Displaying items by tag: currier museum

Susan Strickler, who has guided the Currier Museum as director and CEO since 1996, has announced her retirement as of June 2016. Upon her retirement, Strickler's tenure as director will be the longest in the Currier's 86-year history. Her visionary guidance converted the once-small museum to one of regional and national renown.

"Susan has had a remarkable two-decade tenure at the helm of the Currier - which was a time of wonderful artistic growth and institutional expansion, raising the profile of the Currier as one of the nation's finest mid-sized museums," said M. Christine Dwyer, Currier Museum of Art Board president.

A rare and early reclining armchair designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) is currently on view at the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH. A pioneer of modern architecture, Wright designed the chair between 1902 and 1903 and it features the minimal aesthetic and linear design that he is best known for. The chair was originally designed for his prairie style Francis W. Little House in Peoria, IL but he used different variations of the chair over the course of the next decade, including in his own studio in Chicago’s Oak Park.  

The presentation of the chair coincides with the reopening of the Currier’s Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman House (1950), which Wright designed. Along with the exterior, Wright devised the House’s interiors, furniture, gardens, and even its mailbox. The Zimmermans left the house to the Currier in 1988 and it opened for public tours in 1990. Besides being able to view a Wright masterpiece, visitors are offered a glimpse of the Zimmermans’ personal collection of modern art, pottery, and sculpture. The Zimmerman House is the only Wright home open to the public in New England. It was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

Tours of the Zimmerman House are offered ten times a week and require a reservation.

For a limited time, the Currier Museum in Manchester, NH is exhibiting an early painting by Claude Monet (1840-1926) in their European Gallery. The painting, Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse (1867), remained in Monet’s family until 2004 and will be returned to its owner in early July. No future public showings have been scheduled.

Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse is an early painting by Monet and features the artist’s father reading a newspaper under an awning of trees. The painting will be shown alongside the Currier’s own early Monet masterpiece, The Seine at Bougival (1869). Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse has only been on public view in a museum once before when it was exhibited in 2011 at Paris’ Galeries nationales du Grand Palais as part of a major retrospective of Monet’s work.

Adolphe Monet in the Garden of Le Coteau at Sainte-Adresse will be on view at the Currier Museum through early July 2013.