Recent Acquisitions on View!

What does a shopping cart, plaster, rope, and twigs have in common? Well artist Charles Long used them to create We Wait a Long Time To See You, To Beat You in 2005 (see right). In the wall text for Out of the Ordinary, one of the five shows in The Discerning Eye, curator Allison Kemmerer wrote “Long loaded the plaster and papier mache sculpture onto a shopping cart and sent both cart and sculpture into the river where it remained for several days.” Removed from the water and now dry, Long’s construction is just one of the recent acquisitions that is currently on view at the Addison.

Other recent acquisitions include a painting by Jennifer Bartlett and numerous woodcut and relief prints by Arthur Wesley Dow. In her recent body of work, Bartlett uses dreams and overheard conversations as sources for her imagery. Standing in front of Sad, a gigantic oil painting (96 x 96 inches!), one can get lost in its frenzied layers of paint until you pull back and recognize the two trees in the foreground and the distant forest.

Switching scale and medium, the Addison also recently acquired a large body of work by Arthur Wesley Dow. Raised in Ipswich, Dow’s prints capture the marshes, meadows, the shanties and bridges found in his beloved hometown. It is remarkable to see how Dow experimented with different techniques and mediums to capture the idyllic scenes. For example, in Ipswich Days: Arthur Wesley Dow and his Hometown one can trace Ipswich Shanties from its early stage as a woodblock to its final color woodcut, the latter which is now part of the Addison’s permanent collection (see left). This exact image recurs in a gelatin silver print taken by the artist as well as an oil painting. The Addison is grateful to the Ipswich Historical Society and Museums, who kindly lent objects to this exhibition and thus made this comparison possible.

The aforementioned objects are on view for the first time at the Addison and we invite you to stop by to take a look at them in person.

Jaime DeSimone
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow