Displaying items by tag: columbus museum of art

The Columbus Museum of Art announced that its new wing will be named the Margaret M. Walter Wing in recognition of Robert D. and Margaret “Peggy” Walter’s transformational $10 million donation to the Columbus Museum of Art. The Walters’ donation remains the largest gift in the Museum’s history and became the foundation for the Museum’s Art Matters Endowment and Capital Campaign.

The Walters are long-time supporters of the Museum. Peggy Walter began leading Museum tours as a CMA docent in 1971 and later joined the Museum’s Women’s Board auxiliary. She has also helped guide the Museum as a member of the Board of Trustees since 1994.

The Columbus Museum of Art announced today that Tyler Cann has been promoted from his position as an associate curator—he will now be the Ohio museum’s curator of contemporary art.

Cann first began working at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2013. In his two years as associate curator, he organized several exhibitions, most notably “In __ We Trust: Art and Money,” which explored the connection between economics and post-recession art.

The renovation and expansion of the Columbus Museum of Art received a $1 million boost yesterday — a donation from JPMorgan Chase & Co. The gift honors the memory of John G. McCoy, the late patriarch of Bank One Corp., whose family has supported the museum for decades.

In addition, JPMorgan Chase is donating to the museum a work from its corporate art collection. The sculpture — "John T. Ward Transporting Fugitives in Columbus, Ohio to Freedom, 1800s" — is a showcase piece by Columbus artist Aminah Robinson.

Modern Dialect: American Paintings from the John and Susan Horseman Collection, a striking new exhibition, opened at the Columbus Museum of Art June 6. The exhibition, on view through August 31, showcases American Modernist paintings from the 1920s to the beginning of World War II, a period marked by significant change and compounded by the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

The more than sixty artists featured in Modern Dialect hail from all parts of the United States, and painted wherever they found inspiration. These artists adhere to a common interest, more than to a single style, in portraying their realities in a decidedly modern fashion. The exhibition reveals the scope of the American modernist aesthetic in the early 20th century, and the vision and integrity each artist brought to the representation of the American experience – from rural landscapes to modern industrial cities (and the people who inhabit them) to purely abstracted compositions.

George Bellows and the American Experience is currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio. The exhibition highlight’s the Columbus Museum’s significant Bellows collection, which is widely recognized as the best in the world. The show also includes a number of paintings on loan from other museums and private collections.

Born and raised in Columbus, Ohio, George Bellows moved to New York City in 1904 to study with the influential artist and teacher, Robert Henri, and soon became the youngest member of the Ashcan School. Dedicated to chronicling the realities of day-to-day life, Bellows made a name as the boldest of the Ashcan artists. He was recently the subject of a major retrospective, which included his well-known paintings of boxing matches and gritty New York tenements, many of which came from the Columbus Museum.

Melissa Wolfe, the Columbus Museum of Art’s Curator of American Art, said, “For the past year our Bellows paintings have traveled the world as part of a major retrospective that drew crowds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Royal Academy in London. We’re excited to welcome them home and to be able to celebrate the profound impact George Bellows had, and continues to have, on the art world.”

An international scholarly symposium will be held on November 8 and 9, 2013 to complement the exhibition. George Bellows and the American Experience will be on view at the Columbus Museum of Art through January 4, 2014.

The Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio is the only art museum to receive a 2013 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. The Columbus Metropolitan Library received the award back in 2011, making Columbus the 16^th American city to receive the medal twice. The National Medal, which is the highest honor for museums and libraries, will be presented to the city at a celebration in Washington, D.C. on May 8, 2013.

The Columbus Museum of Art, which was historically focused on European and American art through the early modern period, has placed more emphasis on contemporary art and photography in recent years. The museum has also made a substantial effort to engage visitors in creative ways as well as reinvent itself as a hub for social and creative happenings in the Midwest. The institution has partnered with 30 Ohio counties as well as Columbus city schools to create various programs that are aimed at engaging visitors of all ages in innovative ways.

The other National Medal-winning museums for 2013 included the Boston Children’s Museum; the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi; the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County; and the National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Twenty-seven early Mark Rothko (1903-1970) works are currently on view at the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio as part of the exhibition Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade, 1940-1950. The formative paintings are on loan from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., which boasts a strong Rothko collection of nearly 300 works.

Rothko’s works from the early 1940s are often overlooked and were even omitted from a Rothko retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1961. The exclusion set the tone for how people interpret Rothko’s oeuvre, often deeming his earlier works as less significant than his later works. Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade aims to dispel that notion.

The paintings on view, many of which are on paper, chart Rothko’s artistic evolution from vaguely figurative to purely abstract. Known for his layered canvases featuring often-rectangular blocks of color, Rothko explored various influences before developing his well-known signature style. The Decisive Decade illustrates Rothko’s early experimentation with shape, space and color and includes works by Arshile Gorky (1904-1948), Robert Motherwell (1915-1951), and Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) that share similar visual and conceptual characteristics with Rothko’s paintings.    

Mark Rothko: The Decisive Decade will be on view at the Columbus Museum of Art through May 26, 2013.

It's one of the ultimate images of summer: a woman in a short, pink slip sits on a bed, her knees pulled up to her chest, gazing out a window. Her hair is tucked back into a bun. Her bare arms rest lightly on her bare legs.

Edward Hopper painted her in 1952 for a work called Morning Sun. The picture has been widely reproduced for decades. But on a recent visit to its home at the Columbus Museum of Art in Columbus, Ohio, it was nowhere to be found.

"It's on loan right now to an exhibition," explains Melissa Wolfe, the museum's curator of American art. "It travels a lot. It's a very well-requested painting."