Future Exhibitions
Fire and Earth: Native American Pottery from the Pueblos of New Mexico
June 27 - September 27, 2013
With a history stretching back more than 1500 years, Native American pottery has a long and distinguished pedigree. Naturally, techniques and visual idioms have evolved in the millennium and half since these pots were first created but modern pottery continues to incorporate traditional materials, shapes, and motifs, keeping this rich tradition alive. Featuring more than two dozen pottery vessels from close to a dozen pueblos in New Mexico, this show explores not only the formal values of these evocative objects, but also their cultural and historical contexts.
The Collector's Cabinet: Renaissance and Baroque Masterworks from the Arnold & Seena Davis Collection
October 3, 2013 - January 11, 2014
In the late Renaissance and Baroque periods in Europe, discerning burghers and aristocrats assembled encyclopedic collections of fine art objects, creating unique kunstkammern, or Cabinets of Arts. Arnold and Seena Davis have followed in this rich tradition, acquiring unique and beautiful works with a discerning eye and a curious intellect. This exhibition highlights the fruits of their labors, including such works as Joos van Cleeve's stunning Madonna and Child in an Architectural Setting (image at left) and several works by the Flemish master painter Sir Peter Paul Rubens. Embracing Continental Europe's principal artistic movements during the years between 1500 and 1700, this fine show also provides a glimpse into the history of an important private collection that was more than sixty years in the making.
Reflections and Undercurrents: Ernest Roth and Printmaking in Venice 1900-1940
January 23 - April 4, 2014
Reflections and Undercurrents features prints by artists who, following the lead of the great American aesthete and expatriate artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), explored in their art the picturesque aspects of Venice. The artists represented in this exhibition include German-born American painter and etcher Ernest Roth (1879-1964), John Taylor Arms (1887-1953) Joseph Pennell (1860-1926) and Whistler himself. This exhibition was organized by Dr. Eric Denker, senior lecturer in the Education Department of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. with Dr. Philip Earenfight, Director, Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA. A parallel show focusing on the work of John Taylor Arms will be mounted by the Fairfield Museum and History Center to coincide with this exhibition.
La Ragnatela/The Spiderweb: Works by Giampaolo Seguso from the Corning Museum of Glass
April 10 - June 14, 2014
La Ragnatela (or "spider web") refers to the characteristically long, thin, lines and complex patterns of filigrana vases. A glass-making technique that was invented in 1527, filigrana consists of preparing parallel glass canes that are then melted into a mass of incandescent glass, creating perfect geometrical shapes in net and spiral-lie patterns. It is still practiced today by the master glass-maker Giampaolo Seguso, whose family has been making glass on the Venetian island of Murano for more than 600 years. The second part of the three-part project Seguso calls "La Galleria dei 99," La Ragnatela is documented in an eponymous book that beautifully illustrates the 33 glass objects in this series; each of which is accompanied by one of Seguso's evocative poetic mediations on the complexities of moral existence, the beauty of the natural world, and the power of the human spirit. Examples of all 33 vases will be on view (on loan from the Corning Museum of Glass) together with copies of the creator's poetry.