Exhibits

Exhibit: Black Patriots at the Battles of Saratoga

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In recognition of Black History Month, Saratoga National Historical Park will offer a temporary exhibit from February 1 through February 28 called “Agrippa Hull – Ordinary Soldier, Extraordinary Man” and on Sunday, February 13 at 1:30pm in the visitor center, Ranger Eric Schnitzer will present a special program about black soldiers at Saratoga.

In the American Revolution, about 5 percent of the Continental Soldiers were of African descent. They fought shoulder to shoulder with white soldiers—but an integrated army would not occur again until the Korean War. That’s just scratching the surface of the information to be presented by Park Ranger Eric Schnitzer as he discusses evidence from memoirs, journals, muster rolls, and pay lists that documents
the roles of free and enslaved African Americans who fought in “the most important battle of the last 1000 years.”

Agrippa Hull, a black Revolutionary War soldier who served in the 1777 Battles of Saratoga, is the focus of a special exhibit titled “Agrippa Hull: ordinary soldier, extraordinary man.” Copies of Hull’s 1777 company muster roll, pension claims, portrait, and photographs of him and his wife Peggy will be on display in the visitor center in February.

Saratoga National Historical Park is located between Rt. 4 and Rt. 32 in the Town of Stillwater, NY. For more information, please contact the visitor center by calling 518-664-9821 ext. 224 or check their website.

Illustration: Portrait of Agrippa Hull, a freeborn black man and Revolutionary War veteran who lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The portrait hangs in the historical room of the town library. Hull was 85 years old when his image was captured. Painted in oil in 1848 by an unknown artist, the portrait is a copy of a daguerreotype done by Anson Clark in 1844. Image courtesy Stockbridge Library Association Historical Collection.

Albany Institute to Debut Graphic Design Exhibit

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On Saturday, February 5, 2011, the Albany Institute of History & Art will open a new exhibition entitled &#8220Graphic Design-Get the Message!&#8221 The exhibition, which will run through June 5, 2011, replaces the historic exhibit, Hudson River Panorama: 400 Years of History, Art, and Culture, which was on display from February 2009 until January 2, 2011.

Graphic design, the carefully planned arrangement of visual images and printed text, can convey both meaning and message. As they tempt consumers, communicate political messages, and reflect social concerns, these boldly crafted, iconic images have been among mankind’s most effective forms of communication.

In the late 18th century the use of printed text and images to deliver messages and ideas proliferated as literacy rates began to rise, paper became more available, and printing technologies improved. The explosive use of advertising in the 19th and 20th centuries also stimulated the use of graphic design to convey messages. Manufacturers and merchants, buoyed by industrial and commercial growth, realized the need to advertise products in order to dominate an increasingly competitive marketplace. By the early 20th century, professionalization of the graphic designer resulted from growing demands for well-conceived, well-designed visual messages. No longer a static medium, graphic design in the 21st century has become a sophisticated means of communication, due in large part to the Internet, which has transformed texts and images through movement and interactivity. Technology once again has been a driving force for change.

&#8220Graphic Design—Get the Message!&#8221 looks at the field from four themed areas: typography and early printing- commerce and graphic design- political and social messages- and the creative process. Through the use of posters, broadsides, package designs, paintings, decorative arts, historical photographs, and computer interactives, these four themes will address topics such as technology and innovation- manufacturing and commercial growth- changing aesthetics- typography- designers and the growth of the design profession- and social and political expression in graphic work. Graphic designs, objects, and the history of design work from the Albany area will be used to address broader issues of national and international significance. As it examines technological, commercial, aesthetic, and social factors, Graphic Design—Get the Message! will reveal not only how the field has changed over the years, but also how it has changed us. Throughout its run, the exhibition will also feature a number of lectures and demonstrations by graphic designers and scholars in the field.

On Saturday, March 5, 2011, the Albany Institute of History & Art will open a separate, but complementary exhibition entitled, &#8220Hajo: An Artist’s Journey.&#8221 Hans-Joachim Richard Christoph (1903–1992), known familiarly as Hajo, lived through most of the 20th century and witnessed firsthand its high points and low moments. Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1903, he trained at the Reimann Schule following World War I, a time of artistic experiment and expression. When he immigrated to the United States in 1925, he brought training and skill that served him well as a graphic designer, first at the New York office of Lucien Bernhard and later at the Fort Orange Paper Company in Castleton, New York. Hajo created fresh, bold designs for Kenwood Mills, the Embossing Company, and other manufacturers, all meant to captivate and entice modern American consumers. In his spare time Hajo painted quiet landscapes that reflect the peaceful, small-town charms of the upper Hudson Valley. &#8220Hajo: An Artist’s Journey,&#8221 tells the story of an immigrant artist, his journey from Europe to the Hudson Valley, and his artistic explorations. Sketchbooks, drawings, paintings, graphic designs, and photographs span the breadth of Hajo’s world and the art he created to capture it.

Three recently opened exhibitions are also now on view:

Art and Nature: The Hudson River School Paintings
Through August 2011

The Albany Institute of History & Art has been collecting materials related to the Hudson River School artists for more than 150 years. The museum’s collection includes 60 paintings, sketchbooks, photographs, paint boxes, and manuscript materials related to all of the major artists associated with this movement, recognized as the first school of American painting. This exhibition includes 25 paintings and complements an additional 20 works in an adjacent gallery.

Curator’s Choice: Recent Acquisitions
Through June 5, 2011

The Albany Institute of History & Art will highlight a number of its latest acquisitions in the museum’s Entry Gallery. Among the items to be displayed are two pieces of Chinese ceramics that Albany artist Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932) depicted in his 1878 painting, Interior of the Learned House, 298 State Street, Albany. Curator’s Choice: Recent Acquisitions also includes a spectacular 12-piece silver serving set presented to Thomas Schuyler (1811–1866) in January 1859. The silver and related materials will be on view, along with a history of the towboat company started by Schuyler’s father, Captain Samuel Schuyler (1781–1842), who was one of Albany’s most successful businessmen of African heritage. The exhibit also features the archive of the Women’s Seal and Stamp Club of Albany, including a framed portrait the club’s logo, “Elm Tree Corner,” made entirely of clipped stamps and the painting, Crabapple (Fall), by Jeri Eisenberg of East Greenbush, New York, the Albany Institute Purchase Prize winner from the 2010 Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region competition.

Bill Sullivan: A Landscape Artist Remembered
Through February 27, 2011

The Hudson Valley and the art world lost one of their finest artists last fall when Bill Sullivan passed away at the age of 68. In addition to the Albany Institute of History & Art, Sullivan’s works are part of collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library. His work has been displayed in countless group exhibitions. To honor Sullivan’s life and work, the museum will present five major canvases from its collection, including a recently promised painting from Albert B. Roberts entitled, View of Albany from Route 9J.

Hudson River School Focus of Major Travelling Exhibit

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Forty-five paintings from the collection of the New-York Historical Society will tour the United States in 2011 and 2012 in the major traveling exhibition Nature and the American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School. Though very seldom loaned, these iconic works of 19th-century landscape painting will now be circulated to four museums throughout the country as part of the Historical Society’s traveling exhibitions program Sharing a National Treasure.

Nature and the American Vision will allow audiences to enjoy and study superb examples of the Historical Society’s collection of Hudson River School paintings while the galleries of the N-YHS are closed for a transformative $65 million renovation project.

The Historical Society’s rich holdings of American art date back to the second half of the 19th century, when the museum acquired, through generous donation, the extensive painting collections formed by pioneering New York art patron Luman Reed (1787-1836). By 1944, the Society was also home to the extraordinary collection of Hudson River School art amassed by Robert Leighton Stuart (1806-1882), another of New York’s prominent 19th-century art patrons. Works once belonging to these pioneering American collectors form the core of the traveling exhibition.

&#8220Our mission for the Sharing a National Treasure program is to ensure that audiences throughout the United States have access to the great artworks and priceless artifacts of the New-York Historical Society, New York City’s first museum and one of the nation’s oldest collecting institutions,&#8221 stated Louise Mirrer, President and CEO. &#8220Nowhere is this mission more vital than in the traveling exhibition Nature and the American Vision. This tour keeps in public view some of the most important works of Thomas Cole, Frederic Church, Albert Bierstadt, John Kensett, Jasper Cropsey, Asher B. Durand, George Inness and many others: the first artists to have created a consciously American tradition of painting.&#8221

The Hudson River School emerged during the second quarter of the 19th century in New York City. There, a loosely knit group of artists and writers forged the first self-consciously American landscape vision and literary voice. That American vision—still widely influential today—was grounded in a view of the natural world as a source of spiritual renewal and an expression of national identity. This vision was first expressed through the magnificent scenery of the Hudson River Valley region, including the Catskills, which was accessible to writers, artists and sightseers via traffic on the great river that gave the school its name.

The exhibition tells this story in four thematic sections. Within these broad groupings, the paintings show how American artists embodied powerful ideas about nature, culture and history—including the belief that a special providence was manifest to Americans in the continent’s sublime landscape.

The American Grand Tour features paintings of the Catskill, Adirondack, and White Mountain regions celebrated for their scenic beauty and historic sites, as well as views of Lake George, Niagara Falls and the New England countryside. These were the destinations that most powerfully attracted both artists and travelers. The American Grand Tour also includes paintings that memorialize the Hudson River itself as the gateway to the touring destinations and primary sketching grounds for American landscape painters.

American Artists A-Field includes works by Hudson River School artists who after 1850 sought inspiration further from home. The paintings of Frederic Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill and Martin Johnson Heade show how these globe-trotting painters embraced the role of artist-explorer and thrilled audiences with images of the landscape wonders of such far-flung places as the American frontier, Yosemite Valley and South America.

Dreams of Arcadia: Americans in Italy features wonderful paintings by Cole, Cropsey, Sanford R. Gifford, and others celebrating Italy as the center of the Old World and the principal destination for Americans on the European Grand Tour. Viewed as the storehouse of Western culture, Italy was a living laboratory of the past, with its cities, galleries, and countryside offering a survey of the artistic heritage from antiquity, as well as a striking contrast to the wilderness vistas of North America portrayed by these same artists.

In the final section of the exhibition, Grand Landscape Narratives, all of these ideas converge in Thomas Cole’s five-painting series The Course of Empire (c. 1834-36), imagining the rise of a great civilization from an unspoiled landscape, and the ultimate decay of that civilization into ruins scattered in the same wilderness. These celebrated paintings explore the tension between Americans’ deep veneration of the wilderness and their equally ardent celebration of progress, recapitulating the larger story told in Nature and the American Vision.

Nature and the American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School will travel to The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, TX (February 26- June 19, 2011)- the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA (July 30 – November 6, 2011)- the Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC (November 17, 2011 – April 1, 2012)- and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR (May – August, 2012). The paintings will then return to their renovated home.

The ideas and beliefs explored in the exhibition are also investigated in an award-winning 224-page catalogue by Linda S. Ferber: The Hudson River School: Nature and the American Vision, published by Skira Rizzoli Publications, Inc. Featuring 150 full-color illustrations of works from the acclaimed collection of the New-York Historical Society, the catalogue places the splendid paintings in the traveling exhibition into a broad historical and cultural context. Dr. Ferber received the 2010 Henry Allen Moe Prize for Catalogues of Distinction in the Arts from the New York State Historical Association for the volume.

Still Life Exhibition Opens at The Hyde Museum

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On January 29, the The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls opens its latest exhibition &#8211 Objects of Wonder and Delight: Four Centuries of Still Life from the Norton Museum of Art.

The show brings together fifty-one works of art from the collection of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida. The subject matter is still life and the exhibition at The Hyde comprises works in a variety of media including painting, watercolor, collage, sculpture, ceramics, glass, and textiles.

Spanning four centuries, from the Ming dynasty of China to the early twenty-first century, this array of images and objects includes all of the major sub-genres of still life such as tabletop arrangements, flowers, and fruits and vegetables. Arranged thematically, the exhibition illustrates both the diversity and the longevity of the still-life tradition in China, Europe, and the United States.

The exhibition, which runs through April 21, 2011, features some of the most famous artists in Western art history, such as Marc Chagall, Gustave Courbet, William Harnett, Robert Mapplethorpe, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Yinka Shonibare, and Andy Warhol.

At 2:30 pm on January 29th, Dr. Roger Ward, chief curator of the Norton Museum of Art and organizer of the exhibition, Objects of Wonder and Delight, will provide a lively presentation entitled Birds Pecking at Grapes and Other Shiny Objects: Four Centuries of Still Life from the Norton Museum. The talk will be a fast-paced account of the evolution of still-life painting in Europe and America, from Antiquity to the present, and how the diverse collection for which he is responsible has been deployed to create this exhibition.

The exhibition was organized by the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.

Illustration: Marsden Hartley (American, 1877–1943): Flounders and Blue Fish, 1942. Oil on rag board. Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida. Bequest of R.H. Norton.

Brooklyn Museum Acquires Unusual 18th-Cent Painting

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The Brooklyn Museum has acquired, by purchase from the London Gallery Robilant + Voena, Agostino Brunias’s (1730-1796) painting &#8220Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape,&#8221 (circa 1764-96), a portrait of the eighteenth-century mixed-race colonial elite of the island of Dominica in the West Indies. Brunias, a London-based Italian painter, left England at the height of his career to chronicle Dominica, then one of Britain’s newest colonies in the Lesser Antilles.

The painting depicts two richly dressed mixed race women, one of whom was possibly the wife of the artist’s patron. They are shown accompanied by their mother and their children, along with eight African servants, as they walk on the grounds of a sugar plantation, one of the agricultural estates that were Dominica’s chief source of wealth. Brunias documents colonial women of color as privileged and prosperous. The two wealthy sisters are distinguished from their mother and servants by their fitted European dresses.

The painting is a Caribbean version of contemporaneous English works made popular by artists such as William Hogarth and Thomas Gainsborough, whose art often depicts the landed gentry engaged in leisurely pursuits. Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape and other Caribbean paintings by Brunias, celebrate the diversity of European, Caribbean, and African influences in the region.

Although Brunias was originally commissioned to promote upper-class plantation life, his works soon assumed a more subversive, political role throughout the Caribbean as endorsements of a free, anti-slavery society, exposing the artificialities of racial hierarchies in the West Indies. Among his supporters was Haiti’s liberator Francois-Dominique Toussaint L’Ouverture, who wore on his waistcoat eighteen buttons decorated with reproductions of Brunias’s paintings.

&#8220Free Women of Color with Their Children and Servants in a Landscape&#8221 will go on view on March 7, 2011 in the European galleries on the portraiture wall between contemporaneous female Spanish colonial and French subjects.

The painting will also be featured in an upcoming Spanish colonial exhibition organized by Rich Aste, Curator of European Art, which is tentatively slated for 2013. Building on the Brooklyn exhibition Converging Cultures: Art & Identity in Spanish America (1996), the upcoming presentation will focus on private art collecting in the colonial Andes and Mexico. Through more than two hundred paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, and decorative arts from Brooklyn’s European and Spanish and British colonial collections, visitors will get a rare glimpse of the private homes of the colonial elite, who acquired and commissioned sacred and profane works of art as signifiers of their faith, wealth, and status.

Image: Agostino Brunias (Italian, ca. 1730-1796), &#8220Free Women of Color with their Children and Servants in a Landscape,&#8221 ca. 1764-1796, Oil on canvas, 2010.59, Gift of Mrs. Carll H. de Silver in memory of her husband, and gift of George S. Hellman, by exchange.

Exhibit: African American Womens Literary Societies

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&#8220They Kept Their Word: African American Women’s Literary Societies and Their Legacy&#8221 is a fascinating new exhibit that has opened at the Buffalo & Erie County Historical Society. The exhibit traces the development and influence of African Americans in Buffalo, particularly with regard to women’s efforts to improve their economic and intellectual conditions.

The remarkable growth and accomplishments that took place in the Buffalo area during the 1830s and 1840s were due to many factors, including expansion of communication through transportation, newspapers, pamphlets, study groups, and lecture series.


Photo: Mary Church Terrell was an influential African American woman in Buffalo in the 1900s. Photo provided.

Huntington Painting Returns to Historic Jay Estate

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The Jay Heritage Center (JHC) celebrated the recent anniversary of John Jay’s birthday on December 12 with news of an extraordinary gift from one of his descendants. In celebration of the continued restoration of the 1838 Jay House in Rye, Ada Hastings of Great Barrington, Massachusetts and her family magnanimously donated a portrait of John Jay’s great granddaughter that once hung in the mansion’s Drawing Room. The luminescent painting of a young Alice Jay by pre-eminent artist Daniel Huntington is documented in sepia toned family photos from 1886- it is visible hanging in a prominent location next to two other famous artworks originally owned by the Jays of Rye: Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of John Jay (which today is on view at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.) and Asher Durand’s depiction of Peter Augustus Jay (which belongs to New York Hospital where Peter Augustus Jay served as President of the Board.

The young subject of the painting, Alice Jay, along with her parents and siblings, lived both in New York and at the Rye estate during the mid and late 19th century. Windows into Alice’s life and times, particularly during the Civil War, are well documented in family letters and diaries. Alice’s father, Dr. John Clarkson Jay, was John Jay’s grandson and a vocal opponent of slavery like his grandfather and father before him. Through the local Episcopal church where he served on the vestry, he was instrumental in spearheading efforts in Rye to recruit volunteers for the Union efforts during the Civil War, a campaign which drew enlistments from Alice’s two older brothers, Peter, who became Captain of a local militia, and John, who served as an assistant surgeon. Alice’s sister kept a diary in which she wrote proudly in 1862, “Rye is called the banner town of the county for she has raised more men by volunteering than any of the other towns.”

The artist of the painting, New Yorker Daniel Huntington (1816 – 1906), trained with Jay family friends and esteemed colleagues like John Trumbull (who accompanied Jay as his secretary to Europe during treaty negotiations but also achieved renown as a painter, most notably for his grand scale Declaration of Independence now at the Capitol Rotunda) and Samuel F. B. Morse (whose successful career as an artist preceded his renown as an inventor and earned him the nickname of “America’s Da Vinci.”) Under the tutelage of men like these, Huntington rose to prominence both during and after the Civil War. He was a member of the National Academy of Design for most of his life and acted as its President for 22 years- he was also Vice-President of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for 33 years and helped that institution expand and grow in stature.

Perhaps Huntington’s most recognizable work, The Republican Court, was completed in 1861 at the start of one of our nation’s bloodiest engagements. His tableau harkened back to what was sentimentally remembered as a more harmonious time between the states &#8212- the initial founding of our union &#8211and it represented an idealized assembly of the leaders of that period (Northern and Southern) in a European, court like setting. The image prominently features John Jay and Sarah Livingston Jay and 62 other identifiable personages of the Revolutionary War. Huntington’s painting was reproduced in 1865 as a very popular engraving. The larger original oil painting is owned by the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Winter hours for the Jay Heritage Center are Tuesday through Friday, 10am &#8211 5pm and by appointment. Please call (914) 698-9275 or contact JHC Program Director, Heather Craane at [email protected] to schedule group or school tours. The Jay Heritage Center’s Exhibit commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Civil War, “The Jays and the Abolition of Slavery: From Manumission to Emancipation” will open in May 2011.

John Jay’s home in Rye is a National Historic Landmark and a designated site of the Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area selected for its themes of Environment, Landscape and Gardens, Architecture and Freedom and Dignity. It is one of 13 sites on Westchester County’s African American Heritage Trail.

Illustrations: Above, &#8220The Republican Court&#8221 by Daniel Huntington (1861, Brooklyn Museum of Art). John Jay is depicted in the crimson robe on the far left and Sarah Livingston Jay is opposite him in white in the right foreground. An engraving based on this painting was recently donated to the Jay Heritage Center. Middle, &#8220Alice Jay&#8221 by Daniel Huntington- Below, an 1886 photograph of the Jay Drawing Room. Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Jay is on the left of the mirror and Asher Durand’s portrait of Jay’s eldest son Peter is on the right.

Brooklyn Museum to Open Lorna Simpson Photography Exhibition

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Brooklyn-based artist and photographer Lorna Simpson will have a solo exhibition at Brooklyn Museum. Lorna Simpson: Gathered presents photographic and other works that explore the artist’s interest in the interplay between fact and fiction, identity, and history. Through works that incorporate hundreds of original and found vintage photographs of African Americans that she collected from eBay and flea markets, Simpson undermines the assumption that archival materials are objective documents of history. The exhibition will be open to the public January 28 through August 21, 2011.

The exhibition also includes examples of Simpson’s series of installations of black-and-white photo-booth portraits of African Americans from the Jim Crow era and a new film work.

Lorna Simpson: Gathered is organized by Catherine Morris, Curator of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum.

Photo: Lorna Simpson (American, b. 1960). 1957-2009 Interiors (detail), 2009. Gelatin silver print. 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches each (14 x 14 cm)- overall dimensions variable. © Lorna Simpson, 2009- courtesy of the artist and Salon 94, New York

Albany Institutes Spring Exhibition Schedule

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The following is a listing of current and upcoming exhibitions appearing at the Albany Institute of History & Art from January through May 2011. Dates, times, and details are subject to change. Call (518) 463-4478 or visit www.albanyinstitute.org for more information.

Current Exhibits

OLD SOLES: THREE CENTURIES OF SHOES FROM THE ALBANY INSTITUTE OF HISTORY & ART’S COLLECTION (THROUGH APRIL 3, 2011)

Highlighting the museum’s shoe collection, Old Soles includes an amazing variety of shoes and pattens, shoe lasts, designer shoes, and silver buckles, from shoes worn by people from all walks of life throughout the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.

GEORGE WILLIAM WARREN: THE SACRED AND THE SECULAR (THROUGH FEBRUARY 2011)

Born in Albany, George William Warren was a well-known composer of both popular and religious music during the late 19th century. Warren became the organist and choir director at St. Paul’s Church in Albany in 1858, where he became an admired and respected teacher, mentor, performer, and concert organizer. Albanians were treated to Warren’s popular music through a number of concerts at various concert halls and churches around Albany. This bookcase exhibition highlights the composer’s career with a selection of sheet music, broadsides, illustrations, and photographs. A newly published book, George William Warren: Bridging the Sacred and Secular in Nineteenth-Century American Music, is now available for purchase in the Museum Shop. Researched and written by Thomas Nelson, Exhibitions and Graphics Designer at the Albany Institute of History & Art, the lavishly illustrated 60-page paperback relies on primary source material, some of which has never been reviewed before by scholars, as it chronicles Warren’s remarkable life and career. The book includes recent discoveries of his material from the Albany Institute’s collection, as well as three years of additional collecting and research, and incorporates more than 75 images—most never published before—of Warren’s sheet music, photographs, broadsides, and maps, documenting the life and career of the composer, renowned in his time yet little known today. Call the Museum Shop at (518) 463-4478, ext. 459, for more information.

Upcoming Exhibitions

ART AND NATURE: THE HUDSON RIVER SCHOOL PAINTINGS (JANUARY 15, 2011–AUGUST 2011)

The term “Hudson River School” is used to describe paintings made by two generations of artists beginning in 1825 with Thomas Cole and flourishing for about 50 years. These artists are best known for their large panoramic views of landscapes throughout North and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Their subject matter ranges from the sublime views of the wilderness, to beautiful pastoral scenes influenced by man, to allegorical pictures with moral messages. The Albany Institute of History & Art has been collecting materials related to the Hudson River School artists for more than 150 years. The museum’s collection includes 60 paintings, sketchbooks, photographs, paint boxes, and manuscript materials related to all of the major artists associated with this movement, recognized as the first school of American painting. This exhibition includes 25 paintings and complements an additional 20 works in the adjacent Lansing Gallery.

Square, Round and Lansing galleries

CURATOR’S CHOICE: RECENT ACQUISITIONS BY THE ALBANY INSTITUTE OF HISTORY & ART (JANUARY 15–JUNE 5, 2011)

The Albany Institute of History & Art will highlight a number of its latest acquisitions in the museum’s Entry Gallery. Among the items to be displayed are two pieces of Chinese ceramics that Albany artist Walter Launt Palmer (1854–1932) depicted in his 1878 painting, Interior of the Learned House, 298 State Street, Albany. The pieces were donated in 2009 by Phillip Kerr of Ann Arbor, Michigan. The house, which still stands on the corner of Dove and State streets, was designed by New York architect Russell Sturgis for Judge William Law Learned. The interior of the Gothic revival townhouse is lavishly furnished with art and decorative arts typical of the period. The painting itself will also be on view, as will the library table designed by Sturgis, also depicted in the painting.

Curator’s Choice: Recent Acquisitions also includes a spectacular 12-piece silver serving set presented to Thomas Schuyler (1811–1866) in January 1859. Helen Hill (a direct descendent), of Bellingham, Washington, donated the materials. The well-known Albany philanthropist, business leader, ship captain, and owner of the Schuyler Tow Boat Company, Schuyler received the silver presentation set from a group of friends and business associates. The large tray, engraved with a variety of images of trains, docks, and boats, includes a large image of the towboat, America, owned by Schuyler’s company. The engraving is taken directly from a painting of the towboat painted by James Bard (1815–1897) in 1852, which is in the museum’s collection. The silver, painting, and other manuscript materials will be on view, along with a history of the towboat company started by Thomas’s father, Captain Samuel Schuyler (1781–1842), who was one of Albany’s most successful businessmen of African heritage.

Also on display in Curator’s Choice: Recent Acquisitions will be the archive of the Women’s Seal and Stamp Club of Albany, including a framed portrait the club’s logo, “Elm Tree Corner,” made entirely of clipped stamps. The items were donated by Karen and Gilbert Conrad of Eustis, Florida. The club, formed in 1936, met at the Albany Institute of History & Art for many years. Elm Tree Corner, located on the northwest corner of State and Pearl streets, is an iconic historic Albany landmark whose history based on the story that Phillip Livingston, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, built his house and planted an elm tree there in 1735.

Also featured in the exhibition will be the painting, Crabapple (Fall), by Jeri Eisenberg of East Greenbush, New York, the Albany Institute Purchase Prize winner from the 2010 Artists of the Mohawk-Hudson Region competition. The 2010 regional is on display at The Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, New York, through January 2, 2011.

BILL SULLIVAN: A LANDSCAPE ARTIST REMEMBERED (JANUARY 15—FEBRUARY 27, 2011)

The Hudson Valley and the art world lost one of their finest artists last fall when Bill Sullivan passed away at the age of 68. In 2006, the Albany Institute of History & Art presented a major retrospective on the work of the internationally known painter and printmaker. The exhibition and fully illustrated catalog, The Autobiography of Bill Sullivan: A Landscape Retrospective, featured 50 landscape paintings ranging from his iconic views of New York State, including New York City, the Hudson Valley, and Niagara Falls, as well as the mountains, volcanoes, and waterfalls of the equatorial Andes in South America. In addition to the Albany Institute of History & Art, Sullivan’s works are part of collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York, and the New York Public Library. His work has been displayed in countless group exhibitions. To honor Sullivan’s life and work, the museum will present five major canvases from the museum’s collection, including a recently promised painting titled, View of Albany from Route 9J.

GRAPHIC DESIGN—GET THE MESSAGE! (FEBRUARY 5–JUNE 12, 2011)

Graphic design, the carefully planned arrangement of visual images and printed text, can convey both meaning and message. As they tempt consumers, communicate political messages, and
reflect social concerns, these boldly crafted, iconic images have been among mankind’s most effective forms of communication.

In the late 18th century the use of printed text and images to deliver messages and ideas proliferated as literacy rates began to rise, paper became more available, and printing technologies improved. Two forces—one political, the other commercial—particularly influenced the increasing prevalence of graphic design. As political revolutions in the late 18th and 19th centuries brought greater freedoms of expression to many parts of the world, communicators expressed their opinions and sentiments on paper in the forms of broadsides and posters that could be widely distributed. Social unrest, military confrontations, and reform movements added to the increasing use and display of visual communication throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

The explosive use of advertising in the 19th and 20th centuries also stimulated the use of graphic design to convey messages. Manufacturers and merchants, buoyed by industrial and commercial growth, realized the need to advertise products in order to dominate an increasingly competitive marketplace. Marketing goods on paper translated into selling goods in the marketplace. By the early 20th century, professionalization of the graphic designer resulted from growing demands for well-conceived, well-designed visual messages. Since that time, professional designers have been responsible for the print ads, package designs, and commercials that have shaped our society and represented its cultural movements. No longer a static medium, graphic design in the 21st century has become a sophisticated means of communication, due in large part to the Internet, which has transformed texts and images through movement and interactivity. Technology once again has been a driving force for change.

Graphic Design—Get the Message! looks at graphic design from four themed areas: typography and early printing- commerce and graphic design- political and social messages- and the creative process. Through the use of posters, broadsides, package designs, paintings, decorative arts, historical photographs, and computer interactives, these four themes will address topics such as technology and innovation- manufacturing and commercial growth- changing aesthetics- typography- designers and the growth of the design profession- and social and political expression in graphic work. Graphic designs, objects, and the history of design work from the Albany area will be used to address broader issues of national and international significance. As it examines technological, commercial, aesthetic, and social factors, Graphic Design—Get the Message! will reveal not only how the field has changed over the years, but also how it has changed us.

Throughout its run, the exhibition will also feature a number of lectures and demonstrations by graphic designers and scholars in the field.

HAJO: AN ARTIST’S JOURNEY (MARCH 5–JULY 31, 2011)

Hans-Joachim Richard Christoph (1903–1992), known familiarly as Hajo, lived through most of the 20th century and witnessed firsthand its high points and low moments. Born in Berlin, Germany, in 1903, he trained at the Reimann Schule following World War I, a time of artistic experiment and expression. When he immigrated to the United States in 1925, he brought training and skill that served him well as a graphic designer, first at the New York office of Lucien Bernhard and later at the Fort Orange Paper Company in Castleton, New York. Hajo created fresh, bold designs for Kenwood Mills, the Embossing Company, and other manufactures, all meant to captivate and entice modern American consumers. In his spare time Hajo painted quiet landscapes that reflect the peaceful, small-town charms of the upper Hudson Valley. Hajo: An Artist’s Journey, tells the story of an immigrant artist, his journey from Europe to the Hudson Valley, and his artistic explorations. Sketchbooks, drawings, paintings, graphic designs, and photographs span the breadth of Hajo’s world and the art he created to capture it.

Fort Ticonderoga Receives Art Exhibit Grant

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Fort Ticonderoga has been awarded a grant in the amount of $3,000 by The Felicia Fund, Inc. of Providence, Rhode Island. The funds will support the upcoming exhibit, The Art of War: Ticonderoga as Experienced through the Eyes of America’s Great Artists exhibit. The new exhibit, scheduled to open in May 2011, will feature fifty works from Fort Ticonderoga’s extensive art collection together for the first time in a single exhibition. Included will be important American works by Thomas Davies, Thomas Cole, and Daniel Huntington.

The funding from The Felicia Fund supports the research, construction, and installation of the exhibit. The exhibit will use the artwork to explore human interaction at the Fort from the 18th century through the early 20th century. Fort Ticonderoga helped give birth to the Hudson River School of American art with Thomas Cole’s pivotal 1826 work, Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga, the museum’s most important 19th-century masterpiece to be featured in the exhibit.

Beth Hill, Executive Director, said the generous grant provided by The Felicia Fund will “utilize the museum’s art collection to engage visitors with the role art played in memorializing the events that took place at Fort Ticonderoga and to encourage participatory activities that make the visitor experience part of the Fort’s continued legacy.”

The exhibit is being developed through collaboration with Winterthur Museum Graduate Program of the University of Delaware.

Christopher Fox, Fort Ticonderoga’s Curator of Collections, said the exhibit “will help the Fort reach new audiences by presenting its magnificent art collections in an exciting new format.”

The Art of War will be exhibited at Fort Ticonderoga in the Deborah Clarke Mars Education Center from May 20th through October 20th, 2011.

Multi-interdisciplinary art-themed educational programs developed with this exhibit will provide new opportunities for students and families to experience Fort Ticonderoga’s history and its 2000 acre campus.

Illustration: Thomas Cole’s &#8220Gelyna, View Near Ticonderoga&#8221 (1826), courtesy Fort Ticonderoga.