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"Envisioning New England is a compelling advertisement for the Fitchburg Art Museum, the Art Complex Museum, the Florence Griswold Museum, and the others, offering glimpses of their 'outstanding art collections and strong and enduring tie[s] to the local community'.”—Connecticut History
A lavish celebration of infrequently seen New England works by beloved American artists.
The White Mountains, Provincetown, Old Lyme, Newport, and Monhegan Island: these names evoke diverse images of New England—images interpreted by such American artists as Martin Johnson Heade, Eastman Johnson, Frank Benson, Willard Metcalf, George Bellows, and Rockwell Kent. The region’s mountains, valleys, salt marshes, and harbors, as well as its villages, cities, and people inspired artists’ representations in varied styles—for instance, Fitz Hugh Lane’s luminist landscapes, Childe Hassam’s impressionist seascapes, John Marin’s abstractions, and Edward Hopper’s realist works. Envisioning New England explores the period from 1850 to 1950 and looks at both the role of American artists in New England and the origins of the member institutions of the Consortium of New England Community Art Museums, their shared histories, and how they reflect the arts of New England. The Consortium is comprised of fourteen New England cultural institutions, renowned and lesser-known, in five states. The Art Complex Museum, Bennington Museum, Cape Museum of Fine Arts, Danforth Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Fitchburg Art Museum, Florence Griswold Museum, Fruitlands Museums, Fuller Museum of Art, Lyman Allyn Art Museum, Mattatuck Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, Newport Art Museum and Art Association, and Provincetown Art Association and Museum have banded together to mount a traveling exhibition including several of each member's treasured paintings. Envisioning New England presents these prized works, complemented by essays by Nancy Whipple Grinnell, Curator, Newport Art Museum; Jack Becker, Director, Cheekwood Museum of Art; and Stephanie Upton, Executive Director, Consortium of New England Community Art Museums.
"The 53 diverse works of art from 1850 to 1950 are reproduced in full color, 46 of them in large format, and they include examples by well-known artists as well as some less familiar names."—Maine Antique Digest
TABLE OF CONTENTS
FROM THE BOOK “How one distinguishes between regional art and history museums and institutions with larger, more encyclopedic collections has never been clear . . . [W]e continue to make a distinction between the two, and we often turn to regional museums to provide information that we can’t get from larger institutions . . . The organizers of this project, to their credit, have sought to preserve the finely textured regional nuance embodied in each of these works while still linking them to major trends in American Art.” -- From the Introduction
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PAMELA J. BELANGER is Independent Art Historian, author of Inventing Acadia (1999) and Maine in America (1999), and editor of Capturing Nureyev (2002).
WILLIAM H. TRUETTNER is Senior Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum.
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