Hillstrom Museum of Art exhibitions: Stuart Klipper: The World in a Few States, and Jerome Myers: The Ash Can Artist of the Lower East SideNov 20, 2017 at midnight to Feb 2, 2018 at 11:59 p.m.
The Hillstrom Museum of Art presents Jerome Myers: The Ash Can Artist of the Lower East Side and Stuart Klipper: The World in a Few States, opening Monday, November 20, 2017, with an opening reception that evening from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Two gallery talks will be presented at the Museum in conjunction with the exhibits.
The first gallery talk will be by art historian Dr. Robert L. Gambone, author of the 2017 monograph Jerome Myers: The Ash Can Artist of the Lower East Side (Gambone also wrote texts for the exhibition), and will be during the opening reception, starting at 7:30 p.m. (November 20, 2017).
The second gallery talk will be by artist Stuart Klipper and will be presented Monday, November 27, 2017, starting at 4:00 p.m., as part of a visit to campus during which Klipper will also meet with art students.
Both exhibits are accompanied by a fully-illustrated brochure produced by the Museum, available there free of charge.
As with all programs of the Hillstrom Museum of Art, the exhibitions, their reception, and the related gallery talks in the Museum are free and open to the public.
Painter and printmaker Jerome Myers (1867-1940) was perhaps the most important artist of his generation to explore New York City in depth, and was one of the first to embrace the colorful world of the immigrant communities of the Lower East Side as a principal subject matter. The artist, critically acclaimed in his own day but later neglected due to changing fashions, is reconsidered in this focused exhibit. It aims to place Myers firmly within the circle of Ash Can artists of the early 20th century, and features works borrowed from collections in New York and Minnesota, the latter including the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, along with works owned by the Hillstrom Museum of Art.
The first work to enter the Hillstrom Museum of Art by Myers was an oil, gouache, and pastel Self Portrait of the artist from around 1930, given by Museum namesake Richard L. Hillstrom in 2004. Since that time, the Museum has added six more works by Myers and a work by his wife Ethel Myers (1881-1960), also an artist. Most of these were gifts from Barry Downes, grandson of the artist, and his wife Helene Taub. The two have sought to preserve and resuscitate Myers' reputation, which was maligned by art historical assessments that declared his vision to be merely sentimental instead of truthful exploration that did not prioritize the ugliness that sometimes was present in tenement life and showed beauty when it was found.
Stuart Klipper: The World in a Few States features panoramic photos of each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, by prominent photographer Stuart Klipper. The artist was born in the Bronx in 1941. In addition to living in New York City, he also lived in Stockholm, Sweden in the 1960s before moving in 1970 to Minneapolis, where he still resides.
Klipper has traveled all around the globe to photograph, including both the North Pole and the South Pole. Other major forays have taken him across the Aboriginal outback of Northern Australia, the Biblical deserts of Israel and Sinai, the tropical rain forests of Costa Rica, the far reaches of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego in Chile and Argentina, and across the expanse of Swedish and Norwegian Lapland.
The artist has been the recipient of numerous major grants and fellowships, including two each from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Bush Foundation (St. Paul, Minnesota), and three each from the McKnight Foundation (Minneapolis, Minnesota), the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the National Endowment of the Arts. He has also been the recipient of the U.S. Navy's Antarctic Service Medal. His photographs have been exhibited in and collected by major museums both nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm, Sweden).
For nearly 30 years Klipper has been making photographs across the United States, distilling and crystallizing the defining characteristics of American regions. This ever-expanding photographic treasure trove, which now numbers upwards of 30,000 images, is the basis for The World in a Few States, which was organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP), Minneapolis, and the Hillstrom Museum of Art.
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