The Magazine Antiques

Current & Coming | By Megan Holloway Fort

Summer in the Adirondacks

May 28, 2009  |  A "Wild, Unsettled Country": Early Reflections of the Adirondacks, which opened last week, includes a selection of paintings, maps, prints, and photographs that illustrate the untamed Adirondack wilderness discovered by artists, photographers, and cartographers who visited the area in the nineteenth century. While tourists were flocking to Saratoga Springs, near what is today the southern boundary of the Adirondack Park, in the 1830s, very few ventured farther north until after 1836, when the New York State Legislature authorized one of the first exploratory surveys of the area, headed by the geologists Ebenezer Emmons and William C. Redfield and documented visually by the painter Charles Cromwell Ingham. When Ingham exhibited The Great Adirondack Pass, which he had painted "on the Spot" during the expedition, at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1839, the view depicted inspired the poet Charles Fenno Hoffman and the artist Jervis McEntee to venture north the follow…» More

Current & Coming | By Megan Holloway Fort

American Indian painting

May 15, 2009  |  Between 1879 and 1900 the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs established twenty-four off-reservation boarding schools for American Indian children, among them the Santa Fe Indian School in New Mexico. The schools were intended as a means of absorbing American Indians into the larger society by transforming the children of what were considered savage warriors into fully "civilized citizens." But since its founding in 1890, the Santa Fe Indian School has served as a major cultural catalyst for the American Indian community throughout the United States, particularly in the fine arts. Through Their Eyes: Paintings from the Santa Fe Indian School, an exhibition opening Sunday at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, focuses on paintings by students who attended the school between 1919 and 1945.

The Santa Fe Indian School has long been considered the birthplace of contemporary American Indian easel painting. Central to its history was the opening in September 1932 of the Art Studio, with a painting program run by the pioneering instructor Dorothy Dunn. Dunn insisted that her students use American Indian subjects and a flat,two-dimensional style derived from rock painting and from the abstract and geometric forms found in traditional painted pottery, beadwork, and basketry. She refused to teach perspective drawing, color theory, and shading techniques developed over the centuries in European painting, preferring that students rely on their natural ability and remembrance of their cultural traditions.
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Current & Coming | By Megan Holloway Fort

Amish Quilts and Recent Acquisitions at the Textile Museum

April 3, 2009  |  When the International Quilt Study Center and Museum at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was founded in 1997, an important aspect of its mission was to promote scholarship by exhibiting its vast collection at institutions throughout the world. Tomorrow a group of the center's Amish quilts goes on view at the Textile Museum in Washington in the exhibition Constructed Color: Amish Quilts, which emphasizes the visual connections between these quilts, which often feature large single color areas, and mid-twentieth-century painting.

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This is certainly not a new approach to the material. The art world took note of some of the similarities between quilts and modern art when the Whitney Museum exhibited a group of pieced quilts on its gallery walls in the 1971 show Abstract Design in American Quilts. Sixty of the quilts included in that exhibition are now in the collection of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum, part of a 2003 gift of more than four hundred quilts from the collector and author Jonathan Holstein.
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Current & Coming | By Megan Holloway Fort

Art at all costs

March 4, 2009  |  A series of recently announced budget cutting measures by a number of museums raises tricky questions about the value of the arts, the responsibilities of museums to the public and expectations for their profitability, and even the prospects of a degree in the humanities.

Just last week, the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced its decision to close fifteen of its satellite shops around the country, in addition to imposing a hiring freeze and curtailing staff travel and entertainment as well as the use of temporary employees. The museum's president Emily Rafferty added that "we cannot eliminate the possibility of a head-count reduction." The Indianapolis Museum of Art will eliminate fifteen full-time and six-part time jobs. Six vacant full-time positions will not be filled, and the use of temporary seasonal employees has been limited. In addition, several curatorial projects have been put on hold—the number of special annual exhibitions has been cut from three to two, and the opening of the Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park has been pushed back to spring 2010. The High Museum in Atlanta is cutting $1.4 million from its budget, mostly by reducing staff salaries, requiring employees to take periods of unpaid leave, putting a freeze on hiring, redistributing staff responsibilities, and eliminating five full-time and three temporary positions. And so on, and so on.

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