part by Macy's and the University of Michigan Office of the Provost.

This year's show is a tribute to Jack Wikle and Bill Heston for their contributions to the Society and for their lifelong pursuit of the art and practice of bonsai. Also featured is a showing of AABS members’ trees, with over 100 beautiful trees on display in all sizes and representing several species. Includes workshops and demonstrations, and vendors. Plus, visitors may vote in the People’s Choice for their favorite bonsai selections from different categories.

Sponsors of the show, the U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum, are also offering free staff-led tours of the site of the new bonsai and penjing garden being built at Matthaei Botanical Gardens. Tours are at 11 am and 1 pm Sat., Aug. 25; 1 pm Sun., Aug. 26.

Presented by the Ann Arbor Bonsai Society.

Closed Sundays and Mondays

UMMA's award-winning docents will guide visitors to experience art through active looking at selected highlights of the collections. Each docent selects a theme of particular interest such as political, social or spiritual subjects; the genres of landscape or portraiture; UMMA's collectors and donors; the use of color or the depiction of mood. These general tours provide a good introduction to the collection and to strategies for looking at art through lively and engaging conversation.