Taft Museum of Art Announces 2010-11 Exhibition Season

Mixed media, including works in fabric, glass, and paper, create an intriguing exploration of art movements throughout history

Images available for download at http://www.taftmuseum.org/pages/201011img.php

The upcoming exhibition season at the Taft Museum of Art explores artists’ responses to the world around through a variety of different media, from women’s handcrafts that celebrated life’s turning points to innovative techniques used to create elaborate stained glass windows. Even with the more traditional media, political satire is carefully etched on paper and a brash and a bold new style of painting challenged contemporary opinions.

“We chose these exhibitions with an eye toward our long range plan goals – particularly of diversifying and increasing attendance and membership,” says Deborah Emont Scott, director/CEO of the Taft Museum of Art. “The media are so different, the subject matter and history of the works so varied, I’m sure people will want to come back to experience each show, and the Taft, throughout the year.”

The season begins with intricate, hand-cut works from artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, as well as one from the 21st. The Keystone Contemporary series returns with Paperwork. Inspired by historical decoration, wallpaper, and draperies, Cincinnati artist Kristine Donnelly’s laborious hand-cutting transforms screen-printed paper into delicate structures that test the physical tolerance of the material. By printing, cutting, rolling, stretching, and pinning, she pushes paper to its limits.

For this exhibition, Donnelly responded to the interior design of the Taft’s historic house. She has also incorporated abstract details of the Taft’s interior architecture and curtain designs into her new work.

Donnelly’s exhibition coincides with American Elegance: Chintz Appliqué Quilts, 1780–1850, an uncommon quilt exhibition.

“Women made these quilts for their own homes or as gifts for friends, not simply to keep warm. Even though inexpensive blankets or bedspreads are easily acquired today, there are still a lot of people quilting,“ says Nancy Huth, the in-house curator for the exhibition and the Taft’s curator of education. “These artists could be likened to many contemporary quilters or crafters, who create out of a love of the craft.”

During this country’s early decades, inventive women created some of the largest and most colorful quilts ever made in America. These artists carefully cut foliage, flowers, birds, and animals from costly printed, polished cotton, called chintz. With tiny stitches, the quilters painstakingly applied these colorful fabric pieces to neutral cotton backgrounds to craft quilts that were both status symbols and decorative showpieces.

For those who feel a secret empathy with Scrooge and the Grinch, the Taft offers an alternative to Yuletide’s good cheer during the winter. The full set of 18th-century Spanish artist Francisco Goya’s 80 haunting images from Los Caprichos (“The Whims” or “The Fantasies,” published in 1799) confront human hypocrisy, pretense, fear, and irrationality, picturing them in every conceivable form. Goya’s singularly original visions of monsters, specters, corpses, and other bitter or callous beings enact challenges to authority of all kinds, including that of the church and state, while still showing precision and detail.

“I think visitors will find the images in Los Caprichos, though created at the end of the 1700s, incredibly relevant to the current state of the world,” says Scott. “Goya created these controversial works in a time of economic crisis in Spain. He also articulated his political liberalism through his work, questioning the Church, politicians, and other figures of authority.”

If Santa Claus, feather trees, and vintage toys are more to your liking, Antique Christmas at the Taft Museum of Art will also be on view during the holidays. With decorations and programs for the whole family, Antique Christmas is a delight for children of all ages. In the Keystone Gallery, guests will have a chance to see The Colors of Christmas: Victorian Paper Decorations. A favorite craft material of the Victorian era, “chromolithographic scraps,” were used to make homemade ornaments and decorations.

“We are so lucky to have the generous lenders for Antique Christmas,” says Scott. “This year will be great fun for the whole family. Along with hand-blown Italian glass ornaments from the 1940s this year, we’ll have a display of Noah’s Ark toys, complete with animal pairs. We hope the Taft will be a holiday destination for families from around the Tristate.”

Spring begins a bit early in 2011, whenThe American Impressionists in the Garden opens. Bringing together brilliantly colored paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the exhibition features 40 pictures of European and American gardens created by American Impressionists and four bronze sculptures for gardens by American sculptors.

“From Giverny to Boston and Charleston, American painters captured the sensuous pleasures to be found in gardens, ornamenting their canvases with lush blossoms in fuchsia, persimmon, and daffodil yellow,” says Lynne Ambrosini, the Taft’s chief curator.

The interactions between the two artistic fields of gardening and painting make up the subject of this exhibition. Some celebrated American artists included in the exhibition are John Singer Sargent, Childe Hassam, Gari Melchers, Ernest Lawson, and Frederick Frieseke.

For its summer show in 2011, The Taft will host a sort of homecoming with In Company with Angels: Seven Rediscovered Tiffany Windows. The seven 8-foot-high stained-glass windows created by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late 1890s were a commission for a Cincinnati church.

“The Taft will recreate some of the original appearance of the Cincinnati church for which the Tiffany windows were created,” says Ambrosini. “Local congregations and private owners are generously lending some pieces of the richly-patterned, 19th-century art-carved furniture by the Fry family, greatly enhancing the display here.”

“These exhibitions are all from such vastly different media,” says Scott. It’s fantastic to be able to show a real breadth of work, all from different eras and art movements, at the Taft in the coming months.”

August 6–October 24, 2010
Keystone Contemporary: Paperwork: Kristine Donnelly
Like peeling wallpaper in an old house, Kristine Donnelly’s work both conceals and reveals itself, encouraging viewers to examine the intricate layers. “I want my installations and sculptures to challenge the notion that decoration belongs in the background,” she says.

A Cincinnati native, Donnelly graduated with a master of fine arts and a master of arts in art education from the University of Cincinnati in 2009 and received a Summerfair Individual Artist grant the same year. In 2007, she was artist-in-residence at Open Studios in Prague, Czech Republic, funded by a Wolfstein Travel Fellowship from the UC College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. She earned her bachelor of fine arts in painting and bachelor of arts in art history from Indiana University in 2003.

Donnelly currently designs art programs for children and families at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Her work has been exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally, most recently at Carl Solway Gallery in Cincinnati, the University of Tennessee, and Northern Kentucky University.

August 28–November 7, 2010
American Elegance: Chintz Appliqué Quilts, 1780–1850
What often comes to mind when we think of quilts is patchwork. But in this country’s early decades, inventive quilters carefully cut foliage, flowers, birds, and animals from costly printed, polished cotton, called chintz, and with tiny stitches, painstakingly applied these colorful fabric pieces to neutral cotton backgrounds. Embellishing and quilting, these artists created some of the largest and most colorful quilts ever made in America. The exhibition American Elegance: Chintz Appliqué Quilts, 1780–1850, features 20 of these distinctive quilts. Both status symbols and decorative showpieces, quilts such as these might well have been owned by the early inhabitants of the Pike Street home in Cincinnati that later became the Taft Museum of Art. This exhibition was organized by the International Quilt Study Center, University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

November 5, 2010–January 9, 2011
Antique Christmas at the Taft Museum of Art
Baum-Longworth-Sinton-Taft House
The Taft offers “something old, something new” this year during the holidays, with its always-changing display of vintage Christmas trees, ornaments, and toys from the 19th and early 20th centuries. Upon entering the museum galleries, visitors will find a charming dollhouse along with a selection of Noah’s Ark toys complete with animals in pair. Also new this year will be a miniature storefront decorated for the holidays and a display of Italian glass ornaments made in the 1940s. The traditional feather trees will include displays devoted to butterfly, flower, and angel ornaments. Guests can reminisce or discover the artfully crafted Christmas decorations of earlier generations.

November 5, 2010—January 9, 2011
The Colors of Christmas: Victorian Paper Decorations
Keystone Gallery
Discover a favorite craft material of the Victorian era, known by the tongue-twisting name of “chromolithographic scraps.” These brilliantly colored, shiny, printed Christmas cut-outs served as the stickers of their time, inspiring 19th- and early 20th-century homemade ornaments and decorations. Visitors can see ten or more exceptionally large and fine examples of “scraps”; those on view in the Keystone Gallery equal the scale of small paintings.

December 3, 2010–January 30, 2011
Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos
Los Caprichos are likely the great Spanish artist’s most influential works and continue to inspire artists to this day. As both prints and images, theyare decades ahead of their time. Goya pioneered astonishingly innovative etching techniques, visual forms, and artistic themes, anticipating the later movements known as Realism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Surrealism.

The etchings on view are from an early first edition, one of four sets acquired directly from Goya, and belong now to an American private collector. The exhibition is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions, Los Angeles, California, in association with Deneberg Fine Arts, West Hollywood, California. Goya (1746–1826) is one of the world’s greatest artists, as famous for portraits that seemingly penetrate his sitters’ souls as he is for portrayals of the brutality of the Napoleonic Wars in Spain (1808–14). The Taft Museum of Art owns an important oil portrait by Goya, Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, of about 1800.

January 21 – April 17, 2011
Keystone Contemporary
Twice each year, the Taft highlights work by an emerging Tristate artist.

February 18–May 15, 2011
The American Impressionists in the Garden
American impressionist painters turned their attention to the garden, finding it an ideal subject for the study of light and color in landscape, and they were not alone. This exhibition explores the importance of gardens in American art and society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Appreciated for their variations of form, color, style, and silhouette, gardens constituted a key cultural interest of the period. The vogue for gardening expressed itself in the birth of garden clubs, horticultural and hobbyist publications, the establishment of civic and private gardens, new modes of garden design. The relationships between the gardening movement and the fine arts of painting and sculpture is the focus of this exhibition, which is organized by the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art in Nashville, Tennessee.

April 1–June 12, 2011
Turner Watercolors from the Taft Collections
Keystone Gallery
Along with two major oil paintings, one from early in his career and one late, the Taft Museum of Art holds ten watercolors by Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, 1775–1851). Spanning the first half of the 19th century, these watercolors depict landscapes of Switzerland, Germany, England, Scotland, and Italy. Historically, they broke new ground in the artistic fields of book illustration, travel views, and the watercolor medium itself.

June 10–August 14, 2011
In Company with Angels: Seven Rediscovered Tiffany Windows
Seven eight-foot-high stained-glass lancet windows represent seven angels, the whole created by Louis Comfort Tiffany in the late 1890s as a commission for a Swedenborgian church in Cincinnati. In 1903 Louis Comfort Tiffany and his studio completed and installed a set of seven figurative windows in the Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem at the corner of Oak Street and Winslow Avenue in Cincinnati. The church was demolished in 1964 to make way for Interstate 71, and parishioners saved the windows, storing them in various locations throughout Ohio. In 1991, they were purchased for the Swedenborgian church at Temonos, near Philadelphia. They are on a national tour to help pay for their conservation and upkeep. The windows are exquisite examples of Tiffany’s glass art. Tiffany revived old medieval and Renaissance methods of glass painting and invented many new techniques of working with glass: making opalescent, rolled, textured, and flashed glass, among other methods. The windows embody the American Renaissance, a blossoming of the arts and decorative arts between 1876, the year of the American centennial, and 1914. Further, as a site-specific installation for a Cincinnati church, they belong to the history of our region. This exhibition is organized by In Company with Angels, Inc.

June 17–July 31, 2011
Small Paintings
Keystone Gallery
Treasures can as often be found in small frames as in large ones. A group of diminutive oil paintings from the Taft Museum of Art and Cincinnati Art Museum offers an intimate experience of collecting tastes at the turn of the 20th century. Featured are tiny paintings by 19th-century artists from France, Holland, Belgium, and the United States.

The Taft Museum of Art is at 316 Pike St., in downtown Cincinnati. The Museum is open Wednesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults, $6 for students and seniors and free for children under 18. The museum is free to all on Sundays. Call 513-241-0343 or visit the website at www.taftmuseum.org for additional information.