The Shelburne Museum has 150,000 works in 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of which are historic and were relocated to the Museum grounds. In addition, the Museum has rotating fine art exhibitions throughout the year. This summer, enjoy three exhibitions and a sculpture installation.
Aaron T. Stephan: 30 Columns
May 1-October 31, 2017
Aaron T Stephan likes to provoke and challenge visitors to reassess their perceptions of the world built around them. His sculptures investigate how recognizable symbols and materials shape our impressions of everyday objects. Using both a critical eye and a wry sense of humor, Stephan’s artworks comment on the complex webs of information and relationships carried by the material world around us.
30 Columns is a spiraling cascade of classical Greek Doric columns that unravel and dance across the lawn at Shelburne Museum. These columns abandon their traditional vertical forms and structural functions, thereby calling attention to their autonomous agency, narrative, and beauty.
Pieced Traditions: Jane Lovell Collects
May 1-October 31, 2017
Jean Lovell, a resident of Carmel, California and longtime friend of Shelburne Museum, has been collecting historic bedcovers since 1979. This exhibition features donations and loans from Lovell’s collection of historic quilts. Assembled over more than three decades from notable dealers like Joel and Kate Kopp (New York City), Phyllis Hader (Stonington, Connecticut), and Stella Rubin (Darnestown, Maryland), the collection is particularly rich in colorful, eye-catching designs. Highlights of the exhibition include Amish and Mennonite quilts from the 19th and 20th centuries ranging from a circa 1890 Double Irish Chain Quilt by Annie Laura Frankfort from Blainsport, Pennsylvania to a circa 1970 Amish A Thousand Pyramids Quilt from Holmes County, Ohio.
Wild Spaces, Open Seasons:
Hunting and Fishing in American Art
June 3-August 23, 2017
“Wild Spaces, Open Seasons: Hunting and Fishing in American Art” is the first major exhibition to explore the visual culture of hunting and fishing in both painting and sculpture from the early 19th century to World War II. The aesthetically rich and culturally important works on view play an influential role in the history of American art.
The exhibition encompasses a wide variety of portraits, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes, including iconic works by Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, and John Singer Sargent, as well as key pictures by specialist sporting artists such as Charles Deas, Alfred Jacob Miller, Carl Rungius, and Arthur Fitzwilliam Tait. In addition, it sheds new light on modernist interpretations of these subjects by George Bellows and Marsden Hartley, among others. American artists’ fascination with depicting hunting and fishing was often informed by their own experiences as practitioners and was more than merely a way of commemorating outdoor traditions. More than 70 paintings and sculptures illuminate changing ideas about place, national identity, community, wildlife, and the environment, offering compelling insights into socioeconomic issues and cultural concerns.
Upstream with Ogden Pleissner
May 1-October 31, 2017
While Ogden Minton Pleissner is recognized today for his hunting and fishing scenes, the artist once noted to his biographer that “I’ve done quite a few sporting pictures because I have always loved to fish and shoot, but I am not one that specializes in sporting subjects. Ten or 15 percent of my work is sporting–the rest is pure landscape painting.” The tension between evocative landscape and lively narrative is especially evident in Pleissner’s fishing pictures. Drawn from Shelburne Museum’s permanent collection, the paintings, prints, and ephemera featured in “Upstream with Ogden Pleissner” transport viewers to some of the avid angler’s favorite streams, rivers, and lakes from Maine to Wyoming while also conveying Pleissner’s first-hand knowledge of and passion for the sport.
Adapted from the Museum’s press materials.
INFORMATION
Shelburne Museum
6000 Shelburne Road
Shelburne 05482
(802) 985-3346
Hours:
Daily, 10AM-5PM (through October 31)
Image (top):
30 Columns by Aaron T. Stephan
96″x192″x636″; painted polycomposite.
Courtesy of the artist and Samsøn Projects, Boston. Image by Addie Zinner.
Image (center):
Pieced Amish Railroad Crossing Quilt by unidentified maker
81.5″x81.625″; cotton; 1986
Gift of Jean Lovell, 2015-11.1. Photography by Andy Duback.
Image (bottom):
Leaping Salmon by Ogden M. Pleissner
17″x26.75″; watercolor on paper; date unknown
Bequest of Ogden M. Pleissner, 1985-31.10. Photography by Andy Duback.