Exhibitions
Join us in November 2010 for a diverse range of special exhibitions as we debut the transformed special exhibition spaces. All housed in the East Building, these new spaces will allow for the first time multiple concurrent exhibitions of varying scale.
American Chronicles:
The Art of Norman Rockwell
November 7, 2010-January 30, 2011
Norman Rockwell, Triple Self-Portrait, 1959, oil on canvas, 44 1/2 x 34 1/3 in., cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 13, 1960, Norman Rockwell Art Collection Trust, NRACT.1973.19, ©1959 SEPS: Licensed by Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis, Ind.
American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell will trace the evolution of Rockwell’s art and iconography throughout his career—from carefully choreographed reflections on childhood innocence in such paintings as Day in the Life of a Little Girl (1952) to powerful, consciousness-raising images for Look in the 1960s, documenting the traumatic realities of desegregation in the South. Rockwell’s artistic contributions and the impact of his images on American popular culture will be explored within the context of his life and times through in-depth exhibition commentary, a decade-by-decade installation of 40 original works of art, and a complete set of 323 Saturday Evening Post cover tear sheets, which spans 47 years. The exhibition travels to 12 national venues through 2013.
The nation’s premier illustrator for more than six decades, Norman Rockwell (1894–1978) was the people’s painter, depicting scenes from American life for the covers and pages of the nation’s most prominent publications. Rockwell is most recognized for his illustrations featured on the covers of The Saturday Evening Post from 1916 to 1963. This important exhibition will offer a multidimensional view of America across the 20th century, as seen through Rockwell’s narrative images, which continue to have a singular impact today.
As the first major exhibition in the Museum’s Center for Special Exhibitions, American Chronicles brings the art of America’s most recognized illustrator to North Carolina. Transcending generations, this exhibition provides the opportunity for all visitors, young and old alike, to discover and rediscover Rockwell’s reflections of 20th-century America.
Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. The exhibition has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, American Masterpieces Program. Publication support has been provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Media sponsorship has been provided by the Curtis Publishing Company and by the Norman Rockwell Estate Licensing Company. Conservation support has been provided by the Stockman Family Foundation.
This exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.
Bob Trotman:
Inverted Utopias
November 7, 2010–March 27, 2011
Bob Trotman, Girl, 2002, paint and tempera on white pine, poplar, and basswood, with small amount of wax, H. 65 x W. 49 x D. 41 in., North Carolina Museum of Art, Purchased with funds from the William R. Roberson Jr. and Frances M. Roberson Endowed Fund for North Carolina Art, ©2002 Bob Trotman
Bob Trotman: Inverted Utopias will be the inaugural exhibition in a new gallery dedicated to showing work by North Carolina artists that will open at the North Carolina Museum of Art in the fall of 2010. The opening exhibition in the North Carolina Gallery will feature key works from the past decade by Bob Trotman, a significant and widely known North Carolina artist who describes his figurative sculptures as an “off-balance hybrid” of influences that include Norman Rockwell, among other artists. Accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, Inverted Utopias will include loans from the artist, private collections, and museums, along with an existing work in the NCMA’s permanent collection. The Museum will also commission a major new work by Trotman for the exhibition that will remain on view as part of the permanent collection.
A native of North Carolina, Bob Trotman began his artistic career as a furniture maker, gradually moving away from crafting functional objects to creating sculpture with a human presence. Inspired by a wide range of sources, including ship figureheads, 19th-century storefront wooden effigies, and Gothic religious sculptures, Trotman’s figurative works evolved out of his earlier anthropomorphic furniture. His painted, stained, and carved wood sculptures often depict anonymous people who appear to be in various states of change or flux, both physically and emotionally. The figures are simultaneously humorous and disquieting. Dressed in suits and ties or ladylike dresses, they are portrayed upside down with their legs waving in the air, poised on the brink of jumping or leaping, or sinking into the floor as if it were made of quicksand.
Trotman’s portraits of “model citizens” are infused with enigmatic narratives that lie beneath their carved surfaces, and their startling poses give a whole new meaning to the term body language. “I’m sure we can all call to mind the idealized, utopian version of American life as offered by Norman Rockwell in the pages of the Saturday Evening Post,” says Trotman. “With my wooden figures, I’m making an inverted version of that picture, a dystopian America, where ambiguity replaces certainty.”
As part of the NCMA’s ongoing commitment to the citizens of our state, the new North Carolina Gallery will exhibit the work of emerging and established North Carolina artists. Solo and thematic exhibitions will rotate twice a year and draw from loans and the Museum’s permanent collection.
Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. Generous support has been provided by The Windgate Charitable Foundation. This exhibition is also made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.
Fins and Feathers: Original Children’s Book Illustrations from The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
November 7, 2010-January 30, 2011
Eric Carle, Green Frog, Green Frog, What do you see?, 1984, from Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? (Henry Holt, 1967, 1984), written by Bill Martin Jr, tissue paper on Bainbridge board, 12 ¼ in x 17 ¾ in., Collection of Eric and Barbara Carle, courtesy of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, © 1967, 1984 Eric Carle
Do you remember your favorite illustrated books from childhood? Perhaps you were awed by swirling colors, fantastical creatures, and detail-filled vignettes that brought stories to life. The world of children’s book illustrations is a lush, imaginative arena for artistic exploration that can last a lifetime, and it is often a child’s first aesthetic experience. Relive the fantasy and fun for yourself—or introduce your family to old favorites—with Fins and Feathers: Original Children’s Book Illustrations from The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Fins and Feathers will feature original illustrations for children’s books from the late 1960s through today, including illustrations by Leo Lionni, Eric Carle, and Petra Mathers.
The fanciful illustrations featured in Fins and Feathers are drawn from the collection of The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Massachusetts. Established by artist and author Eric Carle in 2002, the museum is the first of its kind, devoted exclusively to original picture book art from both national and international illustrators. Fins and Feathers highlights some of the best works from this collection, including a number of works by Arnold Lobel, who illustrated classic stories in The Random House Book of Poetry for Children and The Random House Book of Mother Goose. Also highlighted are works by Ashley Bryan, the much-praised and award-winning author and illustrator of Beat the Story-Drum, Pum-Pum. This book, a collection of Nigerian folk tales, is only one of his works to have won a prestigious Coretta Scott King Award, which honors African American authors and outstanding works of literature for children or young adults.
Focused entirely on images of friendly and occasionally comical beasts, Fins and Feathers features daydreaming fish, stately egrets, day-tripping chickens, and one very mixed-up chameleon. At turns humorous and elegant, the illustrations in Fins and Feathers sparkle with bright colors and even brighter original imagery. This family-friendly exhibition will be the perfect attraction for children and children-at-heart.
With a commitment to serve the younger citizens of our state, the North Carolina Museum of Art presents Fins and Feathers in concert with other special exhibitions in fall 2010. Families will find a natural connection between the children’s picture book biography Into the Woods: John James Audubon Lives His Dream and the exhibition of the newly restored folios of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, in a new nearby gallery. Fins and Feathers also provides an interesting counterpoint to American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell, where children and their families can enjoy examining and comparing different styles of illustration for books and print media.
Organized by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, Mass.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.
Binh Danh: In the Eclipse of Angkor
November 7, 2010–January 30, 2011
Binh Danh, Iridescence of life #14, 2008, chlorophyll print on nasturtium, Papilio Rumanzovia butterfly specimen, and resin, 12 x 10 in., Courtesy of the artist and the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, © 2008 Binh Danh
In the Eclipse of Angkor presents new work by Binh Danh, including chlorophyll prints, found butterfly specimens, and Daguerreotypes. Danh has emerged as an artist of national and international importance with work that investigates his Vietnamese heritage and the collective memory of war, specifically in Vietnam and Cambodia. Danh states that he uses his photographs, appropriating and transforming archival images, as a method of fabricating memories. His family rarely discussed the Vietnam War while he was growing up, and he has very few personal memories of that time because he was only two years old when they left in 1979. He went back to Vietnam for the first time in 1999 and now visits the region on a regular basis. Danh’s work reconstructs memory and history, both personal and collective, and his methods and materials comment on the fragility and elusive nature of both.
This exhibition focuses on Danh’s recent works, which document and interpret the genocide that took place in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. This body of work stemmed from a trip in 2008 to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Choeung Ek, the site of the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge; and Angkor Wat, Cambodia’s famous Khmer temple.
To create his unique “chlorophyll prints,” Danh starts by selecting a suitable leaf, then places the leaf on a felt-covered board and rests a photographic negative directly on the leaf. The negative is chosen from Danh’s collection of archival images that he has saved from magazines and other sources. Danh then places a sheet of glass over the leaf and exposes the leaf and negative to sunlight for a variable period of time—sometimes a week, sometimes several days—and lets the photosynthesis process of the sun and the leaf create the images. His most recent work utilizes the Daguerreotype process, the early 19th-century photographic process that also produces a single print that cannot be duplicated.
Binh Danh: In the Eclipse of Angkor is part of the Museum’s ongoing commitment to present work by internationally recognized contemporary artists and to highlight the variety and historical depth of art and artists from diverse cultures and regions represented in the Museum’s permanent collection.
Organized by the Eleanor D. Wilson Museum at Hollins University, Roanoke, Virginia, in collaboration with the artist, Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, Arizona, and Haines Gallery in San Francisco, California.
John James Audubon’s
The Birds of America
Opens November 7, 2010
John James Audubon, Carolina Parrot, from The Birds of America, 1827-38, Havell XXVI, hand-colored aquatint/engraving on Whatman paper, image 33 x 23 ½ in., North Carolina Museum of Art, Transfer from the North Carolina State Library
For the first time, a treasure of art publishing that has belonged to the State of North Carolina for more than a century and a half will be exhibited in its entirety at the North Carolina Museum of Art. In recent decades the Museum’s copy of John James Audubon’s incomparable collection The Birds of America, a four-volume set, has been unavailable for viewing, except for a small number of plates separated from the volumes. Now restored, all four volumes will move to a special gallery devoted to Audubon’s art.
The Birds of America consists of 435 hand-colored prints produced by a combination of engraving and aquatint. Each volume is quite large, about 40 inches high. The ensemble represents a heroic life’s work that required Audubon to search for perfect specimens and undocumented species of birds in the roaring rivers and rough backwoods of a young American nation. Considering himself a naturalist as well as an artist, Audubon set out to depict nearly all of the birds life-size, a considerable challenge when he faced describing species as large as an American flamingo or a great blue heron. Until Audubon, bird illustrators painted their subjects looking stuffed, lifeless, and out of context. Audubon’s birds are vividly portrayed in their natural habitats, surrounded by the flowers or foliage typical of their environment.
Today only about 200 complete sets of The Birds of America exist. North Carolina governor William Alexander Graham had a set purchased for the state in 1846. Many years of stains and minor damage have recently been treated, and the worn bindings have been replaced with new ones, including handmade, marbled endpapers.
In the new Audubon Gallery, the NCMA will present Audubon’s work in the context of his international accomplishments. New cases will be designed for each of the enormous volumes, with hydraulic lifts that allow staff members access so that the pages can be turned regularly. During the five-year course of the exhibition, a majority of the plates will be on view at various intervals.
Organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. This exhibition is also made possible by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.