Displaying items by tag: newyork historical society

Comic book superheroes are a part of our daily lives. They engage our imaginations on the pages of comic books, television and movie screens, as well as the Broadway stage and in the virtual world of gaming. Contemporary literature and art reference them; adults and children alike delight in donning superhero t-shirts, caps, and sneakers.

Since their introduction in the late 1930s, superheroes have been powerful role models, inspirational and enviable.

With the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill and Frederic Church’s home Olana, a New York state Parks Historic Site, in Greenport, it’s fair to say that Greene and Columbia counties form the heartland of the Hudson River School of Painting.

As such, movement in the art world that pertains to their works is always of interest to many in the area, and there has, in fact, been movement.

Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, today announced the appointment of curator Margaret K. Hofer to the role of Vice President and Director of its Museum division. Ms. Hofer has contributed to or overseen New-York Historical’s decorative arts collections and exhibitions for over two decades, and spearheaded the groundbreaking 2007 exhibition and publication A New Light on Tiffany: Clara Driscoll and the Tiffany Girls, which revealed previously unrecognized achievements of Tiffany Studios’ women designers.

A masterpiece unfolded on Sunday at the New-York Historical Society, and it wasn’t the Picasso.

In an hourslong operation of practiced precision, “Le Tricorne,” a stage curtain painted by the Spanish master, arrived in its new home, shepherded by a team of art handlers.

It was the end of a tortured ordeal over the fate of the work, which had resided at the Four Seasons restaurant in the Seagram Building only to be pushed out in a dispute between the landlord and the New York Landmarks Conservancy.

The New-York Historical Society is to unveil Pablo Picasso's iconic painted theater curtain, commissioned for Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, Le Tricorne, in 1919. The masterpiece is the largest work by the Spanish born artist in America. It was donated by the Landmarks Conservancy to the New-York Historical Society and after considerable conservation will be on view to the public, later this spring. The Le Tricorne curtain was installed as a tapestry for 55 years at the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Mies van der Rohe designed, modernist, Seagram Building, in New York City.

John James Audubon painted many birds, but for sheer stage presence, his great gray owl is hard to beat. Perched on a rotten branch, it turns halfway, as though disturbed, and fixes the viewer with an imperious stare. The yellow eyes glow, their intensity magnified by concentric ringlike markings that spread outward, like a feathery vortex. The plumage is regal — thick drapery, in a gray and brown pattern, falling in soft folds. The owl exudes the heavy solemnity of one of Velázquez’s popes or Holbein’s portrait of Thomas More.

The owl has stiff competition in “Audubon’s Aviary: The Final Flight.”

The Frist Center for the Visual Arts presents "Telling Tales: Stories and Legends in 19th-Century American Art" through June 7, 2015, in the Center’s Upper-Level Galleries. The exhibition features paintings and sculptures that recount stories relating to American cultural aspirations and everyday life throughout the 19th century. Narrative landscapes by Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand of the Hudson River School, genre scenes by William Sidney Mount and Francis W. Edmonds and sculptures by John Rogers are among the highlights of the exhibition.

Assembled from the collection of the New-York Historical Society, Telling Tales integrates genre, historical, literary and religious subjects—through styles ranging from Neoclassicism to Realism—to paint a vivid portrait of American art and life during the country’s most formative century. The exhibition is organized into six sections: “American History Painting,” “English Literature and History,” “Importing the Grand Manner,” “Genre Paintings,” “Economic, Social, and Religious Division” and “Picturing the Outsider.”

When City College student Stephen Somerstein heard Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call for a march to Montgomery in 1965, he wanted to witness what he knew was going to be a historic event.

A budding photographer and picture editor of the school newspaper, Somerstein, then 24, grabbed his camera and headed to the Deep South. Fifty years later, his photographs documenting the Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March are on display in a new exhibition at New-York Historical Society.

Dr. Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, today announced plans for the establishment of a new Center for the Study of Women’s History, located on New-York Historical’s fourth floor within a fully-renovated Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture. A model of innovation, the new Center will include permanent and temporary exhibition galleries and a theater featuring a multimedia film, providing a venue for scholarly research, seminars, and public programs that bridge the gap between “women’s history” and American history. The new Center is scheduled to open in December 2016.

“The new Center for Women’s History will become a destination for discovery of the crucial role that New York women played in our nation’s social, political, and cultural evolution as women struggled for and eventually won the right to vote,” said Dr. Mirrer. “We will highlight the women who changed the course of our history, giving voice, in many cases, to the voiceless, who ushered in the Progressive era and emerged triumphant in the struggle for women’s suffrage.”

On the final leg of its Smithsonian-organized, cross-country tour, Annie Leibovitz’s “Pilgrimage” exhibition will land at the New-York Historical Society from November 21 through February 22, 2015. While Leibovitz may be best known as a portraitist to the stars, this collection of images contains nary a celebrity portrait — at least not in the traditional sense.

When Leibovitz’s longtime partner Susan Sontag died in 2004, she took to the road to visit places and things that the couple had always wanted to see together.