Expanding Horizons: Recent Additions to the Drawings Collection – April 17–July 3, 2010

This exhibition will celebrate the remarkable expansion of the Walters’ drawings collection resulting from recent gifts. In 2009, the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation presented to the museum 22 works on paper by a number of 19th-century French artists.

Henry Somm, The Third-Class Carriage
pen and ink on beige paper, gift of the Joseph F. McCrindle Collection, 2009 (37.2799)

McCrindle was a distinguished collector and philanthropist who founded the Transatlantic Review where he published such authors as W. H. Auden, Jean Cocteau, John Updike and Iris Murdoch. His interests in art ranged from Old Master paintings to 19th-century and early 20th-century drawings. The Walters is among 30 institutions to benefit from his generous foresight. Drawings from the McCrindle collection, by such artists as Delacroix, Meissonier, Doré and Gérôme, will be exhibited along with several other recent donations.

Hours are Wednesday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays

The Walters Art Museum
600 North Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21201

General museum information: 410-547-9000

www.thewalters.org

Portland, Maine – This summer the Portland Museum of Art will present Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place, on view June 5 through September 6, 2010. In honor of the centennial of Homer’s death in September, this exhibition will showcase 20 works from the Museum’s collection of Homer watercolors and oils on canvas. Based upon the extraordinary gift of 17 works by Charles Shipman Payson to the Museum in 1976, the exhibition will feature paintings understood to be national treasures, such as Artists Sketching in the White Mountains (1868) and Weatherbeaten (1894) as well as The Sharpshooter (1862), Homer’s first oil painting and the gift of Bernard and Barbro Osher. This will be the first time since 1988 that all of these works will be on view together in the Charles Shipman Payson Building, due to their sensitivity to light.

Winslow Homer (United States, 1836 – 1910), “Young Ducks”, 1897. Watercolor on paper, 14 x 21 inches. Portland Museum of Art, Bequest of Charles Shipman Payson

The relationship between Winslow Homer (1836-1910) and the Portland Museum of Art is long-standing and intimate. Homer exhibited at the Museum in his lifetime, and in the course of the 20th century, the Museum has become a symbolic home for the artist with the recent purchase of his studio. Long understood to be one of the most important painters in the history of American art, Winslow Homer lived in an age when the United States grew from a young country of small towns to modern industrial nation. Throughout his career as a graphic artist, genre painter, and chronicler of the rugged Maine coast, Homer provided his clients with images that helped create a sense of place in this era of rapid change and growth.

In 2006, the Museum purchased the Winslow Homer Studio at Prouts Neck, Maine, 12 miles from the Museum, and is currently involved in a major conservation and restoration project at that storied site. The Museum plans to open the Studio to the public in September of 2012.

Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place will also be the debut of a ground-breaking on-line resource for the study of Winslow Homer organized by the Museum and funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Humanities Council.

This website will provide searchable and zoomable access to 250 images, selected from the Harold and Peggy Osher Collection of Homer’s graphic art. A computer station will be also be available in the exhibition to allow visitors to view these works.

Winslow Homer and the Poetics of Place is organized by Chief Curator Thomas Denenberg and is accompanied by a catalogue written by Denenberg and designed by Portland-based graphic artist Daniel Pepice. The catalogue will be available in the Museum Store this summer.

Museum Information
The Portland Museum of Art is located at Seven Congress Square in downtown Portland. The Museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday. Memorial Day through Columbus Day, the Museum is open on Mondays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Museum admission is $10 for adults, $8 for seniors and students with I.D., $4 for youth ages 6 to 17, and children under 6 are free. The Museum is free on Friday evenings from 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. Museum Cafe and Store. For more information, call (207) 775-6148. Web site www.portlandmuseum.org

DURHAM, N.C. — There’s a robotic doctor making a house call to the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, on Saturday, March 20. The event Robot Rumble will feature several robotics companies including Intouch Health’s RP-7 ® telemedicine robot, presented by Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s Telestroke Network. This advanced medical technology robot is not only changing how physicians interact with patients, but the technology is helping to save lives. It allows critically ill patients at rural hospitals to receive care from specialists that may be hundreds of miles away, or in another county. This will be the RP-7’s first public appearance outside of a hospital setting in North Carolina.

Through the use of the internet, board certified vascular neurologists at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center’s Telestroke Network can use the robots for two-way live video and audio consultation to treat stroke patients at several of its partnering rural hospitals. By using a remote, doctors can maneuver the robot through the halls of a hospital to a patient’s room and can even zoom in on a patient, listen to his heart beat, examine x-rays, and also talk with the patient and the onsite medical team. The patient can even see the physician’s face, which is projected onto a monitor which serves as the head of the robot.

Currently Wake Forest Baptist Telestroke Network serves approximately 24 counties in western North Carolina and southern Virginia. It has three robots deployed in three hospitals including Lexington Memorial Hospital, Wilkes Regional Medical Center and Ashe Memorial Hospital. It is one of 250 hospitals internationally using the remote presence system to provide care to patients at distant hospitals.

Visitors to the Museum for the Robot Rumble event can also expect to see Carolina Combat Robots battle it out in robot hockey. Insight Robotics will be there with its new autonomous robot and will share information about its thrilling venture with Team Stellar to create a robot to land on the moon. SuperDroid Robots is showcasing its latest tactical surveillance robots for SWAT, military and law enforcement. Team Rex, the state champs for the North Carolina Lego FIRST competition as well as other Lego teams will be present showing off their skills, while IBM will demonstrate a variety of dancing robots. The hands-on activities that are planned for the general public throughout the day are included in the price of admission.

To learn more about Robot Rumble, visit www.LifeandScience.org or call 919.220.5429. The Museum of Life and Science is one of North Carolina’s top attractions. It is located at 433 W. Murray Avenue in Durham. Hours: Mon. through Sat. 10 a.m. – 5 p.m., Sun. 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.; closed on Monday from mid-September through mid-December

Cost: $12.50 for adults, $10.50 for seniors (age 65 and older) and active military with a valid ID, $9.50 for children ages 3 – 12 and free for under 3; group rates available – free parking
CONTACT: Taneka Bennett
919.220.5429 ext. 323
tanekab@ncmls.org

The first Beaulieu ‘Simply Ford’ event takes place on Sunday 2nd May and promises to be a great day out for all Ford enthusiasts. All Ford owners are invited to come to Beaulieu in their vehicle and become part of the event. Any model is welcome, from the new Focus RS to the old MK 1 or 2 Escort RS or even a Model T.

All Ford owners taking part have an opportunity to enter the Pride of Ownership competition with the winner receiving a £100 cash prize and a Beaulieu trophy. The winner will be one of twenty vehicles chosen by the judging panel to go on display in the Main Arena and take part in a cavalcade.

For entrants arriving on the day in their Ford and joining the event on the Beaulieu Parkland, individual prices are adult £10 and child £5. To book in advance or for more information about group or club entry and concession prices telephone 01590 612888. All other entries will be via Beaulieu main reception at normal admission prices.

Entry into the Beaulieu Parkland with your Ford is from 8.30am – the Brabazon Restaurant will be open for bacon rolls, cakes, teas and coffees.

Admission to the event includes entry to the whole Beaulieu attraction; the National Motor Museum and World of Top Gear, Palace House and gardens and Beaulieu Abbey.

beaulieu.co.uk/beaulieu/simplyford

DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum announces the acquisition of Reflection II, a sculpture by internationally acclaimed artist Antony Gormley. It is the first international acquisition for DeCordova. Reflection II is scheduled to be installed Monday, March 15, 2010.

Director Dennis Kois says, “the Gormley acquisition not only brings an incredible work of art into the collection, but signals the seriousness of our intent to build an exciting, engaging, and ambitious sculpture program. As the largest year-round sculpture park on the East coast, we are in a unique position to be a national leader in connecting the public with great sculpture. We couldn’t be more pleased.”

Antony Gormley Reflection II, 2008; Edition: Edition of 3 and 2 APs; Cast iron; 2 bodyforms: each 191 x 68 x 37 cm; Installation view, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2008; Photograph by Bob Goedewaagan, Rotterdam; © Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

DeCordova’s acquisition of Reflection II is the first in a series of major acquisitions made possible by the Hamilton James Sculpture Park Acquisition Fund in an effort to strengthen the Park’s collection of contemporary sculpture. The acquisition of Antony Gormley’s work moves DeCordova toward its goal of becoming one of the pre-eminent sculpture parks in the country within a decade.

Reflection II consists of two cast iron sculptures at approximately 6′3″ tall intended to stand on either side of a glass wall, appearing as a mirror image of itself. The piece will be installed with one figure inside and the other outside the Museum’s first floor lobby, so visitors may interact with the piece when they enter. This installation is symbolic of DeCordova’s commitment to presenting sculpture in the Park, as well as in the galleries. This sculpture, part of an edition of three with an artist’s proof, is the only one in a public collection.

Reflection II has been exhibited publicly only twice before—at the Contemporary Art Museum of Monterrey and the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City as part of a major Gormley survey exhibition.

According to DeCordova Senior Curator Nick Capasso, “Antony Gormley is among the world’s most significant contemporary artists, and has arguably done more to advance the tradition of the human figure in outdoor sculpture than any other artist since Auguste Rodin or Henry Moore. We are thrilled to display his Reflection II in our Sculpture Park which already includes important Modern and Contemporary works by George Rickey, Nam June Paik, Ursula von Rydinsvard, Sol LeWitt, William Tucker, and Jim Dine.”

The Gormley acquisition by DeCordova coincides with the artist’s first U.S. public art debut this spring in New York, March 26-August 15. Mad. Sq. Art, part of Madison Square Park Conservancy, will host Event Horizon, a first-ever installation of artwork inside and outside Madison Square Park. Thirty-one life-size cast iron sculptures will be displayed on the sidewalks and rooftops in New York City’s Flatiron District. Simultaneously, the Sean Kelly Gallery will host a solo show of Gormley’s work March 26-May 1.

About the artist
Antony Gormley, born in London in 1950, is one of the most celebrated contemporary British sculptors. He uses sculpture as a way to investigate the human body as a place of memory and transformation, often using casts of his own body, as he did in Reflection II. Gormley explores the relationship between self and other by installing his large-scale pieces in public spaces so people may interact with his work.
Gormley’s recent installation, One and Other is praised as one of the most important public art pieces of our time. Gormley transformed the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square into a platform for 2,400 Londoners to take the stage in one-hour increments. His other major public art works include Angel of the North and Another Place in the UK. His work has been exhibited worldwide with solo shows in museums and galleries in the UK such as the British Museum and Hayward Gallery. Other venues include the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. He has also participated in the Venice Biennale.

About the Hamilton James Sculpture Park Acquisition Fund
The Hamilton James Sculpture Park Acquisition Fund was created in August, 2009 with a gift of one million dollars. Given by Hamilton E. (Tony) James in honor of his late father, the grant also includes a potential future gift of $500K in matching funds for the acquisition or commission of other major works. The gift is the largest ever given specifically for the Sculpture Park. It recognizes the service and philanthropy of Hamilton R. James, long-time supporter and former Trustee to the Museum. His widow, Waleska James, continues to be involved as a Museum Guide and member of DeCordova’s Education Committee. Tony James is currently the President, Chief Operating Officer and Director of The Blackstone Group, L.P. in New York City.

About DeCordova
DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum was established in 1950 to educate as broad and diverse a public as possible about American contemporary art. DeCordova’s unique campus features both indoor and outdoor venues, allowing its visitors to celebrate and explore contemporary art across 35 acres. Inside, the Museum features a robust slate of rotating exhibitions and innovative interpretive programming. Outside, DeCordova’s Sculpture Park hosts more than 60 works, the majority of which are on loan to the Museum. DeCordova also offers the largest non-degree granting studio art program in New England. DeCordova Sculpture Park + Museum attracts more than 100,000 visitors from New England and tourists from around the world to its campus each year and enrolls more than 3,000 students of all ages in its studio art program.

General Information
DeCordova is open Tuesday through Sunday, from 10am to 5pm and on selected Monday holidays. General admission during Museum hours is $12 for adults; $8 for senior citizens, students, and youth ages 6-12. Children age 5 and under, Lincoln residents, and Active Duty Military Personnel and their dependents are admitted free. The Sculpture Park is open year-round during daylight hours. Guided public tours of the Museum’s main galleries take place every Thursday at 1pm and Sunday at 2pm. Tours of the Sculpture Park are given on Saturday and Sunday at 1pm from May to October. All guided tours are free with Campus admission. Visit www.decordova.org or call 781/259-8355 for further information.

The International Slavery Museum is continuing its celebrations of International Women’s Day with the unveiling of three new plaques on the Black Achievers Wall on Wednesday 10 March 2010.

The plaques will be unveiled during “Celebrating Women”, a special evening of guest speakers, dance performance and discussion at the museum.

The three new faces, who have earned their places through creativity, bravery and talent are:

Aretha Franklin – the multi-award winning American singer, songwriter and pianist commonly referred to as “The Queen of Soul”. Since 1961, Franklin has achieved a total of 45 “Top 40″ hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, which includes her anthemic version of the song “Respect”. Franklin also sang at the 2009 presidential inauguration ceremony for Barack Obama.

Andrea Levy – an award winning British author. Levy’s book “Small Island” won the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Whitbread Novel Award, the Orange Best of the Best, and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. In 2007, the bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave trade, “Small Island” formed the centre of the biggest mass-reading initiative that has ever taken place in Britain. An interview with Andrea Levy is included in the museum’s Freedom Wall.

Diane Nash – a key figure in the birth and development of America’s Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s she joined various political groups and dedicated herself to fighting against racial prejudice. President John F. Kennedy appointed her to the national committee that led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and she also worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) with Martin Luther King Jr. from 1961 to 1965. In 2009 Nash launched Liverpool’s Slavery Remembrance Day with a memorial lecture at the town hall.

Claire Benjamin, head of communities says:

“We feel privileged to be in a position to celebrate and recognise the achievements of Black women, nationally and internationally, through our involvement in International Women’s Day 2010. The Black Achievers Wall is perfectly placed to raise public consciousness of Black people and their achievements, known and otherwise. The women we have chosen to unveil represent achievement in many diverse ways, from political activism in its most extreme sense, through to literature and popular music”

The Black Achievers Wall in the Legacy gallery of the International Slavery Museum is a celebration of Black Achievers past and present. These people represent a real mix of backgrounds, eras and disciplines, from civil rights campaigners and politicians to rock stars and poets. Some are household names like Bob Marley. Others, such as the enslaved Gaspar Yanga, are virtually unknown to the general public, but all are inspirational.

International Slavery Museum
Albert Dock
Admission FREE
Open 10am-5pm
Information 0151 478 4499
Website liverpoolmuseums.org.uk

Pittsburgh, – Home is a word dense with personal and social meaning, and one that conjures images of everything from a stately mansion, to an apartment building, to a child’s treetop refuge. More than simply a house, a home is at once the focus of domestic aspirations and the outward expression of them, however modest or grand.

Tracy Myers, curator of the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, realized that the Center is home to a remarkably rich collection of material that, when examined and presented together, provides a survey of the evolution of home design from the 19th century to the present. Imagining Home: Selections from the Heinz Architectural Center—curated by Myers and on view at Carnegie Museum of Art open through May 30, 2010—presents more than 125 drawings, models, books, and games from the Heinz Architectural Center’s collection that reveal ways in which the home has been envisioned over the last 200 years. Imagining Home is the first exhibition ever mounted of the Center’s home design collection.

Among the subjects Myers explores are the range of styles in residential architecture, innovative construction technologies, interiors, company-built housing, and how the modern and contemporary house has evolved over time. Architectural models, drawings, and other objects from the collection are supplemented by photography, video, and two new works of installation art.

“While the need for shelter is fundamental and universal, the ways in which that need is met are enormously varied. Our attitudes toward, and relationships with, the places in which we live are wonderfully complex,” said Myers. “The exhibition Imagining Home encourages us to contemplate the question of what ‘home’ means to each of us, and how our answers influence the ways in which we fashion our personal environments.”

Imagining Home reviews residential typologies and styles since the 19th century, primarily in the United States. The exhibition explores, through presentation of significant works in the Heinz Architectural Center’s collection, how the house has served as a laboratory for architectural experimentation in the 20th and 21st centuries. These key works include drawings or models of projects by innovators like Kadambari Baxi and Reinhold Martin, Winka Dubbeldam, estudio teddy cruz, Steven Holl, William Lescaze, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Samuel Mockbee, and Richard Neutra.

The exhibition includes a group of 15 plaster models of houses from around the world that were produced by the Museum Extension Project, a Depression-era work-relief program that originated in Pennsylvania. The program created a wide variety of visual materials for distribution to the public schools. The architectural models produced by the program raise questions about who decided which houses were considered worthy of reproduction, and what kinds of assumptions and messages the models reflect. The Center’s collection of MEP models was donated by Carnegie Museum of Natural History, which received them from an anonymous donor in 1960.

Drawing on the Heinz Architectural Center’s collection of trade catalogues and promotional books, Imagining Home also looks at innovative construction strategies devised by several building materials manufacturers, such as the National Fire Proofing Company and the Aladdin Company, producer of “kit homes.”

Imagining Home also features a section on the Draper Company, a 19th-century manufacturer of equipment for the textile industry, which planned an entire town for its workers in Hopedale, Massachusetts. Unlike many company towns of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Draper Company’s housing was designed not by building contractors but by architects, who offered nearly 20 different home designs.

The influence of house-design competitions sponsored by materials manufacturers and architectural journals is also examined. Winning designs from these competitions were published and distributed nationwide, providing architect-designed plans to homeowners who might not otherwise have had access to them and bringing national attention to architects who otherwise might have had no such platform for their work.

Imagining Home is rounded out by a section on interiors that includes two newly created installations. The first is a habitable sculpture of layered draperies created for the exhibition by Sheila Klein. The second is a project by local artist Wendy Osher, who employs embroidery and digital photography to investigate the seductive convenience of prepared foods and the way in which they erode the symbolic value of home cooking and dining. Four interior views by American photographer Sarah Malakoff pointedly speak to the central objective of the exhibition: provoking thought on the places we call home. Shot between 2003 and 2008, the photographs document exceptional and eccentric home interiors, including a nautically themed basement wet bar designed to mimic the prow of an actual boat, and a dining area furnished with a diner booth in lieu of a conventional table and chairs.

About the Heinz Architectural Center
The Heinz Center, a gift of the Drue Heinz Foundation, comprises one of the most extensive facilities devoted to architecture in an American art museum. The Center’s collection focuses on drawings and models, most from the 19th and 20th centuries. Information about, and images of, many of the Center’s objects can be accessed through the museum’s online collection search. The Center has its own galleries and has been displaying intriguing and powerful works of art related to the world of architecture since it opened to the public in 1993.

www.cmoa.org