Displaying items by tag: White House

Paintings by the Hudson River School artist Jasper Cropsey reside in the White House, the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and museums at Yale and Princeton, but the best place to commune with Cropsey’s glorious 19th-century landscapes is in an oasis in Hastings-on-Hudson.

Not far from the rush of Metro-North trains on the Hudson Line, behind a commuter parking lot, is the Gallery of Art, which houses roughly 75 paintings spanning the career of an artist who idolized Thomas Cole and taught himself to paint well enough to join the likes of John Frederick Kensett and Frederic Edwin Church in the Hudson River School’s top tier.

When: Friday, November 13, 2015 at 1:00 PM EST to Sunday, November 15, 2015 at 1:00 PM EST

Where: Deerfield Community Center, 16 Memorial St., Deerfield, MA 01342

Join Historic Deerfield for an in-depth examination of the decorative arts of New England's inventors, merchants and peddlers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

When President Adams moved into the new White House in 1800, innovation and adaptation already drove the creative designs of many New England-made objects. Even as elite tastes maintained traditional ties to European styles and materials, the consumer demands of an expanding middle class fueled inventive entrepreneurial approaches to making and selling cheaper American-made attractive goods. At times protected or even encouraged by embargo, war, and westward expansion, New Englanders made and sold a profusion of wares including patent clocks, popular prints, glassware, stoneware, tinware, pewter, cast iron stoves, and stenciled and painted furniture. First competing with and ultimately replacing European manufactures for many families, they infused their products with artistic energy and excitement that spurred a national impulse to "Buy American." Forum speakers and demonstrators will include Peter Benes, Deborah Child, David Jaffee, Amanda Lange, Ned Lazaro, William McMillen, Mary Cheek Mills, Sumpter Priddy, Andrew Raftery, Christine Ritok, and Philip Zea.

John Baldessari, the celebrated Los Angeles visual artist, will be among the 11 recipients of the 2014 National Medal of Arts that President Obama will present in a White House ceremony later this month, organizers announced on Thursday. 

Baldessari will be honored along with musician Meredith Monk, tenor George Shirley, actresses Sally Field and Miriam Colon, novelists Stephen King and Tobias Wolff as well as fellow artists Anna Hamilton and Ping Chong.

The Renwick Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution’s decorative arts and crafts museum in Washington, DC, is due to reopen to the public on November 13 after a two-year, $30m renovation. Built in 1859 across from the White House, the Renwick is the first American building designed specifically to showcase art.

The inaugural exhibition, “Wonder”, will take over the entire museum. The Renwick commissioned nine contemporary artists, including Chakaia Booker, Tara Donovan, Maya Lin and Leo Villareal, to create site-specific, room-size installations out of unorthodox materials such as insects, tires and glass marbles.

One of Georgia O’Keeffe’s iconic flower paintings has shattered the auction record for a work by a female artist. On Thursday, November 20, “Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1” (1932), a commanding painting with an impressive provenance, sold for $44.4 million during Sotheby’s American Art sale in New York. The work, which belonged to the artist’s sister, Anita O’Keeffe Young, and hung in the White House’s private dining room during the George W. Bush administration, was offered for sale by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. The Santa Fe-based institution sold the painting, along with two other works by O’Keeffe, to benefit its Acquisitions Fund.

Seven bidders competed for “Jimson Weed,” driving the price to a record height and nearly tripling the work’s high estimate of $15 million.

George Washington University (GW) in Washington, DC, is beefing up its arts infrastructure. Less than two months after the university finalised its merger with the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the GW Museum and the Textile Museum announced they will open a joint facility on the university’s Foggy Bottom campus on 21 March 2015.

The museum is set to occupy both the Maxwell Woodhull House, a historic former home of a US Navy commander, and a 35,000 sq. ft addition designed by the local firm Hartman-Cox Architects. Since the university finalized its merger with the Corcoran in August, it has also assumed operations of the gallery’s Beaux-Arts building near the White House.

The Corcoran Gallery of Art is taking steps to guarantee that most of its 17,000 artworks will remain in the Washington area and that the historic building near the White House always will display art, under the plan to turn over operations to George Washington University and the National Gallery of Art.

Legal papers filed by the Corcoran this week in D.C. Superior Court also show that the D.C. Attorney General’s Office is keeping a close watch over the dissolution of Washington’s oldest private art gallery and art college, which was announced earlier this year.

Looking to visit the Smithsonian American Art Museum without actually going to the Smithsonian? You might soon be able to do so from the comfort of your own smartphone.

On Friday, the White House announced in a blog post that the Smithsonian American Art Museum would soon open up its digitized collection to developers so they can build it into educational apps. According to the White House, “even museum curators do not have easily accessible information about their art collections. This information will soon be available to everyone.”

The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York has lent two paintings by Edward Hopper to the White House. ‘Cobb’s Barns, South Truro’ and ‘Burly Cobb’s House, South Truro’, both oil on canvas works painted between 1930 and 1933 in Cape Cod, are currently on view in the Oval Office.

The paintings from the Whitney, which holds the world’s largest archive of Hopper’s works, were created while Hopper and his wife were renting a summer cottage in South Truro. From the home, Hopper executed a series of drawings and paintings of the buildings on his landlord’s farm, capturing the structures from various angles and at different times of the day. Both of the paintings from the Whitney capture Hopper’s masterful use of light and the quiet stillness that pervades much of his work.  

The two Hopper paintings will join Rembrandt Peale’s ‘George Washington,’ George Henry Story’s ‘Abraham Lincoln,’ Thomas Moran’s ‘The Three Tetons,’ Childe Hassam’s ‘The Avenue in the Rain,’ and Norman Rockwell’s ‘Statue of Liberty,’ all of which belong to the permanent White House collection.

Gifts from three families affiliated with the Princeton University Art Museum have established the John Wilmerding Curatorship of American Art. The endowed curatorship honors John Wilmerding, an esteemed scholar, curator, collector and Professor of American Art, Emeritus at Princeton University. Karl Kusserow, the museum’s current curator of American art, has been named the inaugural Wilmerding curator.

An anonymous donor with long-standing ties to Princeton made the first gift towards the curatorship. The Sherrerd family, who previously established two funds in support of scholarship and programming in American art at Princeton, and the Anschutz family, which includes one of Wilmerding’s former students, made additional contributions.

Wilmerding, who assumed emeritus status in 2007 and retired from Princeton last spring, has been reappointed by President Obama to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House. He is a trustee of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Wyeth Foundation of American Art. Kusserow, who joined the Princeton University Art Museum in 2005, previously held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has organized numerous important exhibitions and his articles and reviews have appeared in American Art, Drawing, Folk Art and The Journal of American History.

James Steward, director of the Princeton University Art Museum, said, “This endowed curatorship not only honors one of the most eminent and versatile scholars of our time, and one of the Museum’s greatest friends, John Wilmerding, but also recognizes the Princeton University Art Museum’s excellence in American art and visual culture. The very first work of art to enter Princeton’s collection in the 1750s was, in fact, an American painting. With this endowment, our work in American art can go forward with confidence and assure Princeton’s leadership in the field of American studies.”