New Exhibitions This Winter at The Allentown Art Museum
All special exhibitions are included with Museum admission unless otherwise noted.
This release covers January, February and March 2008
January 20–February 10, 2008
The Pennsylvania Regional Scholastic Art Awards
Community Gallery
Reception: January 27, 2-4 PM
The preliminary competition of the National Scholastic Art Awards is the most prominent and remunerative for secondary art students in our area with over $3,500 in scholarships and prizes. Regional Gold Key and American Visions entries will be juried by the National Scholastic Art Awards.
January 27–May 25, 2008
“National Geographic: The Art of Exploration”
Kress and Rodale galleries
Admission: $5 for non-members (in addition to Museum admission)
Preview Party: January 26, 6-8 PM
“I must pack into this panel not what one man saw on a particular day at a particular time, but what all men have seen and felt…”
-N.C. Wyeth, from a letter to National Geographic Society President, Gilbert H. Grosvenor, 1926
Artists play a major role in making National Geographic the magazine that it is–a colorful, carefully researched guide to the fascinating world around us. For more than a century, gifted illustrators have accompanied explorers and archaeologists to the far corners of the earth and to the depth of the oceans in search of historical and scientific realities. Their stunning images bring us to places where we can never venture, recreating long lost civilizations of the ancient past and proposing unknown journeys that may lie ahead.
Here, in more than one hundred original works selected from the thousands commissioned and published by this venerable publication, artists serve as our guides to the universe. Paintings bursting with color, excitement and information reveal the wonders of nature, the glory of civilizations that flourished and faded so long ago and the outer reaches of our solar system. Iconic and unforgettable, they reflect each artist’s commitment to accuracy and the highest aesthetic standards, helping to shape our understanding of science, history and geography, and inviting us to imagine our world.
Exhibition guides ($2 each) will be available at the Museum information desk. Quantities are limited.
“National Geographic: The Art of Exploration” has been organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Major support provided by Adams Outdoor Advertising, County of Lehigh, and The Harry C. Trexler Trust
Contributing support provided by The Dexter F. and Dorothy H. Baker Foundation and The Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment
Sustaining support provided by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc.; Amaranth Foundation; The Audrey and Bernard Berman Endowment Fund; and State Theatre Center for the Arts
Additional support provided by Campbell, Rappold & Yurasits; Meritage Catering; and Victaulic
February 10–April 27, 2008
“Memphis Blues: Photographs by Ernest C. Withers”
Payne Hurd Gallery
Ernest C. Withers, a practicing photographer for over 60 years, lived and worked in Memphis, Tennessee. A perhaps unwitting historian, Withers, who passed away on October 15, 2007, made a living shooting community events and selling photos to news agencies, telling American stories through the lens of the camera. He captured in black and white key moments in the Civil Rights movement, the life and death of the Negro Baseball League and the black social life of the city. He also documented the vibrant Beale Street music scene that grew out of the city’s black culture and influenced a generation of white musicians such as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis, who helped to bring the Memphis sound to the attention of the nation.
This exhibition features Withers’ photographs from this classic period in American music. The works provide an insider’s view of the clubs on Beale Street at the point when Americans, white and black, were beginning to recognize Memphis as a musical Mecca. He photographed hundreds of the great musical performers who performed on Beale Street stages, many of whom he knew well. B. B. King, Ray Charles, Ella Fitzgerald, Ike and Tina Turner, James Brown and a host of others were captured in his camera’s eye. His photographs reveal the musicians’ spirit and talent as well as the regional flavor of an important place in time. Withers’ powerful images validate the message he had printed on his business card: “Pictures tell the story.”
February 14–27, 2008
Louis E. Dieruff High School
Community Gallery
Reception: February 24, 1-3 PM
Allentown School District’s Dieruff High School presents its third annual exhibition of two- and three-dimensional student artwork.
March 1–18, 2008
IDEA
Community Gallery
Reception: March 2, 1-3 PM
The Inter-District Experience in the Arts (IDEA) presents outstanding works of art from high school students in the Palisades and Southern Lehigh school districts. The display of contemporary works by student artists will be highlighted during the Museum’s Winter Festival on Sunday, March 9.
March 21 – April 8, 2008
Salisbury Township School District
Community Gallery
Reception: April 6, 12-2 PM
Salisbury Township School District celebrates its 26th annual exhibition of artworks by middle and high school students.
Continuing Exhibitions
Through January 6, 2008
“Tiffany by Design”
Kress Gallery
Admission: $5 for non-members (in addition to Museum admission; include Alphonse Mucha)
“Tiffany by Design” is an exhibition of lamps, a stained-glass window, metalwork, and related materials made by Tiffany Studios under the direction of Louis Comfort Tiffany. The show explores the construction, fabrication, design and qualities of Tiffany lamps made between 1900 and 1925. Forty objects are featured, including table lamps, chandeliers, bases, accessories, a three-part model of a Tiffany shade in the making and a leaded glass window. Large photographs of Tiffany Studios and the factory workers, and extensive didactic material are included. The objects are a part of the large collection of Tiffany lamps and glass collected by Dr. Egon Neustadt and his wife Hildegard between 1935 and 1984. In 1970
“Tiffany by Design” offers the public a unique opportunity to view a wide variety of Tiffany lamps, including some examples which are rare or one-of-a-kind. The exhibition fits well with the Museum’s collection of works by Tiffany as well as its Frank Lloyd Wright Library with its leaded glass windows, and complements its extraordinary decorative arts collection.
Dr. Lee A. Vedder, director of collections and exhibitions, is site curator for this exhibition.
Organized by The Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, Long Island City, New York
Contributing support provided by Mr. and Mrs. W. Beall Fowler, The Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment, and Mr. and Mrs. Joseph B. Scheller
Sustaining support provided by S. Agentis & Mr. Rooter Plumbing; The Audrey and Bernard Berman Endowment Fund; Lutron Electronics Co., Inc.; and Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Wood.
Additional support provided by Caleb, Jade and Lily Farr, and The James Musselman Family.
Through January 6, 2008
“Alphonse Mucha: Art Nouveau Extraordinaire”
Rodale Gallery
Admission: $5 for non-members (in addition to Museum admission; include Tiffany by Design)
Moravian born Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) made his artistic pilgrimage to Paris in 1887. There he invented a lively new popular style of art that would seduce the famous actress Sarah Bernhardt, entrance Europe and America and offer a modern artistic identity for the new nation of Czechoslovakia that was reshaping his homeland. His sensuous, interlocking contours that are synonymous today with Art Nouveau, caressed and merged female and floral forms in a fresh, compelling way, and his commercial designs ultimately sold everything from books, magazines and theatre productions to champagne, chocolate and postage stamps. On view to accompany “Tiffany by Design,” this special loan exhibition features a selection of Mucha’s posters and textile designs and also highlights Art Nouveau decorative works from the Museum’s own collection.
Contributing support provided by The Leon C. and June W. Holt Endowment.
Sustaining support provided by The Audrey and Bernard Berman Endowment Fund.
Through February 3, 2008
“Picasso and Delaunay: The Book as Inspiration”
Payne Hurd Gallery
This exhibition features a rare portfolio of 13 prints by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), the result of a collaboration with legendary Parisian fine art publisher Ambroise Vollard to produce an illustrated edition of Honore de Balzac's novel, Le Chef-d'oeuvre inconnu, published in 1931. Accompanying these elegant works is a “simultaneous book” created by modernist designer Sonia Delaunay-Terk and poet Blaise Cendrars. Inspired by the colors of painters Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, Delaunay employed in these prints a stenciling technique called “pochoir,” which gives extraordinarily vivid colors to the work.
Dr. Jacqueline M. Atkins, the Kate Fowler Merle-Smith Curator of Textiles, is the curator for this exhibition, which features prints drawn from the Museum’s extensive collection of works on paper.
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