Exhibitions
April 1, 2011 - August 14, 2011
Rufus Grider (1817-1900) and Fritz Vogt (1842-1900) sketched the farms, homes, stores and churches found in the Mohawk Valley. These two remarkable vernacular artists, whose personal stories and motivations could not have been more different, documented buildings and landscapes in the same rural New York region during 1890-1900. They were both German-speakers who came to the Mohawk Valley as adults. Grider, a Canajoharie schoolteacher, studied early accounts of the Mohawk Valley in an effort to reconstruct the past and document his interest in the fast-changing landscape. Vogt was an itinerant handyman and artist who produced his portraits of farms and homes as a way to earn a living. While they created their sketches for different reasons, their works viewed together provide us with a clear picture of of the past.
Exhibition funded, in part, by the New York Council for the Humanities, and by the Iroquois Gas Transmission System.
October 2010 - March 22, 2011
Many of the stars of the Arkell Museum’s remarkable collection of American paintings are featured in this exhibition. The exhibition showcases the rich variety of America’s landscape from a western landscape of El Capitan by Albert Bierstadt, to Winslow Homer’s dramatic crashing waves on the coast of Maine. Portraits in the exhibition include George Washington by Gilbert Stuart and everyday folk by Thomas Hart Benton. A glimpse at how American’s spent their leisure time in the mid twentieth century can be seen be seen in The Sand Lot Ball Game by Paul Sample, and in circus scenes by Jon Corbino and Ogden Pleisner. The title of the exhibition comes from Gilbert Stuart who stated: “Paint what you see and look with your own eyes.” Visitors will discover how realist artists’ interpretation of “paint what you see” changed through the decades.
June 19, 2010 - October 3, 2010
Reflections on Water in American Painting is drawn from the collections of Arthur J. Phelan. The exhibition opens with the earliest form of American maritime painting – the grand academic-style portraits of graceful sailing ships – and includes waterscapes from the sea to the lakes and rivers of the American heartland, light-flooded impressionist visions of quaint New England seaside towns, and modernist renderings of industrial waterfronts and everyday life on the water. Highlights of the exhibition include James Bard’s meticulously drawn Hudson River steamboat, Frank Benson’s marshland with more than 30 rising ducks, William Trost Richards’ breaking waves, William Merritt Chase’s intense study of the Arno River, and Reginald Marsh’s cathedral-like rendering of a New Jersey railway bridge.
Exhibition Contributing Sponsor: The Overbrook Managemnent Corporation
