The McKissick Museum presents Walter Inglis Anderson: Everything I See is New and Strange, exhibition open through May 7, 2011.
Walter Inglis Anderson’s distinctive and timeless works of the plants, animals, and people of the Mississippi Gulf Coast have placed him among the finest American painters of the 20th century. Everything I See Is New and Strange celebrates Anderson’s perspective as an artist, naturalist, and environmentalist. Through the works viewers are transported back fifty plus years to a simpler time before the development of casinos and off-shore drilling.
Anderson spent most of his life exploring the wonders of nature. He literally absorbed the ambiance of the water, marshes, and woods surrounding him. His output was staggering. He worked in oil, watercolor, pen and ink, and pencil. He sculpted in wood, crafted furniture, carved and decorated pottery, and cut large linoleum blocks for print making. He also produced stained glass and hooked rugs. For Anderson, art was not a product but a process, a means of experiencing the world. His drawing, prints, and watercolors celebrated the natural rhythms of the weather, the seasons, the sea, and the cycles of plants, flowers, and animals. His abiding interest in nature combined with his strong sense of design and color, his avid intellectual curiosity, and his bold imagination have made his works distinctive and timeless.
Recognition was meager during Anderson’s lifetime. But, since his death in 1965, his art has been the subject of numerous books, films, and articles. Major retrospective exhibits at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, the Brooks Museum in Memphis, and the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Museum have received tremendous critical acclaim.
In 1991, the Walter Anderson Museum of Art was established to archive and exhibit Anderson’s monumental achievements. It also serves as a center from which Anderson’s genius emanates to an ever-broadening circle of artists, art-lovers, scholars, scientists, naturalists, and environmentalists. Everything I See Is New and Strange: A Retrospective Exhibition of Walter Inglis Anderson was developed by the Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and is partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts’ American Masterpieces program.
Image: Walter Inglis Anderson, McKissick Museum
McKissick Museum, College of Arts and Sciences, University of South Carolina 816 Bull Street, Columbia, South Carolina, 29208 phone 803-777-7251 / fax 803-777-2829
www.cas.sc.edu/mcks