Displaying items by tag: Mint Museum

The Denver Art Museum (DAM) announced today that it will have a major exhibition about female Abstract Expressionists in summer 2016. Titled “Women of Abstract Expressionism,” the show will feature more than 50 works by 12 artists. Following its run at the DAM, the show will travel to the Mint Museum in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Palm Springs Art Museum in California.

Abstract Expressionism has long been defined by its male adherents—including Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman, among others—whose fame greatly exceeds the women in the movement.

Thanks to a generous gift from longtime museum donors, Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art added 37 new pieces, including vessel forms and sculpture, to their permanent glass collection. The acquisition includes works by notable glass artists such as Michael Glancy (b. 1950), Klaus Moje (b. 1936), Ann Warff Wolff (b. 1937), and Richard Marquis (b. 1945).

LACMA’s glass art collection, which focuses on studio glass from the mid-1960s to the late 1990s, contains more than 100 objects, most of which came from Greenberg and Steinhauser who started donating to the institution in 1984. The museum’s relationship with the couple is so strong that earlier this year Greenberg and Steinhauser invited LACMA officials to handpick works from their personal collection for the museum. Besides their substantial glass gift, Greenberg and Steinhauser made a monetary donation to LACMA to go towards educational programs about glass.

Greenberg and Steinhauser’s collection boasts 400 to 500 works and is considered among the top five studio glass collections in the United States. The couple began avidly collecting in the mid-1970s and slowed down around the mid-1990s when sculpture and nontraditional forms became more prominent than the vessel art they adored. The duo has since taken to collecting contemporary photography.

In celebration of the studio glass movement’s 50^th anniversary, Greenberg and Steinhauser decided to disperse most of their collection to a number of institutions across the country. The couple will keep 15 to 20 sentimental pieces for themselves and the rest of their works will go to LACMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts, and the Corning Museum of Glass. Greenberg also hopes to donate works to the Smithsonian, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, the Mint Museum, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Racine Art Museum, although arrangements with those institutions still need to be made.

This fall The Mint Museum will present Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections, a major retrospective of one of America's most preeminent African American artists and foremost collagists.  Opening on the centennial of the artist's birth in Charlotte, the city in which he was born, the exhibition is the first of its kind to examine in depth how the South served as a source of inspiration throughout Bearden's career. Encompassing approximately 100 works of art drawn from The Mint Museum's extensive holdings as well as from national public and private collections, the exhibition will be on view at the Mint Museum Uptown at Levine Center for the Arts from 2 September 2011 through 8 January 2012 and then travels to the Tampa Museum of Art (28 January through 6 May 2012) and Newark Museum (23 May through 19 August 2012).

"Romare Bearden: Southern Recollections is an incredibly compelling retrospective assembled by The Mint Museum that showcases the immense contribution of America's most renowned African American artists and the significance of his Southern heritage as a source of inspiration, "said Dr. Kathleen V. Jameson, President & CEO of The Mint Museum.  "It is an important and timely examination of Bearden's work."

The exhibition highlights themes unexplored in prior exhibitions or writings, and surveys fifty years of the artist's work including his early abstract paintings and the influential collages that dominated his later body of work.  Among the large thematic groupings will be selections from the Prevalence of Ritual series, which includes Bearden's first revolutionary collages that demonstrate his ability to transform life into art, revealing abiding rituals and ceremonies of affirmation. Elements seen in this series are repeated throughout Bearden's oeuvre, serving as icons for his statements about life in America. One such icon is the locomotive, which not only symbolizes a means of moving from one place/mode of life to another but also references the Underground Railroad, as well as the migration of Southern blacks to northern cities in the early twentieth century.

"Given the long association between Bearden and the city of Charlotte, the Mint has a special interest in organizing such an important retrospective," said Carla Hanzal, exhibition organizer and Mint Museum curator of contemporary art.   "Romare Bearden broke new ground with his innovative collages and left a powerful legacy to generations of American artists.  As Charlotte's oldest visual arts institution, we are proud to have a substantial history of collecting and presenting works of art by Romare Bearden."