Date/Time
Date - March 2, 2019
1:30 pm until 3:30 pm
Location
New Britain Museum of American Art
56 Lexington Street
New Britain, CT, 06052
Georgia O’Keeffe, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, 1932, Oil on canvas, 48 × 40 in., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2014.35 © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Photo: Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art/Edward C. Robison III. Image courtesy of New Britain Museum of Art
Join me for the exhibition that opens on February 22 at The New Britain Museum of American Art – The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art. This is a wonderful opportunity to introduce the Museum to those of you who don’t know about it or haven’t been there yet – their exhibitions are terrific, and their permanent collection is very impressive. Hopefully this will be a good day to explore them.
Members are invited to have brunch as a group before our visit, information will be sent to attending members. Kindly RSVP to Laura by Thursday, February 28.
Loie Hollowell, Yellow Mountains, 2016, Oil, acrylic medium, and sawdust on linen over panel, 48 × 36 × 3 in., Courtesy the Artist and Pace Gallery, Photo: Feuer Mesler Gallery. Image courtesy of New Britain Museum of American Art
THE BEYOND: GEORGIA O’KEEFFE AND CONTEMPORARY ART
February 22 – June 2, 2019
From the website: nbmaa.org
Enormous flowers, luscious colors, desert landscapes, feminine forms, and still lifes. Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986) pioneered revolutionary ways of visually interpreting the world through her early embrace of abstraction and effusive use of color and is recognized as one of the preeminent American painters of the twentieth century. Her art has intrigued viewers and artists alike for generations, and this spring, the New Britain Museum of American Art will present The Beyond: Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art, an innovative exhibition that celebrates her work and legacy. Drawn from important public and private collections across the country, The Beyond will bring together three dozen iconic works—spanning O’Keeffe’s long career and the full range of her output—as the centerpiece of a unique exploration. Grouped by theme—Flowers; Cities and Deserts; Still Lifes; The Intangible Thing; Finding the Figure; and The Beyond—O’Keeffe’s paintings and sculptures will appear alongside works by twenty contemporary artists that evoke, interrogate, and elaborate upon the images and approaches that mark O’Keeffe’s career.
The Beyond will examine the lasting impact and legacy of O’Keeffe’s work as a touchstone for artists working today, showing the continuing connections between our collective history and our present.
This exhibition will not make one-to-one comparisons between O’Keeffe and the contemporary artists included here. Rather, the work of these artists is intended to expand on conversations and themes O’Keeffe presented in her work and her life, creating new ways of seeing and understanding the mother of American Modernism. The New Britain Museum of American Art is proud to be the final and only northeast venue for the exhibition, following its presentation at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, and the North Carolina Museum of Art.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM
The New Britain Museum of American Art
Image: The Defining Photo, courtesy of the NBMAA
The New Britain Museum of American Art’s founding in 1903 entitles the institution to be designated the first museum of strictly American art in the country. That year, a $20,000 gift of gold bonds to the museum’s former parent, the New Britain Institute, from industrialist John Butler Talcott, created funds to purchase ”modern oil paintings.” Subsequent purchases, with advice from New York museums and galleries, further defined ”modern” to mean American works of art, now numbering more than 8,300. With particular strengths in colonial portraiture, the Hudson River School, American Impressionism, and the Ash Can School, not to mention the important mural series The Arts of Life in America by Thomas Hart Benton, the museum relies heavily on its permanent collection for exhibitions and programming, yet also displays a significant number of borrowed shows and work by emerging artists.
New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington Street, New Britain, CT