The Carnegie mansion is still home to what was once known as the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, an outpost of the Smithsonian that has now banished its hyphen, flung open its doors, and reinvented itself as a twenty-first-century digitally enhanced experience.
William H. Johnson in the Johnson Collection
Paintings by William Henry Johnson are rarely available in today’s art market, as most of his work is secure in museum and university collections. The Smithsonian American ArtMuseum, for instance, owns more than one thousand works by this noted African-American artist. Nevertheless, the relatively nascent Johnson Collection, located in Spartanburg, South Carolina, has been able to acquire five works by …
Events: Exhibitions, symposiums, and lectures through December
ALABAMA Montgomery Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts: “Alexander Archipenko: Dreizehn Steinzichnungen”; November 29 to January 18, 2015. “The Grand Tour: Prints from Rome, Florence, Venice, Paris, and London”; to November 23. “Imprinting the West: Manifest Destiny, Real and Imagined”; November 8 to January 4, 2015. ARIZONA Tucson Tucson Museum of Art: “La Vida Fantastica: Selections from the Latin American Folk …
Events: Exhibitions, symposiums, and lectures
Fore more, visit our calendar. Left: Eagle by Bernard Langlais, ,ca. 1964, raw and painted wood, 96 x 48 x 3 inches, Colby College Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Bernard Langlais. Photo: Pixel Acuity. On view at Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine. July 19 to January 4, 2015. ALABAMA Montgomery Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts: “Origins: The First Twenty-Five …
Then and Now: A museum’s museum
One of my earliest memories is from half a century ago and relates to something that I saw, and that astonished me, in the darkened halls of the American Museum of Natural History. I was four and my nanny was taking me-not for the first time, as I clearly recall-to the museum, a few blocks from where I grew up. …
Wild at heart: Rediscovering the sculpture of Anna Hyatt Huntington
Cranes Rising by Huntington, 1934. Bronze; height 45, width 16, depth 22 inches. Art Properties, Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library, Columbia University in the City of New York, gift of the artist; photograph by Mark Ostrander, courtesy of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. The energy of some art only becomes apparent with the passage of time. Anna …
Upcoming shows and fairs in New York
Armory Antique Show The Armory Antique Show is a crowd pleaser, offering a playful abundance of eclectic wares at a range of prices. Organizers promise roughly one hundred specialists in antique and vintage furniture, folk art, Americana, modern design, garden ornament, lighting, jewelry, silver, textiles, and ceramics. Under new management this year, the Armory Antique Show was recently acquired by …
Double take: A closer look at American bronze sculpture
From The Magazine ANTIQUES November 2006. Bronze sculpture made in the United States between 1845 and 1945 was little studied and largely undervalued until it began to attract interest in the early 1980s. It now continues to gain attention from scholars, museum curators, and collectors. Broadening scholarship has brought recognition to the variety, quality, and importance of this field of American …
Parisian jewelry and American patrons, real and fictional
By SHIRLEY BURY; from The Magazine ANTIQUES, April 1992. The formidable skill of Parisian jewelers in interpreting the work of innovative designers was the prime cause of their international popularity. Although craftsmen elsewhere practiced the late eighteenth-century technique of open-backed, or à jour, setting, which allowed light to refract and reflect through the stones, greatly enhancing their brilliance, the contrast …
The Virginia Dulcimer
For generations of Virginia musicians, dulcimer (or dulcimore) has described a family of instruments with three characteristics