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Columbia Museum of Art
1515 Main St. Columbia, South Carolina Phone: 803.799.2810 Map www.columbiamuseum.org Current and Upcoming Exhibitions: Exhibitions: Nature and the Grand American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School Painters Our Time, Our Place: Photographs of the Black South by Richard Samuel Roberts Nature and the Grand American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School Painters Forty-five magnificent paintings from the rich collection of the New-York Historical Society will be on view at the Columbia Museum of Art next fall, beginning November 17, 2011, in a major traveling exhibition Nature and the Grand American Vision: Masterpieces of the Hudson River School Painters. Though individual works are very seldom loaned, these iconic works of 19th-century landscape painting are traveling on a national tour for the first time and are circulating to four museums around the country as part of the Historical Society’s traveling exhibitions program Sharing a National Treasure. The Columbia Museum of Art is the only stop in the Southeast. “The Museum is delighted to bring this extraordinary exhibition to Columbia, giving visitors from around the 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 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. “For apart from the skillfulness and dreaminess of so many of the pictures, the fact that several of them have not been on public display in half a century makes the exhibition even more remarkable.” - The New York Times The exhibition tells this story in four grand thematic sections. Within these broad groupings, the paintings show how American artists embodied powerful ideas about nature, culture and history. 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 Thomas Cole, Jasper F. 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. These celebrated paintings explore the tension between Americans’ deep veneration of the wilderness and their equally ardent celebration of progress. Nature and the Grand American Vision allows audiences to enjoy and study superb examples of the Historical Society’s unsurpassed collection of Hudson River School paintings while the galleries of the N-YHS are closed for a transformative $65 million renovation project. “Our 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,” stated Louise Mirrer, President and CEO. “Nowhere 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.” Nature and the Grand American Vision 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. N-YHS Senior Art Historian Dr. Linda S. Ferber, curator of the exhibition, said, “The New-York Historical Society houses one of the oldest and most comprehensive collections of landscape paintings by artists of the Hudson River School. We welcome this unique opportunity to share these treasures with a national audience.” Additional support has been generously provided by these sponsors: BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina, BB&T and John and Kay Bachmann. This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities. A Tru Vue Optium® Conservation Grant from The Foundation of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works has supported glazing of the works in the exhibition. Catalogue to Accompany the Exhibition About the Hudson River School Collection of the New-York Historical Society About the New-York Historical Society
In one photograph, a young boy looks plaintively toward the camera, dressed in undoubtedly his finest wool suit, his prized rooster gently clutched under his arm. In another, the Reverend Charles Jaggers sits regally in a finely carved chair, his Bible in one hand and his cane in the other. These are the faces of African Americans who lived in Columbia and across South Carolina during the 1920s and 1930s, as captured by African American photographer Richard Samuel Roberts. This December, the Columbia Museum of Art proudly unveiled an exhibition of 23 images taken by Roberts, selected by the Advisory Committee and the Board of the Museum’s newest affiliate group, Friends of African American Art and Culture. Our Time, Our Place: Photographs of the Black South by Richard Samuel Roberts, on view in Gallery 15 through April 29, illustrates the richness and diversity of Roberts’s oeuvre. The images in the exhibition are just a fraction of the more than ten thousand images he is estimated to have made during his career. Born in Fernandina, Florida, in 1880, Richard Samuel Roberts displayed a talent for art from an early age. The earliest known photograph of Roberts shows him as a young man in the yard of his Florida home, paint brush in hand, standing before an unfinished landscape. Were it up to his father, who reared his twelve children according to a code of strict discipline and limited education, Roberts likely would have remained employed throughout his life as a stevedore — like his father — on the Fernandina docks. Attending school only through the sixth grade, Roberts eventually gained employment with the United States Postal Service, which allowed him the opportunity to pursue his photographic interests. Roberts established The Gem Studio in Fernandina, specializing in portraiture. What few photographs survive from this time illustrate the combination of his innate ability and the countless hours he spent furthering his understanding of the medium by studying how-to manuals and taking correspondence courses. His early photographs bear many of the distinguishing characteristics of his mature work: technical precision, meticulous composition and the ability to establish an instantaneous rapport with his subject, all of which enabled him to create an honest portrayal of the human personality. Roberts transferred to Columbia, South Carolina, in the early months of 1920, together with his wife, Wilhelmina Pearl Williams Roberts, and their four children (a fifth would be born shortly after their move). He paid $3,000 for a five-room house on Wayne Street, evidence that he and his family were members of a rising middle-class African American community in the segregated city. In 1922, he established theRoberts Studio at 1119 Washington Street, just west of Main Street, in the heart of the city’s “Little Harlem.” Each day, Roberts labored from 4:00 am until noon as custodian in the Post Office, after which he walked several blocks south to his studio to meet clients, make appointments, and process his photographs. Using cameras which could accommodate 5x7 and 8x10 glass plates, Roberts excelled at portraiture. He advertised that “if you are beautiful, we guarantee to make your photographs just like you want them... If you are not beautiful, we guarantee to make you beautiful and yet to retain a true and brilliant likeness of you.” His portraits of African Americans—whether taken in the studio or during his travels across the state—all possess a quiet dignity. They reflect a socio-economic cross-section of life during the 1920s and 1930s: children, laborers, domestic servants, self-made entrepreneurs, families, religious personages, and educated professionals. Roberts also took architectural photographs, documenting homes old and new, as well as institutions of higher learning. The only African American commercial photographer in the city, Roberts was commissioned to document important events for schools, social clubs, churches, and others. Some of these images found their way into the pages of the Palmetto Leader, a newspaper serving the African American community, and whose offices were conveniently located across the hall from Roberts’s studio. Roberts was one of only a few African American photographers active in the city of Columbia during the 1920s and 1930s and one of only about a half-dozen active in the South during that time. Were it not for his reliance on the use of glass plate negatives at a time when celluloid-based sheet film had grown in popular usage, Roberts and his photographs might have been rendered a mere footnote in the annals of photographic history. Fortunately, that is not to be the case. Each in their own way, the photographs contained within this exhibition perfectly illustrate the meditation by Eudora Welty about the power of photography to "part a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls between people, the veil of indifference to each other’s presence, each other’s wonder, each other’s human plight." Exhibition presented by: RELATED PROGRAMS One Room School House: Our Time, Our Place Artist Salon Series: FAAAC Board Member Kyle Coleman Artist Salon Series: Photographer Phil Dunn Enjoy an afternoon of piano music inspired by the photography exhibition, Our Time, Our Place: The Black Richard Samuel Roberts is heralded as one of the south’s most accomplished photographers of the 1920’s |
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