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 Fenimore Art Museum
Calendar of Events, Cooperstown, N.Y.
One of
the nation's premier art institutions, the Fenimore Art Museum is home
to an exceptionally rich collection of American folk art and American
Indian art as well as important holdings in American decorative arts,
photography, and twentieth-century art. Founded in 1945 in Cooperstown,
New York, the museum is part of the New York State Historical
Association (NYSHA), founded in 1899. The museum's renowned Eugene and
Clare Thaw Collection, housed in the American Indian Wing, comprises
more than 800 significant art objects, representing a broad scope of
North American cultures. The collections of folk and American art
include seminal works by Grandma Moses, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Cole,
William Sidney Mount, Benjamin West, and John H. I. Browere. The museum
offers a range of interactive educational programming for children,
families, and adults, including lectures and workshops for museum
visitors and distance learning instruction for classrooms nationwide.
The museum further explores and examines our cultural history by
organizing and hosting nationally touring art and history exhibitions,
including Grandma Moses: Grandmother to the Nation;
Treasures from Olana: The Landscapes of Frederic Edwin Church;
A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of
John Brewster, Jr.; Winslow Homer: Masterworks from
the Adirondacks; and Ralph
Fasanella's America.
The
Fenimore Art Museum is located on 5798 State Hwy. 80, Lake Road, in
Cooperstown. The museum's Fenimore Café, overlooking beautiful Otsego
Lake, features wonderful views and a tranquil setting amid the terraced
gardens. The Museum Shop offers fine jewelry, art reproductions, and a
wide selection of publications on folk art, history, and Native
American art. Museum admission is $11 for adults, $9.50 for visitors
age 65 and over, and $5 for children age 7 to 12; children 6 and under
and NYSHA members are admitted free. Reduced price combination
admission tickets that include The Farmers' Museum and The National
Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum are also available. The museum is open
from April 1 through December 30. For museum hours or general
information, please call 1-888-547-1450 or visit www.fenimoreartmuseum.org. Fenimore Art Museum’s 2008 Exhibition Season will Surprise, Inspire and Inform
Cooperstown,
N.Y., March 25, 2008—Delve into the Arts & Crafts movement, explore
Otsego County through the lenses of Richard Walker and Smith and
Telfer, and discover the link between Jewish visual culture and the
American carousel industry in the 2008 exhibition season at the
Fenimore Art Museum.
From April 1 through May 12, the
museum will be open Tuesday through Sunday, from 10 am to 4 pm, closed
on Mondays. Summer hours begin on May 13 and continue through
Columbus Day, October 13. During the summer season, the museum is open
seven days a week from 10 am to 5 pm.
Exhibition highlights include:
Gustav Stickley: The Enlightened Home
April 1- August 10, 2008
The
Fenimore Art Museum presents an exhibition on the furniture of
celebrated turn-of-the-century designer and manufacturer and leading
spokesman for the American Arts and Crafts movement, Gustav Stickley.
Gustav Stickley: The Enlightened Home features 40 pieces of original
Stickley furniture and decorative objects drawn from The Stickley
Museum, Fayetteville, N.Y.; Dalton’s American Decorative Arts,
Syracuse, N.Y.; The Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms, Morris Plains,
N.J. and private collections.
The exhibition explores
Stickley’s well-designed and carefully crafted furniture within the
context of his philosophical contribution to the American Arts and
Crafts movement. Inspired by the ideas of British Arts and Crafts
philosopher William Morris, who advocated a return to fine
craftsmanship, honest design, and dignity of labor, Stickley generated
his own “Craftsman” philosophy, which catapulted him to the forefront
of the American Arts and Crafts movement. Rejecting the superfluous
ornamentation characteristic of Victorian homes, Stickley championed
functional homes whose beauty derived from simplicity and harmony.
Gustav
Stickley: The Enlightened Home, which includes two period rooms, a 1904
living room and a 1907 dining room, highlights several pieces from
Stickley’s rich body of work and illustrates how Stickley redefined the
American home with his Arts and Crafts-inspired items. Stickley’s
philosophy of building in harmony with the environment by using natural
materials was fully realized in his home, Craftsman Farms in Morris
Plains, New Jersey. His functional approach to design was a departure
from the Victorian era’s dark and overly ornamental interiors.
Stickley’s unornamented, clean-lined furniture was exemplified
throughout the interior and exterior design of his home. While
individual pieces of furniture used construction as decoration,
embodied simplicity, and prioritized utility, these tenets were also
implemented on a much grander scale within the home.
Bits of Home
April 1 – December 31
Visitors
to the Fenimore Art Museum have long enjoyed the extraordinary
collections of fine art, folk art, and American Indian art held by the
New York State Historical Association (NYSHA). Less well known are the
thousands of historical artifacts in the collections storage areas.
Bits of Home is a new exhibition that is intended to acquaint visitors
with these historical collections by featuring a selection of more than
30 artifacts from NYSHA and The Farmers’ Museum’s extensive collections
of domestic life in nineteenth-century New York. As a theme-based
gallery, this exhibition allows the visitor to explore the function and
design of everything from household textiles to toys and games in a
setting evocative of the environment for which they were originally
made.
Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel
May 24 – September 1, 2008
From
gilded lions to high-stepping horses, the sacred to the secular, and
the Old World to the New, this exhibition traces, for the first time,
the journey of Jewish woodcarvers and paper cut artists from Eastern
and Central Europe to America. Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The
Synagogue to the Carousel, organized by the American Folk Art Museum,
New York, highlights the unsung role these artisans played in
establishing a distinct Jewish culture in communities throughout the
United States and provides a surprising revelation of the link that was
forged between the immigrant Jewish woodcarvers and the American
carousel industry. The exhibition brings together extraordinary
examples of majestic synagogue carvings—gilded lions, Decalogues,
crowns and eagles as well as intricate paper cuts—juxtaposed against
dynamic carousel figures created for Brooklyn’s great amusement park,
Coney Island, and others. Featuring 100 rarely exhibited artworks,
drawn from private and public collections in the United States, Eastern
Europe and Israel, the exhibition tells the story of this fascinating
aspect of Jewish and American visual culture.
Organized
by Guest Curator Murray Zimiles and coordinated by the American Folk
Art Museum’s Senior Curator Stacy C. Hollander, the exhibition is
accompanied by a fully illustrated 192-page book, Gilded Lions And
Jeweled Horses: The Synagogue to the Carousel, co-published by the
American Folk Art Museum with Brandeis University Press, an imprint of
the University Press of New England. In addition, please visit the
exhibition website at gildedlions.org, which was conceptualized by
George Blumenthal and funded by The Center for Online Judaic Studies,
Inc.
Major support for the exhibition and catalogue was
provided by Michael Steinhardt; Kekst and Company; the David Berg
Foundation; the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation; the Smart Family
Foundation; the Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation, Allentown,
Pennsylvania; the Betty and John A. Levin Fund; the Robert Lehman
Foundation; the Nathan Cummings Foundation; the National Endowment for
the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts; and the New York
Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment
for the Humanities.
Through the Eyes of Others: African Americans and Identity in American Art
August 23– December 31, 2008
The
images of African Americans at the Fenimore Art Museum offer insights
into the ways that Americans in the past viewed one another; how
artistic representations of black people created and reinforced popular
attitudes; and how these attitudes continue to affect us today. This is
not simply a story for African Americans, but for all of us, because
the issues represented in this exhibition— identity, self-portrayal,
survival, resistance, and stereotyping—are issues that relate to each
individual who has ever wondered about their own identity and to every
group that has entered this country.
This exhibition
is curated by Gretchen Sullivan Sorin, Director of The Cooperstown
Graduate Program and has been made possible by a generous grant from
the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency.
Earl Cunningham’s America
September 27 – December 31, 2008
Earl
Cunningham’s America examines the paintings of Earl Cunningham
(1893-1977), one of the premier folk artists of the 20th century. This
retrospective presents the artist as a folk modernist who used the flat
space and brilliant color typical of Matisse and Van Gogh to create
sophisticated compositions with complex meanings about the nature of
American life. The exhibition features 50 of more than 400 canvasses
Cunningham painted during his life. His imaginary landscapes are
marvels of the unexpected and the unlikely. Pink flamingoes dot the
shoreline of the Maine coast, New England cottages sit at the edge of
Florida swamps and Seminole Indians wear feathered headdresses.
Earl
Cunningham’s America is organized by the Smithsonian American Art
Museum. The exhibition will travel to the American Folk Art Museum in
New York City (March 4, 2008 – August 31, 2008) and the Mennello Museum
of American Art in Orlando, Fla. (March 6, 2009 – August 2, 2009).
The
exhibition is made possible by generous support from Darden Restaurants
Foundation; the Elizabeth Morse Genius Foundation; the Arts and
Cultural Affairs Office of Orange County, Florida; CNL Financial Group;
Bright House Networks; Lockheed Martin; and Friends of The Mennello
Museum of American Art. The exhibition’s tour is supported in part by
the C. F. Foundation, Atlanta.
Remembering Cooperstown: Photographs by Smith and Telfer
April 1 – May 11 & September 20 – December 31
This
exhibition, culled from the museum’s permanent collection, features
familiar and rarely seen photographs drawn from the Smith and Telfer
Photographic Collection. The spring and fall exhibits will each feature
a different selection of photography showcasing the breadth of the
collection. Cooperstown photographers ‘Wash” Smith and “Putt” Telfer
compiled an exceptional record of Cooperstown’s people and places for
almost a century. The Smith and Telfer Photograph Collection, donated
to the museum in 1951, numbers nearly 55,000 glass plate negatives.
Smith and Telfer’s legacy is rich, and includes not only standard
studio work, but also a vast number of images of people and activities
recorded outside of the studio. Their familiarity with Cooperstown’s
people and places gave their images a natural, unposed quality, which
captures the spirit and sensibility of small town life. Through their
lens Cooperstown is remembered as the quintessential American rural
village.
About the Fenimore Art Museum
One of the nation’s
premier art institutions, the Fenimore Art Museum is home to an
exceptionally rich collection of American folk art and American Indian
art as well as important holdings in American decorative arts,
photography, and twentieth-century art. Founded in 1945 in Cooperstown,
New York, the museum is part of the New York State Historical
Association (NYSHA), founded in 1899. The museum’s renowned Eugene and
Clare Thaw Collection, housed in the American Indian Wing, is a
masterpiece collection of more than 800 art objects, representing a
broad scope of North American cultures. The collections of folk and
American art include seminal works by Grandma Moses, Gilbert Stuart,
Thomas Cole, William Sidney Mount, Benjamin West, and John H. I.
Browere. The museum offers a range of interactive educational
programming for children, families, and adults, including lectures and
workshops for museum visitors and distance learning instruction for
classrooms nationwide.
The Fenimore Art Museum is
located on 5798 State Hwy. 80, Lake Road, in Cooperstown. The museum’s
Fenimore Café, overlooking beautiful Otsego Lake, features wonderful
views and a tranquil setting amid the terraced gardens. The Museum Shop
offers fine jewelry, art reproductions, and a wide selection of
publications on folk art, history, and Native American art. Museum
admission is $11 for adults, $9.50 for visitors age 65 and over, and $5
for children age 7 to 12; children 6 and under and NYSHA members are
admitted free. Reduced price combination admission tickets that include
The Farmers’ Museum and The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum
are also available. The museum is open from April 1 through December
31; closed January through March, except for special events and school
groups. For museum hours or general information, please call
1-888-547-1450 or visit www.fenimoreartmuseum.org.
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