Black Women Artists from the Tubman Museum Collection

 

Ana Bel Lee (1926 – 2000) Wedding.

Tubman Museum

(ARTFIXdaily.com) 

On March 5, 2021, the Tubman Museum will open an exhibition titled A Mighty Chorus: Black Women Artists from the Tubman Museum Collection.  The exhibit will feature works by local African American women artists from the Tubman museum collection with a special focus on the works of Nellie Mae Rowe and Anna Belle Lee Washington, also known as Ana Bel Lee.

After the death of her second husband in 1948, Nellie Mae Rowe (1900 – 1982) spent the rest of her life creating an extensive and important collection of art.  She transformed her home in the Vinings neighborhood of Atlanta, Georgia into what she called her “playhouse.” The house was decorated on the inside with boldly colorful drawings illustrating her personal mythology.  The outside of the home was decorated with objects hung from the trees and fences.  Rowe also expressed her creativity by making stuffed dolls, one of which she named ‘Little Nellie.” Rowe completed the work Nellie in Heaven shortly before her death in 1982.  A devout Christian, Rowe attributed her prolific talent to God.

Nellie Mae Rowe (1900 – 1982) Nellie in Heaven.

Tubman Museum

Ana Bel Lee (1926 – 2000) was a self-taught painter who lived and worked on St. Simons Island off the Georgia coast.  Ana Bel Lee was born Anna Belle Lee Washington in Detroit, Michigan.  She was a social worker for 39 years.  She retired in 1984 and moved to the Georgia Sea Islands, where she took up painting.  Lee volunteered and studied painting at the Coastal Center for the Arts.  She had her first gallery show in 1985.  Her popularity increased in 1991 after her work was featured in a documentary produced by Georgia Public Television.  Her paintings often featured faceless subjects and depicted the history and culture of the island’s African American inhabitants.  Though sought after by collectors, Ana Bel Lee’s works were removed from the art market after her death in 2000.

Lee’s works in this exhibition are the newest additions to the Tubman Museum collection.  The works were donated to the museum by Mrs. Pamela Dice of Jessup, Georgia in honor of her brother, Mr. Paul Carter.  Carter was an art collector with a sizeable collection of works by Lee.  In addition to Lee and Nellie Mae Rowe, the exhibition will also include works by Beverly Buchanan, Mildred Thompson, Stephanie Jackson, and other local female artists in the Tubman collection.  A Mighty Chorus will remain on view in the BB&T Gallery of the museum through April 3, 2021.

An outstanding group of modern drawings by European and American masters has been presented to The Courtauld

 An outstanding group of modern drawings by European and American masters assembled by the late collector Howard Karshan has been presented to The Courtauld by his wife, the artist Linda Karshan. It is one of the most significant gifts of art to The Courtauld in a generation.

Cézanne, Kandinsky, Klee & Richter among major gift to the Courtauld

Wassily Kandinsky, Untitled, 1916. Brush and India ink on paper, 15.8 x 23.4 cm. The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) Gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan © Georg Baselitz. Photo © The Courtauld.

Living between London and New York, Howard and Linda formed a preeminent collection of modern drawings. Collecting with great discernment and passion, the drawings were an essential part of their lives for more than half a century. A carefully chosen group of 25 works on paper by leading artists of the modern and post-war period, which lay at the heart of their collection, forms this generous gift.

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The works being given to The Courtauld demonstrate Howard and Linda’s sensibility for the expressive power and rich variety of drawing as an art form. The works are characterised by innovative mark-making and distinctive use of line. Examples range from radical watercolours by Cézanne and highly expressive finger drawings in ink by Louis Soutter, to abstract compositions made by Henri Michaux whilst experimenting with Mescalin to explore the subconscious, and on to works by Twombly that further broadened the possibilities of draughtsmanship.

Paul Cézanne, Mountainous Landscape [Paysage montagneux], watercolour and charcoal on paper, 30 x 47 cm, Executed circa 1885-1890. The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) Gift by Linda Karshan in memory of her husband, Howard Karshan Photo © The Courtauld

The Karshan gift will transform The Courtauld’s collection by extending its major historical holdings fully into the twentieth century. It will join the gallery’s internationally renowned collection of 7,000 drawings, including masterpieces from the Renaissance onwards. Aside from Cézanne, none of the artists included in the gift has previously been represented in the collection.

The Karshan collection will be a major springboard for a wide range of future activities at The Courtauld, including exhibitions, displays, research projects, teaching and schools programmes.

Linda Karshan said: “Howard was as passionate about studying his drawings as he was about collecting them. He carefully positioned them on the walls around him, so as to be able to have his favourites within sight.

These are the drawings that make up the Karshan Gift. At The Courtauld, they will find their natural home, where they can be in the public eye while being studied for generations to come, echoing the role these drawings played within our family for over 50 years.”

Professor Deborah Swallow, Märit Rausing Director of The Courtauld, said: “Howard and Linda Karshan have been close friends of The Courtauld for many years. We are deeply honoured that Linda has chosen to give this outstanding group of drawings to us in memory of Howard, who assembled such a remarkable collection of modern works on paper with her over many years. Gifts and bequests from major collectors have always been fundamental to the growth of our collections and these works from the Howard Karshan Collection will truly transform our holdings. Howard and Linda, herself a distinguished artist, always cherished the particular role The Courtauld undertakes as a public gallery and as a centre of education. We are hugely excited by the prospect of making these drawings a vital part of our collection and activities to inspire future visitors, scholars and students alike.”

The gift of 25 drawings from the Howard Karshan Collection features works by Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Paul Cézanne, Otto Dix, Jean Dubuffet, Sam Francis, Alberto Giacometti, Philip Guston, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Willem de Kooning, Henri Michaux, Gerhard Richter, Louis Soutter, Wayne Thiebaud, and Cy Twombly.

The works will be exhibited at The Courtauld Gallery when it reopens in late 2021. This follows a major transformation project to restore its grandeur and create state-of-the-art facilities, which is supported by £9.5 million from The National Lottery Heritage Fund and generous donations from foundations, individuals and supporters.

The Karshan gift will be accompanied by a new illustrated catalogue, edited by Coralie Malissard, Bridget Riley Art Foundation Curatorial Assistant and Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art, and published by Paul Holberton, published in late 2021.

Alice Neel: People Come First

The Metropolitan Museum of Ar March 22 through August 1, 2021 Guggenheim Bilbao September 17, 2021–January 23, 2022 Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco March 12, 2022–July 10, 2022

Alice Neel (America, 1900-1984). Geoffrey Hendricks and Brian, 1978. Oil on canvas. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, by exchange, through an anonymous gift. © The Estate of Alice Neel "For me, people come first. I have tried to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being."—Alice Neel, 1950

Alice Neel: People Come First is the first museum retrospective in New York of American artist Alice Neel (1900–1984) in 20 years. This ambitious, career-spanning survey at The Met positions Neel as one of the century's most radical painters, a champion of social justice whose longstanding commitment to humanist principles inspired her life as well as her art, as demonstrated in the survey's approximately 100 paintings, drawings, and watercolors. Alice Neel: People Come First will be on view March 22 through August 1, 2021.   "Alice Neel was an outstanding painter whose iconic 'pictures of people,' as she called her portraits, radiate her fierce personal belief in humanity's inherent dignity and her steadfast social conscience," said Max Hollein, Marina Kellen French Director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "This important exhibition places Neel's life and art within the context of the 20th century, considering them both in relation to the major events and upheavals of the time. Throughout her long career, Neel remained true to her own vision—despite many obstacles—and today her imagery resonates with our own challenging cultural and political circumstances in striking ways."   Sheena Wagstaff, Leonard A. Lauder Chairman of Modern and Contemporary Art, added: "Neel's portraits are deeply human: her empathy for the people in her community resulted in paintings of such unflinching intensity it is as if past and present—their time and ours—are brought together in a single moment. Now, when personal histories are crucial to establishing self-identity, Neel's world tells the stories of human beings from all walks of life in the city she called home. Together they vividly capture the unique character of New York City."

The exhibition spans the entirety of the artist's career, from her professional launch in Cuba in the 1920s and her work as part of the W.P.A. in the 1930s, through her resolute commitment to centering the figure in her painting at a time when abstraction was ascendant, in the 1940s and 1950s; her resurgence in the 1960s and 1970s; and the emergence of her "late style" in the 1980s.

In keeping with the artist's commitment to painting "pictures of people," which she considered to be historical records of the time in which they were made, the exhibition will feature dozens of Neel's most striking portraits, celebrated today for their unyielding psychological acumen. The survey also sheds light on her accomplishments in other genres, specifically still lifes, landscapes, and cityscapes. The inclusion of relevant ephemera and personal effects—such as photographs and leftist periodicals to which she contributed drawings—illuminates her relationships, personality, and political convictions as well as her eventual entree into American popular culture. Neel was a longtime resident of New York, and the city served as her most faithful subject. Indeed, the sum total of her work testifies to the drama of its streets, the quotidian beauty of its buildings, and, most importantly, the diversity, resilience, and passion of its residents.

Alice Neel: People Come First presents and interprets the artist's work in eight sections that highlight her engagement with key subjects that recur over her career. Neel's connection to New York City is a major focus. Another section groups Neel's many paintings and drawings of interior spaces, mostly in her own home, an intimate, psychologically charged setting that occasioned still lifes full of drama and personality but also a series of sometimes erotic, sometimes poignant portraits of family members and lovers. The exhibition's most robust section is devoted to the many bohemians, dissidents, and activists that Neel painted (and with whom she frequently collaborated) over the course of her life, including prominent Black rights leader James Farmer and the Lower East Side gender nonconforming performer Jackie Curtis. Another gallery showcases Neel's empathetic penchant for rendering bodily and emotional affliction caused by loss, illness, injury, and, in the case of Andy Warhol, an assassination attempt. One area of the exhibition draws upon select works from The Met collection, such as Vincent van Gogh's Madame Roulin and Her Baby (1888), Susanne Valadon's Reclining Nude (1928), and Jacob Lawrence's Blind Beggars (1938), to shine light on the myriad ways in which Neel's painting intersected with and also diverged from art historical precedent with regard to both subject and technique. Another section explores Neel's candid depictions of prepartum and postpartum mothers, which confront one of the most taxing and complex of female experiences. A large gallery features many of the artist's most provocative, groundbreaking nudes from the 1930s onward, including her nude self-portrait, rendered when she was 80 years old. The exhibition concludes by highlighting Neel's engagement with abstraction and her formal innovations, drawing particular attention to her embrace of "unfinishedness," which served ends both aesthetic and allegorical, functioning as a powerful metaphor for beginnings and endings, life and death.

Alice Neel: People Come First is curated by Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art, and Randall Griffey, Curator, with Brinda Kumar, Assistant Curator, all in the department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Met. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue published by Yale University Press. It will include scholarly essays by the exhibition curators, Kelly Baum and Randall Griffey, as well as Meredith A. Brown, Director of Museum Affairs and Chief Curator at Planting Fields Foundation; Julia Bryan-Wilson, Doris and Clarence Malo Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, University of California at Berkeley; and Susanna V. Temkin, Curator, El Museo del Barrio. Each author dives deeply into different aspects of Neel's practice, illuminating a variety of topics that have been little studied until now, such as Neel's relationship to the political Left, her engagement with the streets and peoples of Spanish Harlem, her many fascinating paintings of LGBTQ subjects, the meaning and function of "home" in her works from the 1920s onward, and her enduring, if conflicted, interest in abstraction.

Walker Evans American Photographs

• January– to April 2021

  Art Museum of West Virginia University

  Morgantown, WV

• September– to December 2021

  Portland Museum of Art

  Portland, ME

• January– to March 2022

  Windgate Museum of Art at Hendrix College

  Conway, AR

• May– to August 2022

  Lauren Rogers Museum of Art

  Laurel, MS

• September– to November 2022

  Mattatuck Museum

  Waterbury, CT

This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition at MoMA, and the accompanying landmark publication that established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Together and separately, through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the Eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation—one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture and the construction of a Modernist history of photography.

Comprising approximately 60 prints from the MoMA collection that were included in the 1938 book or exhibition, the installation maintains the bipartite organization of the originals: the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social contexts, while the second consists of photographs of American cultural artifacts—the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. The exhibition’s placement on the fourth floor of the Museum—between galleries featuring paintings by Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol—underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture and the vernacular.

Walker Evans, Roadside Stand Near Birmingham, 1936, photograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8c52874

Walker Evans, American, 1903–1975. Interior Detail, West Virginia Coal Miner's House, 1935, Gelatin silver print, 8 7/8 x 7 3/16 in. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase.

Walker Evans, Negro Barber Shop Interior, Atlanta, 1936, photograph. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8c52232

Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment

• February– to May 2021

  Reynolda House Museum of American Art

  Winston-Salem, NC

• June– to October 2021

  Olana State Historic Site

  Hudson, NY

• June– to October 2021

  Thomas Cole National Historic Site

  Catskill, NY

• November 2021– to March 2022

  Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

  Bentonville, AR

Exhibition Images

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  Photography by Dwight Primiano

  Martin Johnson Heade, Amethyst Woodstar, ca. 1863 – 1864, Oil on canvas. 12 1/4 x 10 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2006.84. Photography by Dwight Primiano

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  Isabel Charlotte “Downie” Church (1871-1935). Botanical Study of False Solomon’s Seal, September 26, 1890. Watercolor on paper. 10 ½ x 7 in. Olana State Historic Site, New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation; 

• OL.1985.303

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  Patrick Jacobs (b. 1971)
 Pink Forest with Stump, 2016. Styrene, acrylic, cast neoprene, paper, hair, polyurethane foam, ash, talc, starch, acrylite, vinyl film, copper, wood, steel, lighting, and BK7 glass diorama window: 7 3/8 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2016.22. Photography by Edward C. Robison III

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  Thomas Cole (1801-1848) Thomas Cole’s Box of Minerals and Artifacts, c. 1830-1848
. Various minerals, artifacts, and specimens. 18 x 20 x 3 in. Thomas Cole National Historic Site; Gift of Edith Cole Silberstein and the Greene County Historical Society, TC.64.11.2

This interdisciplinary project takes inspiration from the influential series of paintings The Gems of Brazil (1863-64) by Martin Johnson Heade, but expands outward to explore pollination in nature and ecology, cultural and artistic influence and exchange, and the interconnection between art and science from 19th into the 21st century. Paintings, sketches, and natural history specimens from the collections of Thomas Cole National Historical Site, The Olana Partnership, and Crystal Bridges form the core of the checklist.

Heade’s The Gems of Brazil will be shown in conversation with artworks by Thomas Cole and Frederic Church, along with their natural specimen collections. Additionally, the exhibition will highlight artworks by Cole’s daughter Emily Cole, Church’s daughter Isabel Charlotte Church, and works by contemporary artists, including Vik Muniz, Roxy Paine, Maya Lin, and Paula Hayes, among others.

Cross Pollination: Heade, Cole, Church, and Our Contemporary Moment was co-curated by The Olana Partnership at Olana State Historic Site, Thomas Cole National Historical Site, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas. Its tour is organized by Crystal Bridges.