EXHIBITIONS
Celebrating One Hundred Years
of Scouting
January 23 – February 21, 2010
Bridge Gallery
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Norman Rockwell (American, 1894-1978), Mighty Proud, 1958. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of the National Scouting Museum, Irving, Texas. |
In collaboration with the Boy Scouts of America Tri-State Area Council, the Huntington Museum of Art will help celebrate One Hundred Years of Scouting with a display of original paintings on loan from the National Scouting Museum in Irving, Texas; three by Norman Rockwell (1894-1978) and three by Joseph Csatari (b. 1929).
Most of us are familiar with the works of Norman Rockwell through his illustrations for Saturday Evening Post, and his advertisements for companies such as Coca-Cola, Ford Motor Company and Sun-Maid Raisins. We are less familiar with his 64-year long relationship with the Boy Scouts, during which he created 50 Brown & Bigelow Scouting Calendar covers, more than 200 illustrations, and 11 covers for Boys’ Life Magazine. Rockwell painted his first Boy Scout calendar cover titled A Good Turn, for Brown & Bigelow in 1924, and continued to create calendar covers for the Boy Scouts for 52 years. The National Scouting Museum owns 47 of these original paintings.
Norman Rockwell became known as “Mr. Scouting” and was presented with the Silver Buffalo Award, Scouting’s highest honor for distinguished service to youth. In 1977, President Gerald R. Ford awarded Rockwell the Medal of Freedom.
In 1976, Joseph Csatari was selected by Boy Scouts of America to continue creating illustrations for the Brown & Bigelow calendar covers. He did so until 1991 when the calendars were discontinued.
Csatari is still actively painting today, and continues the tradition of recording Scouting history with annually commissioned oil paintings. During his long career, he has created illustrations for Saturday Evening Post, Brown & Bigelow Boy Scout Calendars, Boy’s Life magazine covers, Reader’s Digest, and for companies such as Nabisco, and Chef Boyardee, as well as more than 100 book cover illustrations. He has painted more than 10 official portraits for the Boy Scouts of America, and for individuals such as First Lady Betty Ford, and created two commemorative stamps for the United States Postal Service.
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A Lasting Impression: Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection
February 6 – May 2, 2010
Daine Gallery
Grand Opening and Ribbon Cutting for the Isabelle Gwynn and Robert Daine Gallery takes place from 4 to 6 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 6, 2010, with a champagne reception as the Daywood Gallery is transformed into a French cabaret. Music will be provided by Nicole Renaud. Everyone is welcome.
After returning to Huntington in 1992 after 60 years’ residence in New York and Connecticut, Isabelle Gwynn Pugh Daine befriended the Huntington Museum of Art, serving as a member of the Collections Committee, and as an Honorary Trustee on the Huntington Museum of Art Board of Trustees.
Mrs. Daine developed a strong understanding of the significance of the museum’s permanent collections, and realized the unique environmental storage and exhibition needs of works on paper. It was with these works in mind that she left a bequest to build a gallery earmarked for the Museum’s collection of drawings, prints, watercolors, pastels, photographs, collage and mixed media. This 1,800-square-foot gallery, designed by Edward Tucker Architects, Inc., includes an anteroom, featuring memorabilia about Gwynn and Robert Daine, and a window looking across the back lawn toward the Walter Gropius Studios.
The works on paper collection in the Huntington Museum of Art numbers just under 2,000 objects. This premiere exhibition in the newly completed Daine Gallery for Works on Paper, will present approximately 50 selected highlights. Each year, this gallery will feature four temporary exhibitions organized from the Museum’s permanent collection, or loan exhibitions from other museums and private collectors.
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Walter Gropius Masters Workshop Series Presents:
Beth Cavener Stichter
Three-day workshop: Friday-Sunday, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. March 5-7, 2010
Public presentation: Friday, March 5, at 7 p.m.
Exhibition: February 6, 2010—April 4, 2010
Switzer Gallery
The Wildness Within
This demonstration-only workshop will give participants of all skill levels a glimpse of how one can tackle elements of gesture and expression with subtle shifts in line and form. During the course of this large-scale demonstration in which the artist works with tremendous amounts of clay, we will cover a range of practical technical information about working in clay as well as initiate discussion on how we transfer ideas and meaning visually. Fee for this demonstration-only workshop is $100 for Members and $125 for non-Members.
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Beth Cavener Stichter, Is it me?, 2009. Stoneware-based mixed media sculpture, 36” h x 44” w x 12” d. Courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery, New York, NY |
Beth Cavener Stichter Background
Beth Cavener Stichter is known for her dynamic, emotionally charged animal and human figures. Her unusual method of working is accessible to interested individuals at every level: working with a solid mass of clay, often more than 2,000 lbs., and then hollowing each part of the sculpture down to the skin.
Beth is currently a full-time professional studio artist working in the state of Washington. She received her BA in sculpture from Haverford College and her MFA from Ohio State University. She was awarded the Artist Trust Fellowship in 2009, the Jean Griffith Foundation Fellowship in 2006, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Grant and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005, and the American Craft Council’s Emerging Artist Fellowship in 2004. She has also been an Artist-in-Residence at the Clay Studio in Philadelphia and the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT. She has exhibited nationally (at such institutions as the Smithsonian Museum) and internationally and has taught numerous workshops across the country.
Artist’s Statement:
“There are primitive animal instincts lurking in our own depths, waiting for the chance to slide past a conscious moment. The sculptures I create focus on human psychology, stripped of context and rationalization, and articulated through animal and human forms. On the surface, these figures are simply feral and domestic individuals suspended in a moment of tension. Beneath the surface they embody the impacts of aggression, territorial desires, isolation, and pack mentality.
“Both human and animal interactions show patterns of intricate, subliminal gestures that betray intent and motivation. The things we leave unsaid are far more important than the words spoken out loud to one another. I have learned to read meaning in the subtler signs; a look, the way one holds one's hands, the incline of the head, the rhythm of a walk, and the slightest unconscious gestures. I rely on animal body language in my work as a metaphor for these underlying patterns, transforming the animal subjects into human psychological portraits.
“I want to pry at those uncomfortable, awkward edges between animal and human. The figures are feral and uneasy, expressing frustration for the human tendency towards cruelty and lack of understanding. Entangled in their own internal and external struggles, the figures are engaged with the subjects of fear, apathy, violence and powerlessness. Something conscious and knowing is captured in their gestures and expressions.
“An invitation and a rebuke.”
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Macy’s Presents
URBAN: Cityscapes from the Permanent Collection
Gallery Three
November 6, 2009, through January 26, 2010
In a continuing venture to highlight the strength and diversity of artworks from the Huntington Museum of Art’s own vaults, Macy’s Presents URBAN: Cityscapes from the Permanent Collection provides an alternative interpretation of the “landscape” that has for so long been the subject of painters, drawers, and printmakers alike.
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Everett Shinn (American, 1876-1953) The Seine, Right Bank, Paris, 1905, 1905. Pastel and gouache. Gift of Ruth Woods Dayton, 1967.1.230 |
The Museum’s collection includes a well-known assortment of outdoor scenes by Barbizon and Impressionist painters that focuses on the splendor of the countryside, its occupants and the leisure activities they enjoyed. Another type of landscape, however, that of the sprawling city, with its energetic streets and romantic canal views, monumental architecture, commercial centers, and crowds of residents, has also served as inspiration for artists over the past few centuries. URBAN provides an extensive look at these metropolitan environments, both in the United States and abroad, through the eyes of artists over the course of the past two hundred years.
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Yvonne Jacquette (American, b. 1934) Motion Picture, Times Square, 1989-1990. Lithograph. Museum purchase with funds provided by the Fitzpatrick Society, 1990.10 |
The earliest works in the exhibition come from the hand of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, an Italian artist famous for his etchings of Rome and its monumental ancient ruins, including the remains of the Forum of Augustus amidst the more recent architecture of the streets surrounding it.
Picturesque Venetian palazzo facades and bridges crossing canals by John Taylor Arms and Sir David Young Cameron are reminiscent of the scenery witnessed during a Grand Tour, a trip taken around Europe by young men and women of means during the 17th and 18th centuries. In contrast, the prints of James Abbott McNeil Whistler reveal the poverty of city life for some, focusing on the harsh conditions in which they dwell. This honest portrayal of the grit and grime of a city’s working class neighborhoods continued in the work of the Ashcan School painters in the early 20th century, represented here by Everett Shinn and John Sloan, who reveal the direct experience of true city life.
American photographer Berenice Abbott gives us a different view of the city and its beauty as a landscape, providing us with a rarely seen bird’s eye perspective that reveals the magnificence of a city illuminated at night. And more recently, Yvonne Jacquette’s print portrays the city as a living being, alive with the energy, motion, and vibrating color of its technology, architecture, commerce, and occupants.
This exhibit is presented by Macy’s. Additional support for this exhibit comes from Auto Tech, Inc.; West Virginia Division of Culture and History; and the West Virginia Commission on the Arts.
