Andover "Mass"terpieces: Celebrating Local Cultural Excellence

The Addison Gallery is pleased to host the Andover Cultural Council reception to honor its 2008 grant award recipients on May 1st from 5:30 to 7 p.m.

Anita Walker, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Cultural Council will be in attendance; Brian T. Allen, Director of the Addison Gallery, and Alan Michel, chairman of the Andover Cultural Council, will welcome guests.

The Andover Cultural Council is a part of a network of 329 Local Cultural Councils administered by the Massachusetts Cultural Council (MCC), a state agency. The MCC provides allocations to each of Massachusetts' 351 cities and towns to support cultural activities. The LCC Program is the largest volunteer-run, grassroots arts funding program in the nation, supporting thousands of community-based projects in the arts, humanities, and interpretive sciences annually.

This year, the Andover Cultural Council funded 18 grants totaling $5,450.

Arts and culture are an important part of what makes our community unique, the Addison Gallery is proud to support the Andover Cultural Council and its outstanding grant recipients.

This year’s grant recipients include Andover Chinese Cultural Exchange • Bancroft Elementary School • Davis Bates & Roger Tincknell • Berkshire Hills Music Academy • Delvena Theater Company • Denise Doucette • Sandra Dukeshire • Greater Lawrence Educational Collaborative • Ruth Harcovitz • Harvard Pro Musica • High Plain Elementary School • Scott Jameson • Gina Murray • Quintessential Brass • John Root • Society for Historically Informed Performances • West Elementary School • Young Opera Company •

The evening will include ACC grant recipients discussing their funded projects, live music and light refreshments, provided by Wine Sense, Atria Marland Place, Cupcake Boutique and Bakery, I Dream of Jeanne Cakes, and Sweet Mimis.

Discovering the Addison Collection

This spring the art department at Phillips Academy is offering Visual Culture: Discovering the Addison Collection, a course focusing on American landscape photography within the context of the Addison Gallery’s collection. Taught by art instructor Elaine Crivelli and museum staff, the enthusiastic students meet regularly at the museum to learn about our current exhibitions, particularly Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke, and common museum practices that they will later apply to their own exhibition in the Addison’s reading room this June.


Here, Kelsey Thorn and Stephanie Schuyler, both in the PA class of 2008, examine potential objects for their show in the museum’s print storage. Students have been introduced to a range of both historical and contemporary photographers. Conversations have ranged from how the photograph acts as documentation, views of the untouched landscape versus man-altered sites, and images that function as conceptual statements. After reviewing a number of images, students were particularly drawn to the work of Ansel Adams, Barbara Bosworth, Henry Callahan, William Christenberry, William Eggleston, Tony Feher, Ralph Steiner and Minor White. They will be conducting research on the aforementioned aritsts for Thursday’s in-class presentations. (If you click on the an artist's name above, then it will link you to the exact works under careful consideration by the students and you can share their experience.)

Moving forward, the students will agree on the exhibition’s theme and finalize their checklist. Today the class will tour Gohlke’s mid-career survey to learn about his process and photographs as well as its design and layout. Stay tuned for an update on these intelligent young curators!

Jaime DeSimone
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow

Frank Gohlke Exhibition Opens This Weekend!

The walls of the entire first floor of the Addison are now filled with the photographs of Frank Gohlke (b. 1942). This thirty-five year retrospective Accommodating Nature: The Photographs of Frank Gohlke opens this Saturday, April 12th and will be on view through July 13th.

With more than eighty photographs, the exhibition reveals how Gohlke explores a variety of landscapes across America - from urban and suburban, to rural and wild - and the complex relationships people have with those landscapes. Interested in more than just the natural features of a landscape, Gohlke uses his camera to investigate the different ways that people interact with their natural environments – how people change the landscape, but also how nature changes them, shaping how they live and work.

Frank Gohlke and the exhibition curator, John Rohrbach, will be at the Addison for a Gallery Talk and Reception on Sunday, April 20th, 2 pm. This event is free and open to the public. We hope you will join us!