Blog Addison

Explorations of The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues to Continue Through the Winter Season

2012-01-04T13:21:00.013-05:00

Groups from on and off campus, including students, teachers, and many public visitors, have integrated the Addison’s exhibition The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues into explorations, conversations, projects, and curricula throughout the fall, and we’re excited to announce that these collaborations will continue as the exhibition will remain on view through April 15, 2012!

Just as The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues explores the varying perspectives, both historical and contemporary, that compose the evolving narrative of this seminal event, the connections made by various groups compose a larger picture about the possible impact of these explorations on curriculum and historical thinking.

Phillips Academy US History classes explored images by such artists as Alexander Gardner and Winslow Homer as primary source documents and researched themes illuminated in the exhibition. Digging deep into topics such as race relations to the impact of technology on the making of Civil War images, students led their own tours of the exhibition for their peers. (Image credit: Alexander Gardner, Abraham Lincoln in 1863, albumen print, gift of Peter Schrager (PA 1945), Addison Gallery of American Art)

Phillips Academy English classes explored questions of which historical events are commemorated, how, and from whose perspective. Journalism classes connected the roots of photojournalism present in the Civil War photographs and newspapers with the current state of media images and ethics. A philosophy and religious studies class used the work of contemporary artists Kara Walker and Glenn Ligon to spark conversations about oppression and resistance. (Image credit: Kara Walker, Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, from Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, offset lithograph with screenprint, purchased as the gift of Katherine and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971), Addison Gallery of American Art)

Middle and high school history classes from public schools in the Merrimack Valley and Boston have joined us to explore The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues and the related Addison fall exhibition, RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered: Photographs by Paul Fusco to discuss what images can reveal about United States history. One high school’s literature, visual art, and history classes visited concurrently and discussed the subjectivity of recorded history and how we construct our interpretations of these documentations, thereby constructing our own understandings of history.

Teachers and adult groups have also explored and contextualized this exhibition, including a public gallery talk led by Assistant Curator Jaime DeSimone and Phillips Academy Instructor in History and Social Science Christopher Jones. Teachers from the local community and beyond participated in workshops in which they were asked to draw inspiration from the fall exhibitions in designing a commemoration to honor a local, national, or historic event while considering the impact and implications of asking students to participate in history.

We look forward to continuing these conversations and starting many more as The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues continues and as the new winter exhibitions open in late January.

Posted by:
Jamie Kaplowitz,
Education Associate and Museum Learning Specialist

Getting Ready for January

2011-12-12T12:21:00.000-05:00

January is going to be a busy month here at the Addison. Not only are we closing five shows and opening three new shows here, but we’re closing and opening two other shows on the road. To prepare for this flurry of art movement, I’ve been spending the last few weeks working with shippers and contacting art lenders to arrange for their objects to be picked up or returned to them.

The shows closing at the Addison are fairly straight-forward. Christopher Cook’s artwork will be returned to him, and Lorna Bieber’s work will be returned to her. The other shows closing are culled from our permanent collection and the artwork will be returned to our storage areas.

Alexi Worth (b. 1964)

Desktop, 2011

acrylic on nylon mesh

27 x 36 in. (68.6 x 91.4 cm)

Courtesy DC Moore Gallery

The three shows opening at the Addison are another story. Open Windows and Land, Sea, Sky are made up of artwork lent by multiple lenders. This is not a matter of asking each lender to “send” their objects to us by a certain date. The Addison contracts with specialized art shippers to pick up the objects at each individual lender, pack them, if necessary, and bring them here to the Addison. In some cases, the shipper can gather the objects at their warehouse before trucking them here. Sometimes the objects need to come directly here from the lender. Some things can be wrapped in bubble wrap and cardboard, some require crates. It depends on the lender’s wishes and the needs of each object. And, of course, each lender is available only at certain times for their pick up so trying to schedule multiple pick ups using the same truck can be maddening. The John Marin show is also made up of different lenders, but our co-organizer, the Portland Museum of Art, is thankfully handling the logistics of shipping that exhibition to us.

These shows are easy to gather compared to our American Vanguards show which opens at the Neuberger Museum of Art late in the month. This exhibition has artwork from no less than forty-one different lenders scattered across the country. American Vanguards opens January 29th, the same day our Sheila Hicks show closes at the Mint Museum of Craft and Design, where the artwork will be dispersed back to its twenty-five lenders, also widely dispersed.

Doing the math, I realized I’ve had to schedule over ninety different pickups and drops off with our art shippers for January and early February. That’s a lot of e-mails and phone calls that result in a lot of truck mileage! But the results are worth it when a visitor comes to see an exhibition of a group of objects that have never been together before. We encourage you to come see what we've gathered here next month!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Gallery Conversation, Nov 15 - The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues, with Christopher L. Jones

2011-11-14T16:29:00.000-05:00

A discussion of current Addison exhibition "In The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues", with Christopher L. Jones, Phillips Academy Instructor in History and Social Science, and Jaime DeSimone, Addison Assistant Curator. The Gallery Conversation, free and open to the public, begins in the Museum Learning Center at 6:30pm on Tuesday, November 15. For more information please call Jaime DeSimone at (978) 749-4038, or email addison@andover.edu.

Below: Winslow Homer, The Army of the Potomac - A Sharp-Shooter on Picket Duty, 1862, wood engraving on wove paper, purchased as the gift of Warren P. Snyder (PA 1936)

Between 1861 and 1865, Americans engaged in wrenching warfare, pitted against each other on their own soil. This lengthy conflict shaped the country that we are today. Now one hundred and fifty years later, The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues offers a new perspective on this divisive event. Featuring historical and contemporary paintings, prints, photographs, and video drawn from the Addison's collection, this exhibition explores different points of view regarding this ongoing and evolving narrative. From Alexander Gardner’s and Winslow Homer’s eyewitness accounts to works by living artists such as Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues reexamines the realities and fictions of this war, its haunting memories, and its lasting effect on American culture.

Below: Kara Walker, "National Archives Microfilm Publication M999 Roll 34: Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands: Six Miles from Springfield on the Franklin Road," 2009, video, purchased as the gift of Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971)

Addison Education Program Back in Full Swing

2011-11-07T10:51:00.000-05:00

The Addison education department has hit the ground running this fall! Almost as soon as the museum opened, classes from Phillips Academy, Andover, and Lawrence have been zipping in and out, visiting all six of the fall exhibitions.

The entire eighth grade class from the Wetherbee School in Lawrence, MA made their first of two visits, focusing on museum practice. Teachers Lisa Stott, Liz McCleary, and Mike Walsh are leading their students on a collections project journey inspired by Keri Smith’s How to Be An Explorer of the World. Their Addison visit was part of their investigation into how and why collections happen, and what they can tell us about a people, community, or group.

Students explored the current exhibitions with Addison educators Julie Bernson, Jamie Kaplowitz, and Katherine Ziskin considering the collecting and display practices of the museum. After focusing on the strategies behind selecting and sequencing, the Wetherbee eighth graders wrote their own wall text for objects in the exhibitions, often working to tell alternative stories to those told by the curators. Wetherbee students will be visiting again for a curating workshop in the Addison’s Museum Learning Center before they begin to design and install an exhibition from their collections in the Wetherbee School’s Media Center.

The Addison Education Department is collaborating on another project inspired by the museum’s collections and exhibitions and by Keri Smith’s book! Andover’s High Plain Elementary art teacher Bette Jean Krieger and Katherine Ziskin, Addison Education Fellow, have embarked on a project with the entire High Plain fourth grade. The first leg of the project took place in October with a true “field trip” to the A.V.I.S. trail behind the school. Connecting with the fourth grade curriculum on regions of the United States including climate, geography, and natural resources, Ms. Krieger and Ms. Ziskin created a project based on exploring the “field” of the student’s own backyard. Students hiked the A.V.I.S. trail, collecting materials, photographing observations, mapping the terrain, and writing about the landscape that they encountered.

Next, High Plain fourth graders will visit the Addison’s current exhibitions to investigate how artists across time have represented the land as the students prepare to create an exhibition about the Andover landscape using their interpretations of their field notes and photographs.

As the students are pouring in, so, too, are teachers who are attending t the Fall Teacher Workshop, How do Images inform Memory?, on November 16, 4:00pm-6:30pm. To request the Fall Teacher Guide or more information on the Addison’s education programs, please contact Kait Ziskin.

- Katherine Ziskin, Education Fellow for School & Community Collaborations

The Ships Are Back

2011-10-31T11:16:00.000-05:00

The first objects we removed from the museum to make way for our renovations in 2008 were the model ships that graced our lower hallway. Finally, after over three years of being safely packed away in storage, the ships are back on view.

The ships actually returned to the museum from off-site storage over the summer with the bulk of our collections. They've been tucked away in our on-site vaults. Their large glass display cases, however, returned just recently. We held off bringing the cases back until now so that we had unobstructed access in our lower hallway, not only to move the larger crates that contained our returning collections, but also for the equipment contractors had to bring through during the roof replacement project.

Once the cases were unwrapped, we had to thoroughly clean them inside and out before the ships could be installed. I had the "pleasure" of climbing inside a couple of the cases to wipe down the glass and remove dust and debris from the bases (see right). It was claustrophobic, but worth the trouble. The ships themselves travelled fairly well despite the fragility of their tiny parts and the brittleness of their aging rigging. We dusted the ships off with small, soft brushes, repositioned some of the loose hatches and lifeboats that had shifted during travel. And then, very carefully, we smoothly slid each ship back into its case. This required multiple sets of eyes to make sure no appendages caught on the cases' narrow openings. It was not quite as difficult as, say, putting ships into bottles, but challenging nonetheless.

So the ships are finally home. I truly understand how popular these are with our visitors now. The lower hallway could not be closed off so the public was free to roam while we were installing the ships in their cases. People stopped and watched, fascinated by our work and the intricate details of the models. One visitor said, "Thank goodness the ships are back!" Our thoughts exactly!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

80th Birthday and Reopening Public Reception a Success

2011-10-17T10:36:00.000-05:00

A big THANK YOU to all who were able to attend our 80th birthday and reopening celebration this past Friday, October 14th. A special thanks to Phillips Academy vocal ensemble the Yorkies, who serenaded us with their rendition of "Happy Birthday."

There were well over 600 excited people at the reception, during which we celebrated the reopening, the opening of six exhibitions, and toasted the Addison's 80th with champagne and cupcakes. Among the guests were some of the artists whose work is currently on view, including Christopher C. Cook, who can be seen here (at far left) introducing his work to a new generation.

Also among the guests was Lorna Bieber, whose Fractured Narratives exhibition can be seen in the background as she (center) chats with Julie Bernson, Director of Education for the Addison (at left) and guest.

Opening Reception and Eightieth Birthday Celebrations October 14

2011-10-12T13:09:00.000-05:00

On October 8, we once again welcomed the public after an extended summer closure for the restoration of our historic glass roof. In celebration of the reopening and of the museum’s 80^th birthday, the Addison is inviting the public to attend a festive evening, free of charge, on Friday, October 14, 6:30–8:30 pm. For additional information, please call 978-749-4015.

Addison supporters are invited to join museum Director Brian Allen in a champagne toast to the Addison’s eightieth birthday at 5:30pm on Friday, October 14, just before the opening. For reservations or to join Friends of the Addison, please call Caroline Pisani at 978.749.4128.

October 14 also sees the opening of three new exhibitions - for images, please visit the Exhibitions page of our website.

80 @ 80 - In honor of the Addison's 80th birthday, this exhibition presents objects by about eighty artists and celebrates the range and depth of the museum's permanent collection. These artists range from well-loved favorites by artists such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and John Singer Sargent whose work first graces the Addison’s walls upon its 1931 opening, to twentieth-century treasures by Edward Hopper, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O’Keeffe, Frank Stella, and Robert Mangold, to exciting recent acquisitions of works by colonial silversmith Jacob Hurd and contemporary artists Jennifer Bartlett and Mark Bradford, to name a few.

The Civil War: Unfolding Dialogues – Featuring historical and contemporary paintings, prints, photographs and video drawn from the Addison’s collection, this exhibition explores the ways that artists across time have understood and contributed to the ongoing and evolving narrative of the Civil War. From Alexander Gardner’s and Winslow Homer’s eyewitness accounts to works by living artists such as Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, Unfolding Dialogues reexamines the realities and fictions of this war, its haunting memories, and its lasting effect on American culture.

RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered: Photographs by Paul Fusco – Following his assassination, the body of Robert F. Kennedy was carried by train from his memorial service in New York City to Washington, D.C. for burial at Arlington National Cemetery. Hundreds of thousands of mourners lined the railway tracks to pay their final respects. Photographer Paul Fusco, on assignment for Look Magazine, took some 2,000 photographs from inside the train. Heralded as one of the most powerful and affecting bodies of work in photographic reportage, Fusco’s RFK series is an incomparable document of this tragic moment in United States history.

Add these to current exhibitions Clearstory Squares and Unitych Variations: Paintings by Christopher C. Cook –Clearstory Squares and Fractured Narratives: Works by Lorna Bieber, and you'll find there is a lot to celebrate at the Addison! Please join us this Friday - we look forward to seeing old friends and meeting new ones.

Shipping Hicks, Again

2011-10-10T10:01:00.000-05:00

Our travelling exhibition, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, has opened at its third and final venue at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, NC. I wrote a post a while back about the challenges of traveling a show of this type. I was still trying to figure out how we were going to get this show to the places it was going. Now, as we near the end of the show’s run, I think I have managed to answer many of the questions I was asking at the end of that post.

Trucking the crates between venues required two tractor trailers: easily the largest show volume-wise the Addison has ever traveled. We were required to have a courier on one of the trucks, and I rode with the show from Philadelphia to Charlotte. Loading the trucks at the end of the show’s second venue at the ICA, Philadelphia was interesting, as their loading dock could not accommodate tractor trailers. We had no choice but to load in the sidewalk outside their front doors. Needless to say, getting some of the show’s massive crates down the sidewalk and up into the truck’s lift gate was indeed a challenge (see upper left). We left Philadelphia late afternoon and pulled into the Mint’s loading dock early the following morning. Sadly, I didn’t get much shut-eye despite the truck’s surprisingly ample sleeping quarters.

I’ve also travelled to each venue to oversee installation at the beginning and packing at the end. Installations were adventures, as each crew at each museum had to figure out the best way to display the objects in their unique settings. Just trying to figure out how to hang things from their ceilings required considerable planning, thought, and effort each time, while Sheila herself added her advice as to how things should look.

The Mint’s installation is certainly different from the other two. I’m always amazed how each museum interprets the same show for a unique experience. But it is beautiful, thanks to the Mint’s gorgeous new galleries, and, of course, the art itself. Sheila Hicks: 50 Years is up until January 29th when I return again to pack it up one last time and return the objects to their lenders. I encourage you to see it while you can!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Collection Is Home, Safe and Sound

2011-10-05T14:36:00.000-05:00

It has been a long six months watching the cranes outside lift huge structural beams and crates of glass atop our museum for our roof replacement project. But it did provide us with an opportunity to finish another project we had as a result of our renovations: the movement of the permanent collection. In earlier blog posts (click here and here), I wrote about the challenges of packing and moving our art collection off site in 2008 in preparation for handing our building over to contractors. Now, some three years later, the collection has finally returned.

Though a small fraction of the collection was brought back for our fall 2010 opening, the bulk of it remained off site. With our renovated storage areas ready to receive artwork (see right), we started transporting the collection back in early April. Each week, I’d drive down to FAE, Boston, where our artwork was being stored, oversee the truck being loaded, and follow the truck back to the museum. We would then offload at our new loading dock. Bringing the objects into the museum was far simpler than moving out, as everything had to be loaded on the trucks in 2008 from ground level using the truck’s lift gate. And, of course, we had left most everything packed from when we moved out, so repacking things for this trip was kept to a minimum.

It took twenty-six truck loads to bring our nearly 17,000 objects back to the museum (see left, one of our emptied storage areas at FAE). My colleagues and I then had to carefully unpack and inventory each and every object, properly store it, and update its location on the database. Depending on the size and type of the objects, some truckloads could bring back hundreds of objects, some only a couple of dozen. Thankfully, with the exception of two large outdoor sculptures that simply won’t fit through our doors, our new storage areas absorbed everything with ample room for growth.

Now, the new glass roof crowning our original Platt building is complete, artwork is being hung on the gallery walls again, and we’re set to reopen to the public Saturday, October 8th. For me, however, I can rest easy knowing that the Addison’s collection is finally home again, safe, sound, and dry, within the museum’s walls.

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Roof Update and a Look Ahead

2011-07-21T11:55:00.001-05:00

Workmen cleaning the glass panels of the original roof, working above one of the horizontal beams that will support the new roof over the existing roof structure.

When the Addison reopens on October 8, the entire museum will have been renovated from top to bottom. The final phase of construction at the museum – the construction of a new glass roof to overlay the old – is progressing without a hitch, and will be completed in time for the Addison’s 80th birthday celebration this fall. Mark your calendars now for our opening reception on October 14, and black tie gala on November 3 (and watch our website and Facebook page for more information).

A 90-ton crane lifts one of the prefabricated metal components that will support the glass overlay, while workmen restore and re-point the chimney.

The completion of this new roof overlay is the exciting last step in preserving and restoring the Addison Gallery’s historic, classical revival building, designed by architect Charles A. Platt and opened in 1931. For the last 80 years, the museum’s glass roof has contributed to the essential character of the building’s exterior appearance and has enhanced the experience of viewing art by allowing UV-filtered natural light to fill the second floor galleries.

The glass panels are meticulously fitted, one by one, into the new metal roof structure.

The innovative approach to protecting and preserving the original roof by constructing a new, state-of-the-art glass overlay roof will allow the continuation of the viewing experience envisioned by the building’s architect. It is with pleasure that the school and the Addison have worked together to assure the retention of Charles Platt’s elegant architecture for generations to come.

The installation of the glass continues on the north side of the Addison roof as workmen prepare the lower face of the roof for its metal cladding.

WEAVING A WEB OF COLLABORATION, CURRICULUM, AND FRIENDSHIP

2011-06-20T10:52:00.000-05:00

We’re not done with you yet, Sheila Hicks! While the Addison exhibition Sheila Hicks: 50 Years (which has since moved on to the ICA in Philadelphia) provided a well of inspiration for many students in Andover, Lawrence, and far beyond, two classes have integrated weaving into their entire school year!

To right: Cardboard loom weavings by Oliver School first graders

Mary Guerrero’s first grade students from the Henry K. Oliver School in Lawrence started out on small cardboard looms, soon moving to collaborative looms made from painting stretcher bars (just like Sheila Hicks’s own mini-loom!). More recently they have been working with artist Kate Delaney on a large counterbalance loom that is reminiscent of those used in the Lawrence textile mills. Consistently thinking outside the box has included experimenting with materials including yarn, pipe-cleaners, lanyard, sticks, and plastic – all while connecting weaving to writing, math, social studies, and local history.

Meanwhile, in Mrs. O and Miss Sarah’s Kindergarten Prep class at The Children’s Place down the street from the Addison, the study of textiles has contributed to numerous other topics including the city of Paris, France (where Sheila Hicks lives!), spider webs, baskets, and spheres (also part of the year-long Great Shape Search curriculum). Recently Kindergarten Prep students designed and worked on hula hoop weavings (which also inspired the same in Mary Guerrero’s class) and made game boards by weaving colored paper.

Spring-time meetings between the Kprep and Oliver teachers and Addison education staff were mutually inspirational and infected the students as well. What if the two classes worked in collaboration? We could make weavings together and exhibit them for parents and the community! So, on June 16th Kprep met Room 203 from the Oliver School and the collaborative creative energy began to flow.

To left: Oliver student gets a tour of Kprep’s weaving projects from her new buddy

Room 203 boarded a big yellow bus, stopping first at The Children’s Place at Phillips Academy. The first graders were paired with a buddy in Kprep who became a tour guide, sharing all of their weavings and other classroom projects.
-Did you see this one? We made that!
-You take one, you put it on, and you weave it.

Above: Fence weaving outside The Children’s Place at Phillips Academy

After our classroom tour, we filed outside where the buddies began to weave the fence around The Children’s Place playground. We experimented with techniques and helped each other with ideas:
-We made a X from here. And I kind of tied it from here. We tied it together. This one I twisted.
-Hey, you could stretch it to make it longer.

At right: Collaborative weaving in the Addison Museum Learning Center

After a picnic lunch in front of the Addison, the fast friends filed into the Addison’s Museum Learning Center to collaboratively weave on cardboard looms. The first graders helped warp the looms and all the students took turns weaving.
- He does the under and I do the over.
- We’re weaving from both ends so we can weave together.
- We doubled it so it won’t fall apart.

Although it was hard for the new friends to say goodbye after such an exciting day of sharing their weaving ideas and techniques, the two classes will meet again at a reception for an exhibit of their individual and collaborative work at Café Verde in Lawrence. Parents and community members are invited to meet and see the students’ work at Café Verde and visit the other sites where the students’ work is exhibited.

Public Reception: June 23, 6pm-7pm - Café Verde 275 Essex Street, Lawrence

Exhibition: July 1 – August 20 - Lawrence Heritage State Park Visitors Center 1 Jackson Street, Lawrence

Beginning June 22 until they last: Oliver School Tree Weavings, corner Haverhill and Lawrence Streets, Lawrence

Currently on view until they last: The Children’s Place Fence Weaving, 10 Abbott Street, Andover, MA

Collection Dialogues: Conservation Discoveries and Quandaries

2011-06-03T08:39:00.000-05:00

Braving tornado warnings on Wednesday night, the audience for our second Collection Dialogue, Conservation Discoveries and Quandaries, had a close-up view of some of the conservation successes, disappointments, and challenges facing objects in the Addison collection. Curators Allison Kemmerer and Susan Faxon shared over a dozen works from the collection, from iconic oil paintings such as John La Farge’s Sketch of Maua, Apia, One of our Boat Crew, which was featured in the recent La Farge show this winter, to multimedia works on paper and album pages of Peter Sekaer’s photographs.

Each work posed a unique set of questions, including what to do when a figure had been painted over by the artist but was, after many years, bleeding through the top layer of paint; how often to exhibit fragile watercolors that fade when exposed to light; and how to restore a painting that had been cleaned overzealously in a previous conservation effort.

One of the most memorable stories involved George Inness’s The Coming Storm. Inness’s son George Inness Jr., who was also a painter, had painted a large canvas depicting a pair of oxen which he had left with his father. Unbeknownst to the son, George Sr. appropriated this canvas and created his own landscape, thus obliterating his son’s work. Years later, George Jr. saw his father’s painting The Coming Storm on exhibition. The light hit the painting in such a way that the underpainting of the oxen was clearly visible. Allison and Susan showed an x-ray of the painting that revealed the painting underneath, and with close inspection, the audience for our Collection Dialogue was also able to see the outline of the team of oxen in The Coming Storm.

We hope you’ll join us for our final Collection Dialogue, American and British Silver, which offers another opportunity to closely explore another aspect of the Addison’s collection:

Thursday 16 June 3:00 pm
American and British Silver
with Brian Allen, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director
Be among the first to see a newly acquired teapot that belonged to Phillips Academy founders Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips and Samuel Phillips, Jr., along with other examples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century silver

Collection Dialogues are free and open to the public and are held in the Museum Learning Center in the Addison’s Sidney R. Knafel Wing. Please enter through the Elson Art Center.

For more information, please visit our website.

Collection Dialogues: The Addison’s Architectural Legacy

2011-05-24T09:38:00.000-05:00

On May 18th, Susan Faxon, Associate Director and Curator of Art Before 1950, presented The Addison’s Architectural Legacy, the first in a series of three Collection Dialogues. Beginning with a discussion of the architecture and landscape planning of the Addison’s architect Charles Platt, who was also responsible for the sweeping redesign of the Phillips Academy campus from 1923-1932, Susan led us through the design decisions for the Addison’s expansion and restoration by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, completed in 2009. Her presentation concluded with a discussion of the current roof project by Robert Olson and Associates.

Along with drawings by the architects involved in the Addison’s restoration and expansion and the roof project, Susan presented oil paintings from the Addison collection by Platt, including Cornish Garden (A Garden in Snow), shown above, which reveals Platt’s continuing interest in the relationship between landscape and architecture. Photographs taken by Platt during visits to Italy shed light on the design aesthetic of the classically-inspired architect whose vision shaped not only the Addison and the Andover campus, but the Freer Gallery of Art, the Lyman Allen Museum, the campuses of the University of Illinois, Rochester, and Dartmouth, and numerous notable homes and villas.

We hope you’ll join us for our two upcoming Collection Dialogues:

Wednesday 1 June 6:30 pm
Conservation Discoveries and Quandaries
with Allison Kemmerer, Curator of Art After 1950 and of Photography
A “beneath-the-surface” examination of the intriguing and complicated conservation challenges facing curators, using examples from the Addison collection such as paintings by Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, watercolors by Winslow Homer, and albums by John LaFarge and Peter Sekaer

Thursday 16 June 3:00 pm
American and British Silver
with Brian Allen, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director
Be among the first to see a newly acquired teapot that belonged to Phillips Academy founders Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips and Samuel Phillips, Jr., along with other examples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century silver

For more information, please visit our website.

Taking the Show on the Road

2011-05-19T10:11:00.001-05:00

In spite of the galleries being closed, the Addison’s education team has been busy as ever with preK-12 classes from Phillips Academy, Andover, Lawrence and even as far as Exeter and Everett. Whether in the Museum Learning Center or on the road, we continue to use the extraordinary resources of the Addison to foster and support creative teaching practices while complementing and connecting various academic subjects.

In the Museum Learning Center

Using works from the permanent collection, Phillips Academy history, English, art, and theater classes have explored everything from the Civil Rights Movement, to the history of photography, to ships and pirates. The Andover Youth Services Girls Leadership group explored gender identity while Exeter, NH High School investigated class identity during their visits to the MLC. The wall drawings of Sol LeWitt were the inspiration for a teacher workshop that demonstrated how process documentation can further both teacher and student learning. And, teachers from as far as Beijing participated in the “Museums as Center of Integrative Learning” session at PA’s Global Education Conference.

In the Community

Artist Wendy Ewald continues to be an inspiration to us as we take photography and writing projects into schools and communities. Second and fourth grade classes at the Frost School in Lawrence have been working on “Best Part of Me” projects featuring self-made photographs of their favorite body parts with accompanying poetry and prose that celebrate their bodies and minds. “Who I Am/What I Do” was our theme at the Andover Bread Loaf Writing Conference at Lawrence Community Works/Movement City on Saturday. As the high school participants made photographs that reflected both their identities and actions, we also brainstormed about public places where we might display mural-size enlargements of the images.

Sheila Hicks is another artist who continues to be an inspiration, even though her exhibition has since traveled to the ICA in Philadelphia . A weaving studio has been set up in the waiting area at Essex Art Center, so parents and their children can weave together on a community loom. Two classrooms which have caught the weaving bug are coming together in June to share their weaving projects, join forces in a collaborative artwork, and create an exhibit for parents and community members. Look for more information and an invitation to see weavings from The Children’s Place in Andover and the Oliver School in Lawrence – and perhaps contribute to collaborative projects in public places!

2011-05-05T09:15:00.001-05:00

Collection Dialogues
Museum Learning Center, Addison Gallery of American Art

The Addison is pleased to announce a Special Series of Collection Dialogues, free and open to the public, to be held in the Museum Learning Center in the Addison’s Sidney R. Knafel Wing.

Wednesday, May 18, 6:30pm
The Addison’s Architectural Legacy
with Susan Faxon, Associate Director and Curator of Art Before 1950
A discussion of the confluence of three architectural projects: the original 1931 Addison Gallery of American Art building by Charles Platt, the recent addition by Centerbrook Architects and Planners, and the roof renovation by Robert Olson & Associates.

Wednesday, June 1, 6:30pm
Conservation Discoveries and Quandaries
with Allison Kemmerer, Curator of Art After 1950 and of Photography
A "beneath-the-surface" examination of the intriguing and complicated conservation challenges facing curators, using examples from the Addison collection such as paintings by Thomas Eakins, Eastman Johnson, and James McNeill Whistler, watercolors by Winslow Homer, and albums by John LaFarge and Peter Sekaer.

Thursday, June 16, 3:00pm
American and British Silver
with Brian Allen, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director
Be among the first to see a newly acquired teapot that belonged to Phillips Academy founders Phoebe Foxcroft Phillips and Samuel Phillips, Jr., along with other examples of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century silver.

Museum Learning Center Access
Entrance to the Museum Leaning Center is through Elson Art Center across from the Andover Inn. Enter by Kemper Auditorium and proceed to the top of the stairs. For wheelchair access, enter by the loading dock through the metal mesh door across from the Chapel Avenue parking lot.

Replacing our historic glass roof

2011-03-04T09:05:00.000-05:00

As you may have read in the Andover Townsman and elsewhere, when our current exhibitions come down at the end of this month, the Addison will take a more extended break than we typically do in the summertime. From March 28, 2011 through mid-October 2011, the Addison will close for the final phase of renovation, the replacement of the museum’s historic glass roof. The museum’s recently added Museum Learning Center will remain open during that time; a schedule of educational programs and events, as well as an occasional look at the roof replacement progress, will be available on the Addison’s web site, www.addisongallery.org, as well as its Facebook page.

While the Addison’s 2008-2010 renovation and expansion included repairs to the museum’s 80-year-old roof, once construction was well under way, it became clear that more extensive treatment of the entire roof would be necessary in order to safeguard the museum’s building and its collection. Throughout last spring and summer, a meticulous engineering study of the roof’s condition and examination of all feasible repair and replacement options was carried out. This has resulted in a comprehensive and innovative approach that will maintain the museum’s glass roof and assure long-term protection.

Addison staff and Phillips Academy leadership agreed to make temporary repairs to the existing roof to enable a September 2010 opening for the museum. By doing so, the Addison was able to maintain its 2010-11 exhibition schedule, which included two traveling exhibitions, Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, and John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891. The full roof replacement was then scheduled for spring and summer of 2011, with an extended summer closure that would have minimum impact on the Addison’s prior commitments.

The Addison, designed by architect Charles Platt, opened in 1931. For the last 80 years, the museum’s glass roof has contributed to the essential character of the building’s exterior appearance and has enhanced the experience of viewing art by allowing UV-filtered natural light to fill the second floor galleries. It is gratifying and exciting that the school and the Addison have worked together to assure the retention of Charles Platt’s elegant and masterful architecture for generations to come.

We encourage you to come visit the Addison in advance of March 28 to enjoy the exhibitions currently on view.

The Importance of Context

2011-02-11T16:03:00.007-05:00

The Addison has an extensive collection of images in multiple formats that document, examine, and comment on the events and narratives of the American Civil War. These objects and images are viewed regularly in the new Museum Learning Center to explore myriad topics, placing these images into varying contexts to investigate the power of the selecting and sequencing of images inherent in the curatorial process.

In each series below, the center image depicts Union officers Studying the Art of War, from Alexander Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Books of the War. How does the meaning of this image change when placed in the following contexts?

What story does each grouping of images tell?

What can we learn from images about the impact of the Civil War on gender roles and expectations?
The first series of images places the Gardner photograph between two Winslow Homer illustrations from Harper’s Weekly, the newspaper circulated in Northern states: Women Making Havelocks for the Volunteers and The Empty Sleeve at Newport. In this context, the images speak to representations in the media, forms of documentation, and the shifting roles and responsibilities of women during the war.

How is history documented, remembered, and presented?
The narrative of the Gardner photograph is immediately altered by placing it between two post-war images. On one side is an oil painting by Edward Lamson Henry, a Union Quartermaster’s supply transporter, who spent eight years compiling sketches made on site into this 1876 painting, City Point, Virginia, Headquarters of General Grant. On the right is a contemporary print by Kara Walker, who reframes and reexamines Civil War-era illustrations printed in Harper’s Weekly by overlaying caricatured silhouettes of African Americans that create a dialogue with the documented narrative. In this new context, we can explore the impact of the particular intentions and perspectives from which history is presented.

How do the intentions of Civil War photographers compare to those of subsequent and recent photojournalists?
In the final sequence, when placed between a version of Dorothea Lange’s iconic Migrant Mother photograph from the Great Depression and Stanley Forman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph from a Boston bus desegregation rally, the Gardner photograph prompts exploration of the ways in which the intentions of the photographers, editors, publishers, and audiences factor into the images’ creation and selection for publication.

The Addison’s education department is creating Portfolio Guides to assist educators and students in navigating the Addison’s vast collection and suggest thematic connections between the rich collection resources and classroom curriculum. These guides can be downloaded from the Museum Learning Center website.

These approaches are not relegated to classes alone; rather, the Museum Learning Center creates the opportunity for all audiences to explore images from the Addison’s collection through teacher professional development workshops, adult group visits, and public programs open to all members of the community. Information about upcoming public programs can be found on the Addison’s website.

Posted by:
Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow and Museum Learning Specialist

IMAGES, TOP ROW: Winslow Homer, The War - Making Havelocks for the Volunteers, from Harper's Weekly, June 29, 1861, wood engraving, gift of Thomas E. Weil, Jr. (PA 1966); Alexander Gardner, Studying the Art of War, scene at Fairfax Court-House, from Gardner's Photographic Sketch Book of the War, Volume I, June, 1863, albumen print mounted on wove paper, museum purchase, Collection Care and Enhancement Fund; Winslow Homer, Our Watering-Places—The Empty Sleeve at Newport, from Harper's Weekly, 1865, 9 3/8 in. x 13 13/16 in., wood engraving on wove paper, museum purchase.
MIDDLE ROW: Edward Lamson Henry, City Point, Virginia, Headquarters of General Grant, 1873 , 30 1/8 in. x 60 1/4 in., oil on canvas, museum purchase; Alexander Gardner (see caption above); Kara Walker, Exodus of Confederates from Atlanta, from Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War (Annotated), 2005, 39 in. x 53 in., offset lithograph with screenprint, purchased as the gift of Katherine and Stephen C. Sherrill (PA 1971).
BOTTOM ROW: Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, neg. 1936, print c. 1950, 11 in. x 14 in., gelatin silver print, museum purchase; Alexander Gardner (see caption above); Stanley Forman, Soiling of Old Glory, Boston City Hall, 1976, 7 1/2 in. x 9 1/2 in., gelatin silver print, museum purchase.
ALL IMAGES FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE ADDISON GALLERY OF AMERICAN ART, PHILLIPS ACADEMY, ANDOVER, MA

The Boston Globe on John La Farge

2011-02-04T09:48:00.000-05:00

On Sunday, the Boston Globe's Sebastian Smee featured our latest exhibition, JOHN LA FARGE’S SECOND PARADISE: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890-1891. To find retreat from the seemingly unending cold and snow that has blanketed New England, Smee advises his readers, "if you can’t make the Tahiti trip, the next best thing has to be a visit to the Addison Gallery of American Art, in Andover, where a small exhibition pungent with the fragrance of hibiscus and frangipani opened last weekend."

We invite you to read the article – and to take a break from the cold to view this tropical exhibition before it closes on March 27.

Terrific Press Coverage

2011-01-18T14:20:00.000-05:00

While we work behind the scenes to set up our next exhibition, John La Farge’s Second Paradise: Voyages in the South Seas, 1890–1891, we thought you might enjoy a look at some of the terrific press coverage the Addison has received over the past few months. Enjoy, and “see” you next week!

The Boston Phoenix, 1/11/11, Artists probe atrocities, the atmosphere, and yarn (includes Sheila Hicks: 50 Years exhibition)

The Boston Phoenix, 12/29/10, 10 must-visit New England art exhibits for early 2011 (includes our upcoming La Farge exhibition)

The Boston Globe, 12/26/10, Broader outlooks at Mass. museums

The Boston Globe, 11/14/10, Sheila Hicks, weaving her own fabric of modernism

AOL’s City’s Best, 10/7/10, Addison Gallery Re-Opens American Art Collection

Andover Townsman, 9/10/10, Addison Gallery Open Once Again

Shipping Hicks

2010-12-03T06:00:00.002-05:00

Our Sheila Hicks: 50 Years exhibition is up now for all to see. But our work with it is far from over.

The show will be travelling to two more venues: the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia (March 25, 2011-August 7, 2011), and the Mint Museum of Craft + Design in Charlotte, North Carolina (October 1, 2011-January 29, 2012). Just as it was my job to arrange the shipment of all the objects from the show's twenty-five lenders to the Addison, it's my job to figure out how to get the show to each of the venues, and then disperse its objects at the end of the tour back to their owners. This is not an easy task.

For example, anyone visiting the exhibition will note that while many of the objects are small, there are some that are rather large. The crates used for shipping these objects had to be even larger. The largest crate we received measures six feet high by three feet deep by fifteen feet long, about two feet shorter than a Cadillac Escalade (see left, with yours truly pictured for scale). Granted, the crate weighed less than the car, but it was too large to move through our galleries. We technically could fit it on our elevator with about an inch to spare, but there was not enough space outside the elevator doors to move it in or out. We ended up unpacking it inside our loading dock area and carefully lugging each of its object's twenty-three components up two floors to the galleries. Very complex logistics were required to ship this here from Europe. Due to the schedule of flights with cargo holds large enough to accommodate it, the crate had to be delivered to the museum one morning at 1:30AM. I was one of the poor souls who was on site to receive it, but that was nothing compared to the long journey the courier who travelled with it had to suffer!

Working with a fine arts shipper, I'll figure out how we'll get this, and the rest of the crates, to the next venues. How many trucks will we need? How large? Can any of the crates be stacked? Will there be enough space to ship the show's cases and pedestals? And, of course, can the venues accommodate large trucks at their loading docks and can we maneuver the large crates around their galleries?

Sometimes, these questions are only finally answered at the end of the show's run, many times through trial, and hopefully, very little error. But the more we can figure out in the advance, the smoother the shipments and installations go. And that is what is best for the art!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Addison on MCTV

2010-11-23T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Addison on Methuen Community Television!

Wednesday, November 24 at 6:30 PM and 10 PM

Watch Thom Gradzewicz's segment on the Addison, filmed in September, on Comcast Channel 22 in Methuen or Verizon Channel 33 in Lawrence, North Andover, and North Reading. Click here for more information, including future air dates.

Exhibition Opening Reception - Nov. 5

2010-11-04T12:43:00.001-05:00

Opening Reception

Friday 5 November
5:00 – 7:30 PM

Please join us for the opening of our new exhibitions:

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years

The first museum retrospective devoted to Sheila Hicks, a pioneering artist known for successfully navigating the terrain between art, design, and architecture in works composed of fiber and color. »MORE

Please join us in Kemper Auditorium on Saturday 6 November at 2 PM when we host a special conversation with exhibition artist Sheila Hicks and co-curators Joan Simon and Susan Faxon!

Artist's Project:Tristan Perich

Inspired by the aesthetics of math and physics, Perich works with simple forms and complex systems to create both his music and art. »MORE

At top: Cristobal Zañartu, photograph of components of Sheila Hick's May I Have This Dance?, 2002-3, in the courtyard of Hicks's Cour de Rohan studio, 2003.
At bottom: Tristan Perich, Machine Wall Drawing, 2010-09-15, 11:53 AM to 2010-09-28, 3:06 PM (detail), ink, 120 x 100 inches

The event is free and open to the public. For directions, click here.

Working on the Next One

2010-10-11T06:00:00.000-05:00

Well before Inside, Outside, Upstairs, Downstairs: the Addison Anew opened, in fact, years before, we began planning for the exhibitions that would follow it.

Sheila Hicks: 50 Years, opening November 5th and prominently displayed on our website, began its planning stages over half a decade ago when our Curators began working with the artist to start research for the book, create the checklist, and find venues to take the exhibition. As the artwork was being hung in time for Inside, Outside's September 7th opening, I was contacting our lenders to Hicks to arrange shipment of their objects here and our Preparators were sorting out installation needs and having pedestals and mounting hardware designed.

While the Preparators and I were working on Hicks, the Curators were looking even further ahead...they were meeting publication deadlines for our American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky, de Kooning and their Circle, 1927-1942, opening next year, while they sent paperwork to lenders for our Whistler's Bridge: Battersea Bridge in the Art of Whistler, opening in 2013.

We plan our exhibition schedule years in advance to make sure there are no conflicts not only during the exhibitions' schedules, but also during the exhibitions' planning stages. And just because a show has closed here at the Addison doesn't mean it is over...Hicks, American Vanguards, and Whistler will each be travelling to two additional venues during their runs. As the person who typically travels with our shows for their installations and deinstallations, I need to make sure I don't happen to need to close one show in Philadelphia while opening another in London at the same time!

So when you come see Inside, Outside, Upstairs, Downstairs: the Addison Anew, keep in mind that the staff here are already working on the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that one!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

First Day of Classes!

2010-09-30T11:00:00.021-05:00

And what a day it was!
The Addison Education Department has expanded by one. Namely, me! Hello, I’m Katherine Ziskin and I just began my stint as Education Fellow for School and Community Collaborations. I will be working primarily with schools and community groups in Andover and Lawrence as well as many other surrounding areas. We now have 50% more staff to accommodate the expanding interest in bringing classes and taking part in all of the opportunities that the new Addison makes possible.

September 16th was a busy day for the Addison Education Department as the first classes to visit the renewed, improved Addison came bounding up the front steps.

Our first class in the new Addison Gallery was the Kindergarten Prep class from The Children’s Place, a Bright Horizons center located on the campus of Phillips Academy. Mrs. O’s and Miss Sarah’s class has been studying circles this month, and as we discussed the architecture of the Addison, we counted all the circles in the rotunda (even noticing the room itself was round!). We also hypothesized about the fountain and the reasons there may be flowers around it.

“Sometimes the flowers need water.”
“So it [the fountain] could look pretty.”

Upstairs we ventured into the Presence gallery to see the painting we had discussed earlier in the month in the classroom, The Drummond Brothers by Benjamin West. We pointed out the differences between the picture of the painting we looked at in class and the one on the Addison’s walls.

“It’s [the one in the Addison] bigger!”
“It has a square around it.”

The students spent time differentiating between ornate (a new vocabulary word!) frames and less decorative ones. And, since the class will be curating their own collection of circle objects we took some time to think about how certain pieces of art were displayed. Some display questions included: “What would be the difference if this pedestal (another new word!) was painted in a dark color?” “What if they put the sculptures on the floor instead of the pedestal?”

We said goodbye to Kindergarten Prep knowing we would see them soon. They’re due back next month to see more of the exhibition, Inside, Outside, Upstaris, Downstairs, and we can’t wait!

Our very first Phillips Academy class also came in on Thursday. Emily Trespas’s ART500/Portfolio class joined us in the afternoon for a brief overview of the renewed Addison and a look inside the Museum Learning Center. We spent some time in the Document gallery discussing what it means to “document” and what a “document” might be. We also hypothesized about some of the paintings, photographs, and sculptures in the Industry and Construction galleries. We tried to define what aspects of composition and artist choice allowed for an art object to convey a certain mood. Why did some of the photographs feel alive and jubilant while others felt desolate and cold?

We made our way into the Museum Learning Center (MLC) where we discussed the possibilities for research in our improved library. But, the highlight of any Museum Learning Center visit these days seems to be watching Tristan Perich’s Machine Drawing draw itself! The drawing has been working on itself for three days now and it can’t be denied that it’s really coming along nicely. Perich, our current Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence (and PA alum) is a visual artist and composer inspired by the aesthetic possibilities of math and science. Using a hand-crafted two-motor machine, Perich programs his creation to draw; in this case on our brand new MLC walls!

All in all it was a rewarding and inspiring day and we look forward to the many groups from both Phillips and all over the area to come, explore, learn, and think in our re-opened galleries!

Posted by:
Katherine Ziskin
Education Fellow for School and Community Collaborations

Grand Reopening!

2010-09-07T09:27:00.002-05:00

The Addison Gallery of American Art is opening its doors once again! As of September 7, 2010, the museum resumes regular public hours, Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and Sunday from 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. and, as always, admission to all exhibitions and events is free.

On View: Inside, Outside, Upstairs, Downstairs: the Addison Anew
To celebrate the Addison’s much anticipated reopening, the Addison’s curatorial team has developed a comprehensive exhibition of over three hundred historical and contemporary art objects chosen from the museum’s extraordinary collection. Arranged thematically, these celebrated treasures, old favorites, less familiar works, and newly acquired pieces illustrate the great strengths of the Addison collection while creating engaging dialogues among works across media and time.

Artist Project: Tristan Perich
Soon, our fall 2010 Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence Tristan Perich (Phillips Academy class of 2000) will begin work on a multimedia installation to inaugurate the Museum Learning Center, the centerpiece of the Addison’s new Sidney R. Knafel Wing. Inspired by the aesthetics of math and physics, Perich works with simple forms and complex systems to create both his music and art. Best known for acoustic and electronic musical compositions that explore the physicality of sound and the polyphonic potential of 1-bit audio, his works for solo instruments, ensemble, and orchestra have been performed throughout the world. As a visual artist he works primarily with handmade machines to create delicately executed pen-on-paper drawings that explore the limits of traditional drawing through randomness and order. (image: Tristan Perich, Machine Drawing in progress)

To celebrate the Addison's reopening and permanent collection, all are invited to our Open House celebration, on Saturday, September 25, from 3:00-7:00PM. Hope to see you there!

For more information, please visit our newly designed and launched website at http://www.addisongallery.org/.

Posted by:
Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow and Museum Learning Specialist

The Big Move, Part III

2010-08-26T06:00:00.000-05:00

With less than two weeks left before our grand reopening to the public September 7th, the staff have been frantically busy putting everything in place!

The movement of material back into the building is nearly complete. It took six trucks to bring over 400 artworks for the opening show back to the museum from our temporary art storage facility. Another three trucks were required to move the staff and the rest of the "stuff" back into the building. This all went smoothly and quickly in part to having a proper loading dock for the first time in the museum's history.

My colleague Samantha Katzen has posted images on our Facebook page showing, finally, that artwork is back on the gallery walls (see above left, click images to make bigger). Samantha has also mentioned that books are returning to our library's shelves. Our archives also have been arranged safe and sound in their new storage units, easily accessible and all in the same place, again, for the first time ever (see right). All members of our staff are in their new office spaces and are getting used to the new layout.

Lastly, our Development Office, and yours truly, have been working hard on getting the Addison's new, redesigned website ready for launch. All new navigation, content, and features expand the website while favorite sections, like our online collection pages (see left, work in progress) and extensive education content, receive revised looks and interfaces. We hope to have the site launch around September 1st.

The move is complete. Soon, the front doors will be open and visitors will be coming back in. Stay tuned for more information regarding our reopening.

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Addison's Other Installation

2010-08-16T06:00:00.005-05:00

By now you probably know that the Addison staff is hard at work installing our first exhibitions since the renovation and expansion project began. Inside, Outside, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Addison Anew will showcase treasured favorites and noteworthy new acquisitions, grouped in creative and unexpected ways that will truly reopen your eyes to the Addison.

As exciting as that is, however, it’s not the only installation currently taking place at the museum. In our dramatically renovated and expanded library, the Addison’s collection of nearly 6,000 books on art, artists, and all things art-related is being cataloged and shelved for the public to use and enjoy. Overseeing this extensive project, which actually began some five years ago, is Timothy Sprattler, a librarian with 32 years experience and 25 years at Phillips Academy. Sprattler, the Assistant Director and Archivist at Phillips Academy’s Oliver Wendell Holmes Library (O.W.H.L.), has spearheaded the Addison art library’s integration into the larger Phillips Academy library system. Instead of disparate collections spread all over campus, institutions like the Addison and PA’s Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology are now satellite libraries, with inventories fully searchable in the central O.W.H.L. database. The days of showing up with fingers crossed that we might have a book on the artist you’re interested in are over!

Make no mistake, however—this is not a casual undertaking. The new Addison art library is the culmination of years of work by Sprattler and other catalogers. Instead of merely alphabetizing by artist (leaving you to guess where to search for a book like Homer, Eakins, and Anshutz: The Search for American Identity in the Gilded Age), the library is now installed in accordance with the industry standard Dewey Decimal System. How, then, did Sprattler take dozens of boxes of books packed in no particular order, and create a true library out of haphazard piles?

To find out, I spoke with him about his work on this project. My first question was simple: where on earth do you begin? Faced with row after row of empty shelves and box after box of uncataloged books, it goes without saying that Sprattler needed to be prepared before diving in. One key component in managing the reinstallation is building in extra space when starting to shelve; as anyone who’s ever tried to put things away and miscalculated the space needed knows, shifting the entire assemblage over and over again in neither fun nor productive. Sprattler builds ample empty space into his mental blueprint, so that only small sections at a time need to be readjusted.

Another tool in his arsenal is something called a “shelf list.” As one might imagine, it is simply a list of all previously cataloged books in the order they should be shelved. When dealing with a fully cataloged collection, this shelf list is virtually all you need to reinstall, because following it is like painting by numbers. The Addison’s collection, however, is not fully cataloged. The purpose of the shelf list is two-fold—a plan of attack for shelving the books Sprattler knows about, and a system for identifying those that still need to be cataloged. Once everything is unpacked and put away, he’ll go through the shelves and check them against his list; anything not on the list still needs to be cataloged.

The project may be complex and occasionally laborious, but the results will be well worth the effort. Students, researchers, and casual visitors will all enjoy the lasting benefits of Sprattler’s undertaking for years to come. The system is organized but flexible, modernizing the Addison’s research facilities while still allowing users to experience the benefits and enjoyment of real books. The internet serves its purpose, and indeed there will be computer terminals available right in the library, but the best way to obtain information is via a variety of sources. Now, the Addison is much better equipped to be one of those sources, and we hope you’ll make time to stop in the library when you visit the Addison after our reopening on September 7^th.

Posted by:

Samantha Katzen
Development Associate

Lawrence After School Collectors Clubs

2010-07-08T13:52:00.016-05:00

Excitement about collecting this year inspired two Lawrence fourth grade After School Collectors Clubs, organized by Mary Guerrero at the Henry K. Oliver School and Christine Jee at the Robert Frost School. These collaborating after school groups explored personal collections, art and historical collections, and Lawrence collections. What can we learn about a community based on its collections? How would you convey information to and about your community using the collecting and arranging of objects and text?

I wanted to make something.
I wanted to show it to the world.

In order to concretize these explorations and expand their vision to include community resources students, family members, and school administrators visited the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and Lawrence Heritage State Park (LHSP).

How do the walls look different in this gallery?
It looks like a landscape!
I didn’t even notice that!
Maybe it came from an area with a lot of mountains.

At the MFA, students investigated what can be learned about the museum, its collections, and what ideas the museum is trying to communicate based on the ways in which objects and exhibitions are curated.

How do these works interact?
They’re looking at each other!

The students also met David Meehan, retired art teacher from Lawrence High School, who talked with them about the White Fund paintings, owned by Lawrence and housed at the MFA.

Downstairs is like a city, outside of the buildings.
Upstairs is inside a house, it has the loom, and it has Essex Street.

At LHSP, the students met Jim Beauchesne, interim director and interpreter, and viewed collections of objects that share information about and histories of their city. They then used these ideas to inspire photographing and collecting on walks around Essex Street and the canal.

What I learned is that getting ready for an exhibit is hard.

The students have created, curated, and installed an exhibition at LHSP detailing their explorations, ideas, connections, personal collections, and collections that speak to their ideas and knowledge about their community. On exhibit are collections from rocks to Pokemon cards, “silly bands” created from alternative materials in shapes that symbolize Lawrence, weavings that display a connection with Lawrence’s textile history, and the students’ own written and photographic documentation of their work.

Their exhibition was recognized in a recent article in the Eagle Tribune, which can be read online by clicking here.

The Collectors Club exhibition, which opened on June 9th on the 3rd floor of LHSP, will be on view through mid-August and is free and open to the public, as are the two floors of historical collections in LHSP’s exhibitions spaces.

Posted by:

Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

The Big Move, Part II

2010-07-02T06:00:00.001-05:00

Moving back into a museum that had been emptied for renovation and expansion is not as simple as calling your local moving company and shifting your computer from one desk to another. There is much more to do!

In addition to shifting the staff and the contents of their offices, which are actually fairly straight-forward to move, there are hundreds of boxes of art library books, archival material (see left and below), and supplies. With the behind-the-scenes parts of the museum now completely different from how they were when we left, everything from hooks to hang artwork and boxes of copy paper, to electric lifts and display cases, cannot simply go where it was before. Archival files will need to be reorganized and rehoused to fit onto our new mobile storage system. Art library books, once spread on shelves in three different areas, need to be rearranged to fit in our new centralized library area. Each printer and photocopier needs a new spot, every piece of installation hardware needs a new place to live, and making sure every phone has a jack to plug into takes time and an immense amount of patience. Just getting a new cash register for the museum shop and training the front staff to use it requires more coordination than one would initially think!

Once everything is in place, we also need to make sure everything works. There are the big-picture items, such as our security and climate systems, which have gone through rigorous testing over the last few months, but simple things, such as: is every network jack we need live, or does the correct light come on when you flip the switch, or do the doors to the bathroom stalls latch properly? Those will be the maddening things that we'll be sorting out over the next few months.

Rest assured, everything will be ready to go the day we reopen! Stay tuned for Part III for our Big Move series, where we discuss yet another facelift, this one electronic, that the Addison will soon receive.

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Big Move, Part I

2010-06-15T06:00:00.000-05:00

With the time remaining until we reopen countable in weeks instead of months or years, we've begun in earnest to prepare for our move back into our newly renovated and expanded museum. I'm starting a series of blog posts that will document our adventures over the next few weeks, so keep checking back here to see where are!

Our current priority is to gather together the 451 objects the curators have put on the checklist for our opening exhibition, Inside, Outside, Upstairs, Downstairs: The Addison Anew. Over the last few weeks, the Preparators and I have been crawling over the crates, bins and shelves of our art storage warehouse facility pulling these objects (see left, Brian Coleman, Preparator, and I contemplate our storage situation atop our crates). Since this checklist did not exist when we packed and moved out of the museum two years ago, the checklist objects are mixed in and packed with the rest of the collection, some more accessible than others. Some have been very easy to pull. Objects recently in our Coming of Age travelling tour are still in their crates, "on top of the pile," so to speak, and can just come straight to the museum as they are. Others are not as easy. Some are in bins three shelves up, some ten to fifteen feet off the ground, and are very difficult to get at. These are not things that can be simply "tossed down" to someone waiting to catch it below. We handle our artwork with great care, and trying to hand a three foot wide painting with a heavy, ornate frame carefully to someone below you while maneuvering your head around beams and sprinkler heads takes patience, practice, and a willingness to get bumped on the head if it means the artwork will get to where it needs to go safely.

Once all the objects have been pulled, we'll truck them to the museum, where they will then be unpacked and laid out in the galleries for the curators to arrange, and the Preparators to install and hang. I will follow behind to update the objects' locations on our database, and finally, for the first time since 2008, users of our website will be able to see "Object currently on view" appear in our object record data.

But this is just what we need to do to get artwork back into the museum. There is much more to do, and stay tuned for Part II, where I'll discuss the logistics of moving everyone and everything else back to the museum. That is, assuming, I haven't suffered too many bumps and bruises to my head!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Frost School’s 2nd Grade Classroom Collections Project

2010-05-24T06:00:00.010-05:00

Ideas about collections this year have sparked projects for PreK through adult audiences. Christine Jee and her second grade class at the Frost School in Lawrence embarked on a year-long Classroom Collections Project in September, exploring the personal and cultural value of collections and museums.

Each student has had an opportunity to be the Collector of the Week, bringing in his or her collection to prompt writing, drawing, and creating – and inspiring additional curriculum connections in math and social studies.

The following are excerpts from the newsletters published from documentation of the students’ work created by the students and Mrs. Jee.

“Our first collector of the week was Gleanys; she brought in her collection of 26 bouncy balls. Students sorted the balls by color and compared her balls to different planets and even to the swirly toothpaste that we use to brush our teeth. We were able to use the many balls during math, as we counted them by 2s and talked about place value by putting them in groups of tens and ones. Finally, we made up addition word problems since Katarina, Mrs. Jee, and Gleanys all brought in more balls to add to the collection of balls. 26 + 2 + 1 + 1 = 30.”

“Remember when Tyler brought in his museum-in-a-box and we got the idea to build our own museums? Well, almost all of the students in our class have brought in their collections by now and we are beginning to plan what it would be like if we had a B301 class collections museum.”

“Last week, Julie and Jamie from the Addison Gallery came into our class and gave us a slide presentation about the museum that they work in. Their museum has been closed to the public since they are working on making it bigger (otherwise we would have gone on a field trip to visit them by now!) and we got to learn about this project. We saw an architect’s rendering, blueprints, and pictures of the construction and talked about the art that the Addison Gallery collects.”

“This week, we will begin constructing a museum of our own. We will make blueprints of what we want the inside of our museum to look like and then build one large museum out of a cardboard box, representing the outside of our museum. Each student will also be in charge of designing and creating their own galleries..”

Mrs. Jee’s students will be showing their work to friends and family soon in a special school exhibition of their “Museum of Art and Other Cool Stuff,” including a celebration of the book of their explorations and process that they co-edited and self-published using blurb.com.

Posted by:

Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

Emptying the Shelves

2010-05-17T06:00:00.008-05:00

I was recently at our temporary art storage facility, looking at the tall shelves of boxes, bins, and crates that are holding our collections safe and sound while the museum is closed for renovation. I realized that there were just a few months left before our reopening and, very soon, our collection will begin to leave storage to return to our walls for display.

The museum, on the outside, looks like it has been finished for months. However, inside the building, a great deal of activity continues. The new climate control systems have been undergoing extensive testing to make sure the museum will provide a safe, stable environment for the collections when they return. The new security and fire detection systems are also undergoing rigorous testing and fine tuning. Our Preparators have been busy installing the new lighting fixtures throughout all of the museum's galleries so that we can actually see what we're doing when the art returns.

Peter Vanderwarker, photographer and Phillips Academy Alum, recently came through the museum and took several images of our beautiful building in its empty state, allowing the architecture to speak for itself (see above and right).
We are looking forward to moving back and reopening to the public this fall. And, I look forward to seeing the shelves at our temporary art storage facility empty in the near future, for it will mean that the art has finally returned to the museum, where it belongs!

Posted by

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Museum Project Part III: Inside the Addison Gallery

2010-05-06T06:00:00.010-05:00

	What do you imagine are the differences between this photo of our visit to the Addison in the fall…

	… and now? - It was September. - They added a new part of the building. - The glass part.

Since the start of the school year, the Addison’s Education Department has been working on The Museum Project with the Kindergarten Prep class at The Children’s Place, a Bright Horizons child care and early education center located on the campus of Phillips Academy. The students have explored all types of collections in order to connect museum collections to the cultural value of their own collections and to learn how to communicate these values to others through classification, display, and interpretation. Click to read Part I and Part II of The Museum Project on Blog Addison. After exploring collections and exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, the Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archeology at Phillips Academy, and additional museums on family trips, we refocused on the Addison Gallery of American Art’s collection and building. To provide some context for their visit to the new Addison storage and gallery spaces, we introduced them to James Sousa, the Addison’s Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives, and fellow blogger. You all have collections of toys at home – Can you list every toy that you have? Can you tell me the location of each toy? The Addison has over 16,000 objects in its collection and my job is to know where they all are. After sharing photos of the Addison’s collections in storage, in crates, in trucks, and on airplanes, James explained another extension of his interest in organizing collections – his Star Wars collection. The students were fascinated with James’s personal collection and how he organizes and keeps track of all those toys! The following day, 11 students, 3 parents, 1 sibling, 1 babysitter, 2 teachers, and 2 student teachers took their experience and knowledge up the hill to the Addison. Joined by the Addison’s Education Department and Susan Faxon, the Addison’s Associate Director and Curator of Art before 1950, the students made astute observations and asked innumerable questions about the museum’s space and functions.

	- I see the new part, it’s glass.

	- What’s the white stuff? - What’s in the box? - We saw a picture of that! - Is there going to be water in there?

What’s different in this room than in the others we’ve seen? - The walls are a different color. - The ceiling. - The lights. - The lines with the shapes inside. - I see a pattern! Red, grey, blue, yellow. - I remember his name: Sol LeWitt.


What part of the building are we in now? - The glass part. What part can we see from here that we didn’t notice outside? - That part – It looks like a gate. - It’s metal. - My favorite room was the one with the shapes on the ceiling because the room was a rectangle and the ceiling was a different shape. - My favorite room was the one with the box in it because I want to see it turn into a fountain. The students were able to make connections between sorting and arranging their collections at home and materials in the classroom with storing, organizing, and exhibiting collections in the multiple museums they have visited throughout The Museum Project. In order to answer the numerous questions that have come up during many of our museum visits about how works are framed and hung on the gallery walls, Jason Roy, Assistant Preparator at the Addison, later came to visit Kindergarten Prep with a large box and a bag of tools. He unpacked, disassembled and then reassembled a matted and framed image of the students so they could see first-hand all of the steps involved. They were able to explore all of the hardware and tools, from D-rings and S-hooks to tape measures and levels. As the school year comes to a close the students will take all of their museum and cultural knowledge with them to kindergarten - and well beyond. And, the Addison and other museum staff will apply the students’ capacity for knowledge, endless curiosity, and observational skills to the development of future education programs. Posted by Jamie Kaplowitz Education Fellow

An Addison film connection

2010-04-30T06:00:00.006-05:00

The Portland Press Herald features an interesting article about the upcoming film Wyeth, which is executive produced by Addison Board of Governors member Mary Kemper Wolf. Ms. Wolf mentions that she's considered filming in Maine based partly on the recommendation of fellow Board of Governors member Elizabeth Evans Hunt!

If you'd like to learn more about the Addison's striking Wyeth painting (see above right), Mother Archie's Church, check out the record on the Addison's fully searchable collections page by clicking here.

Posted by:

Samantha Katzen
Development Associate

Truck, Wait, Plane, Wait, Pint

2010-04-12T06:00:00.001-05:00

Things are never dull here at the Addison. I recently served as courier to accompany an object we are lending to the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin, Ireland for their Vertical Thoughts: Morton Feldman and the Visual Arts exhibition. The trip was not nearly as long or complex as my adventures with our Coming of Age exhibition, but did have its challenges, and rewards, as well.

The object we lent was an ink on paper by Barnett Newman (see left). Thankfully, it needed only a small crate, a much easier package to deal with than the multitude of large crates I traveled with Coming of Age. I left with it on a truck from our art storage vault to Logan Airport's air cargo facility. I stood with our export and security representatives for hours in the cold warehouse, dodging the speeding forklifts, waiting for another shipment to come in that would share the pallet with my crate on the plane. As it turned out, that other shipment was canceled, and our wait had been in vain. However, my crate ended up traveling on its own pallet, an ideal situation for fragile artwork and a best case scenario for any museum Registrar.

Finally, the crate and I were on the plane for the red eye to Dublin. And red eye it was for I didn't sleep a wink on the flight. When I arrived just under six hours later, it was morning, and time for another wait in the cold outside Dublin Airport's air cargo facility. Well over an hour later, the crate was loaded on the truck and we made our way through the Dublin Port Tunnel, across the Liffey, and into the parking lot of the IMMA (see below).

I had yet another wait in the cold, this time in drizzle, for security to let us into the exhibition space. But finally, the crate was safe and in place within the museum. I still had one more wait, this time for 24 hours for the crate to acclimate to the IMMA's interior climate, before it could be opened and the object inspected and installed. I didn't spend that wait in the cold, however. After being awake for over 36 hours, I got a nice, long, uninterrupted night's sleep at my hotel (a true luxury for someone with an infant at home) and managed a moment to enjoy a pint of "fresh" Guinness on Irish soil.

The installation went smoothly with IMMA's fabulous crew, and then I was on a flight back home the following day. It was a fast trip, but I've gotten used to doing them once or twice a year. You have to take the good with the bad: wear warm clothes, learn to pass time, be ever vigilant, and of course, enjoy the pints when you can get them!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Social Impact

2010-03-19T06:00:00.000-05:00

Recently, Addison Registrar and Financial Administrator Denise Johnson and I attended an event entitled “Telling our Story: the Local Cultural Council 2010 Statewide Assembly.” We were addressed by state legislators, the head of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the president of Americans for the Arts, one of the leading national non-profit arts advocacy groups.

As one might expect, the speakers discussed the concerns facing the arts community as a result of the current economic climate. This was not merely an opportunity to lament financial setbacks, however. It was a time to reevaluate the importance of arts and cultural institutions and where their funding needs fit into federal, state, and personal budgets.

At the Addison, the collection itself is a precious trove of American art and culture to be conserved and shared with students, artists, and lovers of art in the Phillips Academy community and far beyond, as it has been for generations past and will be for generations to come. For many people, supporting that legacy is cause enough. But for others, the hardship they see in today’s world leads them to question their philanthropic priorities. It is difficult for museum lovers — and museum employees — to accept that, because the art is so close to our hearts. We must recognize, however, that these issues are being raised every day, and we must face them. It was this most pressing of concerns that the speakers at the Assembly confronted.

Art can be beautiful. It can be moving, disturbing, whimsical, evocative, and powerful. It can also be an economic and social force. Arts education reaches students at risk of failure and connects them to their schools and their communities¹. Art is good for our children. In some of our poorest cities, like Lawrence, MA, where the Addison’s Education Department provides extensive services, young people with exposure to arts and arts education are more likely to have low rates of juvenile delinquency and truancy². Art lowers crime and helps fight the cycle of poverty. Workers trained in arts and cultural fields drive the success of leading industries, including software development, telecommunications, and new media³. Art prepares students for the jobs of the future. In Massachusetts alone, arts and cultural nonprofits employ 37,000 people, collect and pay $6.6 million in state sales taxes, and have a total economic impact of over $4.2 billion⁴. Art powers the job market and the economy.

The benefits hardly stop there. Bringing arts and culture into a neighborhood is one of the most successful means of revitalizing it. One need look no further than the DUMBO district in Brooklyn or downtown Lowell, Massachusetts to see flourishing examples of struggling areas revitalized by the introduction of artists, arts organizations, and cultural offerings.

What this Statewide Assembly brought home to me is how vast an impact the arts have. It is an influence that goes far beyond the intellectual or emotional appeal of works of art or cultural offerings. We must advocate for our arts institutions and for arts funding on the local, state, and federal level in order not only to preserve access to these institutions, but also to protect the social and economic benefits they provide. If you would like to let your state or US congresspersons or senators know about the importance of support for the arts, you can visit the Contact Elected Officials page of the www.usa.gov website to find names, phone numbers, and addresses for all your representatives.

Art matters, perhaps more now than ever before.

Posted by:

Samantha Katzen
Development Associate

^1. “Creative Economy Initiative: The Role of the Arts and Culture in New England’s Economic Competitiveness,” The New England Council, 2000.
^2. “The Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate About the ‘Benefits of the Arts’,” by Kevin F. McCarthy, Elizabeth H. Ondaatje, Laura Zakaras, and Arthur Brooks, the RAND Corporation, 2004.
^3. “Culture Builds Community: Evaluation Summary Report,” by Mark J. Stern and Susan C. Seifert, Social Impact of the Arts Project, University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work, 2002.
^4. “New England’s Creative Economy: The Non-Profit Sector,” 2002 by Gregory H. Wassail Ph.D and Douglas DeNatale Ph.D, New England Foundation for the Arts, 2005.

Seeing Carroll Dunham from a New Perspective

2010-03-04T06:00:00.001-05:00

Several Addison staff members made the trip to Albany, New York, to see our traveling exhibition Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey open at the University Art Museum at SUNY-Albany.

Consisting of 119 prints, the UAM space offers a new perspective on Dunham’s graphic work. At the Addison, the exhibition was displayed chronologically and divided into four galleries, unearthing gripping vantage points through each doorway. Here, the visual progression of Dunham’s prints—abstract yet simultaneously figurative, spontaneous yet deliberate—is revealed upon first entry into SUNY’s enormous two-level gallery (see images above and below, click to make bigger). If you stand and twirl in the gallery’s center, the chronological sequence evolves, your point of origin gradually fades, and you become immersed in the polymorphous shapes, vibrant colors and semi-abstract figures of Dunham’s work.

It has been a veritable pleasure working with the University Art Museum's staff to make this show possible. The exhibition will be up through April 3rd so be sure to see it while it is there!

Posted by

Jaime DeSimone
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow

and

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Deaccesioning in the Museum World: A Message from the Director

2010-02-22T06:00:00.002-05:00

Today we hear again from guest poster Brian T. Allen, the Addison Gallery's Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director, this time regarding deaccessioning policies in museums:

Recently I returned to Andover from the annual meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors, the key organization representing the major museums in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Over the past few years, the dominant issue at this conference has been the restitution of stolen art, primarily Nazi loot but more recently antiquities. On both accounts the Addison could take a politely interested but ultimately distanced view. But in this past meeting in January a new issue emerged to displace the mighty topic of restitution: the sale of art from permanent collections to pay for operating expenses.

The centrality of this issue merely reflects the temper of the times. Many museums are under enormous financial pressures as endowments have dropped, visitorship continues a long term decline, and donors have become strapped for disposable cash. Many museums facing financial problems have substantial assets – art in the permanent collection – and more and more directors and trustees are seeing the sale of some of these assets as a quick fix.

The Association of Art Museum Directors decided years ago to thwart temptations of this kind with a simple, straightforward rule. It is a violation of museum ethics to use money from the sale of a work of art accessioned in the permanent collection for any reason other than the purchase of new art.

There are many reasons for this standard. When an object enters a permanent collection, it becomes part of the history of the museum and part of the cultural heritage of the community the museum serves. It enters the collection via a curatorial decision that it will advance the educational mission of the museum. Selling art to pay the bills is an assault on the mission and heritage of the museum and an affront to the proposition that art has a unique power to educate and to inspire.

There are practical reasons as well for this standard. Selling art to support operating expenses puts the museum on a very slippery slope indeed. Trustees and major donors, if they know that this avenue is available for balancing the budget, will pressure museum directors and curators to sell art rather than write checks themselves to support the museum. Why should a donor give money to a museum that has ample assets to liquidate as opposed to the local animal shelter, theater company, or hospital that has no such assets? The risks to the museum are enormous, and the effects of selling art to pay operating expenses are deeply corrosive.

This issue will stay with us for some time. The Association of Art Museum Directors has its standard but the American Association of Museums, which represents art museums, historical societies, house museums, and science and children's museums, has a critically different standard. The American Association of Museums allows for the sale of art to support and purchase new art and the undefined cause of “direct collection care.” Each institution is free to interpret this rule in its own way. It could be interpreted liberally to include not only conservation of works of art but salaries for registrars, curators and even for the portion of the electric bill commensurate with the percentage of the museum building occupied by art storage. Given the terrible state of museum finances, this may indeed evolve as the museum standard as a way to smuggle new money into museum coffers.

Many museums are seeking to tap endowments dedicated to acquisitions for operating expenses, and these museums are not institutions at the margins of the museum world. In this dangerous and ambiguous world, there will be much more to report to you in the future as this story unfolds.

Posted by:

Brian T. Allen
The Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director

Thinking Outside the Frame

2010-02-15T06:00:00.001-05:00

“Going out into the world and seeing people who live, breathe, and ARE their art was incredible.”

In order to help students think outside the frame for a self-portrait assignment, the Addison Gallery arranged for three Lawrence High School photography classes to visit three art galleries in the SoWa (South of Washington Street) neighborhood of Boston’s South End.

"Visiting the exhibit clarified my goal…”

At Gallery Kayafas, Arlette Kayafas talked students through the taxonomic groupings of portraits by August Sander, the seemingly candid street scenes by Jules Aarons, and the portraits of women and children in Lebanon by Rania Matar.

One student, who had been struggling to find the best way to format her desire to use a series of photographs of the moon to express her individuality, was inspired by Sanders’s “wall photos side by side creating just one of his main topic.” She now plans to use this grouping idea to generate visual interest in her image.

“I remember a certain piece of art that was so small that people had to get really close to see the shape and detail. It was fascinating! So, I’ll put small details in my [work] that will stand out by making people focus more.”

At Carroll and Sons, Joseph Carroll invited students to explore works from the Boston Drawing Project, created to make works on paper available to a larger audience. This incredibly wide variety of works, ranging from paintings and drawings to photographs and collage, inspired students to think about creative modes of expression for their self-portraits.

“I plan on adding some of the artists’ techniques into my own artwork, such as creative textures and repeated patterns for the background of my photos.”

“I noticed that artists don’t just have one thing that they’re influenced by. For example, Raul was influenced by his culture, where he grew up, his own likes and imagination, AND Japanese anime! He displayed all of that in his work and I plan to collaborate most of my passions and influences into my work as well.”

Raul Gonzalez, whose exhibition of drawings, animations, paintings, and an artist book featuring fictional characters that play on vintage animations and cartoons, entitled “Lookum Here: It Might Could Have Been,” was on display at Carroll and Sons, talked through his inspiration, process, and work with students. This opportunity to meet an exhibiting artist moved some students think more about their own artistic process

“I’m thinking of getting a sketchbook and drawing specific characters I always draw… The art gallery showed me that I can most likely integrate my cartooning tendencies with photography as long as the main idea stays intact.”

“You can barely notice where he cut the image.”

At the Howard Yezerski Gallery, students were fascinated with the collages and photomontages of John O’Reilly. Comparisons between his work and the works on paper by other artists in the exhibition inspired other students to consider the applications of these techniques in their own work.

“I am going to use John O’Reilly’s focus on collage and incorporate it into my text. I want to take a picture of our student body at lunch and then take pictures of different letters for my text.”

As one student realized, having the exposure to artists and artwork, “instead of looking at someone’s artwork online or in a book,” greatly widens their approaches to their assignment and their work as artists outside the classroom. “I’ve realized that artistic freedom is limitless.”

Posted by
Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

Holy Giacometti!

2010-02-08T06:00:00.009-05:00

Today we hear from guest poster Brian T. Allen, the Addison Gallery's Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director, regarding the current state of the art market:

Although Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) was not an American artist, I could hardly not notice the sale of one of his life-size bronzes for £65,000,000, the most expensive work ever sold at auction (see left). The sale, which took place on February 3 at Sotheby’s in London, speaks much about the chaotic state of the art market in the depths of a terrible economy.

I follow the art market closely, both the auction art market and the dealer-based market and want to share a few observations about the state of the market in light of the Sotheby’s auction. The market is in a curious place now. Buyers have lost many, many billions of dollars during the course of the financial crisis. This has had two fundamental effects. Capacity has dropped, and we see this in the steep declines in totals generated in almost every auction. Sometimes sales totals are down by more than half the take for the same sale in 2008. Consignments have shriveled as well, with anyone having any discretion on whether or not to sell deciding to keep their art until the economy improves. But consignments still happen. Death, divorce, and debt still drive sellers to Christie’s and Sotheby’s, but if a collector is not a Madoff victim, chances are he or she is waiting for an overall financial uptick before selling art.

In the face of reduced supply, there are still many people with both enormous wealth and a voracious will to collect. They are competing for art in a market where the supply of great things has been reduced by this new hesitation to sell. So, despite the overall decline in auction sales totals, records are still broken in most sales. The prices of objects of the very highest quality have not dropped but, indeed, have continued to increase, whether the object is a painting by Rembrandt or van Dyke, a drawing by Raphael, or an extraordinarily rare bottle of wine. If a high quality object has been in a private collection for many years, its freshness to the marketplace makes it even more appealing.

I would not call the Giacometti art of the very highest quality. Rather, I would place it in the general category occupied by Andy Warhol’s painting, 200 One Dollar Bills, which sold for almost $44 million late last year. Although the Warhol is historically a more important work than the Giacometti, both are flashy “name” artists and immediately recognizable brands whose presence on a Manhattan or London wall bespeaks their owner’s cultural and financial firepower.

Surprisingly, then, given continued demand and reduced supply, now is probably a good time to sell at Christie’s and Sotheby’s. On the dealer side, overall my dealer friends tell me the market is improving very gradually after a deep freeze that lasted most of 2009. A wobbly stock market will not help to keep things moving in that direction. I will report more after I visit the major art shows in New York in early March.

Posted by:

Brian T. Allen
The Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director

Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey opening at University Art Museum at SUNY-Albany

2010-02-01T06:00:00.000-05:00

The Addison may be closed for renovation, but there is still an opportunity to see artwork from our collection!

Our traveling exhibition Carroll Dunham Prints: A Survey, will be opening at its third and final venue on Tuesday, February 2nd at the University Art Museum at SUNY-Albany, NY. The show is comprised of over one hundred prints from the Addison's collection of the artist's work spanning the 1980s until the present.

I was fortunate enough to travel to Albany a couple of weeks ago to help with the unpacking and condition checking of the objects. The University Art Museum's elegant exhibition space is considerably different from the Addison's galleries in that you can stand in the middle of it and view almost the entire show from one viewpoint. You can compare objects of different types and periods easily and it makes quite an impact on the viewer.

This is a venue that is certainly worth visiting! We, and the staff at the University Art Museum, hope to see you there!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Mining the Archives

2010-01-25T06:00:00.001-05:00

I recently watched the movie Angels and Demons. As one of my duties here is being the Addison's "archivist," I was fascinated by the way the movie (and the book) depicted the Vatican's archives. A sleek, modern, and highly-secured space deep below ground, the Vatican's archival treasures were neatly arranged in hermetically-sealed chambers designed to keep humidity levels unnaturally low to preserve their ancient texts. Whether anything like this actually exists at the Vatican (or anywhere in the world) is questionable, but it made me think about the Addison's archives, and where they will be going in our new building addition.

The Addison's archives include files associated with the art and artists of our collection, the museum's administration, and every one of our exhibitions (nearly 1400 of them since we opened in 1931). We have thousands of slides and photographs documenting our exhibition installations, and various archives from the museum's special projects including our ship model collection, our 1993 HVAC installation (see left), the creation of our David Ireland Artist Apartment, and all the work and research that went into the making of our 1996 65 Years catalogue. I've always found it fun browsing through our archives: reading letters from our past directors, finding old photographs of our museum, and figuring out how objects came into our collection.

Up to now, the archives have been stored in various areas throughout the museum and off site. It's been very difficult to track down certain things and keep it all organized and catalogued. Thankfully, in the Addison's new addition, the archives will all be housed on site, and in a space conveniently located adjacent to our offices (see right). A large compact storage shelving system will keep everything together, in order, accessible, and with plenty of space for expansion. With each new acquisition and exhibition, the archives continue to grow!

Granted, our archive won't be hermetically sealed like it is in Angels and Demons, but it will be kept at our standard museum climate of 70' F and 50% relative humidity, and it will be secure, orderly, and ready for any of the Robert Langdon-like symbologists of the world to make an appointment to peruse.

Posted by
James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Return of the Venus

2010-01-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

As fellow blogger Jaime DeSimone announced in her recent post, the Venus Anadyomene fountain by Paul Manship that has graced our rotunda for as long as we've been open was to be reinstalled on December 16th. And, as scheduled, Adam Nesbit, objects conservator from Williamstown Art Conservation Center (WACC), and a crew of experienced art handlers from USArt, led by George Hagerty, arrived that frigid day with the multiple crates containing the fully cleaned and conserved parts for the reinstallation.

The crates came into the museum through our new loading dock, which was a treat for me to use. For the first time ever, the crates rolled from the back of the truck over our dock leveler and straight into the building without the need for an awkward truck liftgate to bring them to ground level. The crates were then brought up to the rotunda in our newly expanded freight elevator where USArt started opening them and began the installation of a large gantry that would help to lift the heavy marble parts into place.

After carefully consulting the notes and images taken during the deinstallation a year and a half ago, the first of six legs was carefully placed over the new pex plumbing pipe that would serve as the fountain's new water supply (see above left, click images to make them larger). A wooden support structure was used to keep the legs safely in place during the installation. Soon, all six legs were installed and properly aligned, and the next layer, the multiple-leveled "wedding cake" (as we were calling it) was installed above using the gantry, locking the legs into the place (see right).

The next part, containing the spigots for the water supply, was placed with the help of a plumber to make the connection with the pex piping (see left). This pex connection weaves back through the floor to a new water filtration and pressure system in the basement designed by Phil Peterson of Peterson Engineering, PC, which was described in detail in Jaime's post. The small metallic spigots, shaped like animal heads, had been cleaned of mineral build-up and tarnish, and showed their original patina for the first time in many years.

Then, finally, with a collective deep breath by all involved, Venus herself was carefully hoisted on top of the structure (see right). It was a momentous occasion to see the fountain complete and back in place. The surface cleaning had brightened her, bringing out the grain of the marble that had been hidden under layers of grime (see below, left). Since construction is still continuing in the building, the fountain was quickly protected with a large wood crate before we were able to test any of the plumbing, but we look forward to seeing Manship's original vision complete when construction concludes.

Thanks is required not only for the careful and skillful eyes and hands of both Adam Nesbit from WACC, George Hagerty and his crew from USArt, and Phil Peterson of Peterson Engineering, PC, but also for Keith and Mary Kauppila, longtime friends of the Addison Gallery, whose generous gift made the restoration of the fountain possible. One of the first artworks ever installed in the museum has become, again, the first artwork installed during our renovation. We can't wait to open our doors to the public so everyone can enjoy seeing Venus again!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Museum Project Part II: Making Connections at the Peabody Essex Museum

2009-12-21T06:00:00.000-05:00

Since the start of the school year, the Addison’s Education Department has been working with the Kindergarten Prep class at the Children’s Place, a Bright Horizons child care and early education center located on the campus of Phillips Academy, to connect an understanding of the value of museums to the cultural value of their own collections and to learn how to communicate these values to others through display and interpretation.

Click here to read Part I of The Museum Project on Blog Addison.

The students have been exploring ideas about collections and museums for the last few months, working with their families to document their own collections at home, presenting their documentation in class, reading book after book about collecting, art, artists, and museums, and documenting a visit to a museum of their choice with their families. Their incredible teachers have infused these ideas into everything they do in the classroom, from studying collections of primary and secondary colors to making collections of vocabulary words to learning about collections of books at the local library.

On December 4th, 2009, seventeen Kindergarten Prep students, twelve parents, two teachers, and the Addison’s museum educators boarded a bus to the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem to explore the museum as a group and put inspiration to use in creative ways.

In the Trash Menagerie exhibition, which presents over thirty works of art created from things most of us simply throw away, PEM’s School and Teacher Program Manager (and former Addison Education Fellow) Rebecca Hayes helped students exercise their observation and interpretation skills, consider the function and use of everyday objects, and see what incredible things can be made from recyclables.

Rebecca: What is this sculpture of a moth made of?
Students responses: Trash, a plate, a broken plate, a pot, wood (It’s from a piano! I can tell because it’s white and brown.), little wires, elastic…

(Image credit: Michelle Stitzlein, Sulphur Blue Smeck, 2005, Moth Series, piano keys, roofing metal, light fixtures, bicycle fenders and fork, china, electrical wire, lawn mower handles, and other trash, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem.)

A discussion about the moth’s antennae being made from bike handles led to a conversation about what you could create from an old bicycle, which then led to brainstorming about creating art.

Rebecca: What could we use at home to make art? What do we recycle?
- I make airplanes out of old writing.
- Juice boxes! I’m going to make a school bus!

In the adjacent art studio, students used this inspiration to cut, rip, glue, and color empty cereal boxes, egg cartons, shampoo bottles, string, and paper strips into their own art menagerie.

- A flower! Now it’s a snowflake.
- A sketch of lightning. I cut one half and now I have to cut the other half.
- A spider. We’re making it together so we can make a big one.

Students also had the opportunity to meet PEM security guard Peter, who fielded a wide range of questions, including:

- Why do you have badges?
- Do you work all night?
- So why do we have museums, anyway?

Peter, an artist himself, was quite stunned when the students said that they had been studying the work of Robert Rauschenberg – along with Pablo Picasso and Claude Monet.

These profound connections between objects in the museum and in home collections, between topics in the museum and classroom curriculum studied, and between art and ideas will push students’ curiosity immeasurably further in the coming weeks.

Stay turned for further updates as this project progresses.

Posted by

Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

Venus Anadyomene

2009-12-16T14:37:00.001-05:00

With the Addison’s building project nearing completion, a combination of brand new and refurbished architectural details and artworks will soon adorn the spaces. Of striking interest will be the return of Paul Manship’s marble fountain, Venus Anadyomene, in the museum’s foyer. Originally commissioned by the museum’s architect Charles Platt, Manship’s fountain has had hydrological problems since the onset. Until now that is….

Art historian Harry Rand wrote about Manship’s objective for the sculpture in the Addison Gallery of American Art 65 Years catalogue (published in 1996):

“In the Roman revision of Greek myth, Venus—goddess of love and beauty—was the child of Dione and Uranus; the latter’s severed genitals mingled with the ocean and spawned Venus from the sea foam. Manship depicted the moment when, come from the surf and for the first time on land, Venus washes the generating ocean from her hair. The Greek anadyomene means ‘born of water,’ which suggests an apt motif for a fountain.”

Apt motif indeed. Unfortunately Manship’s desire to reference this myth was never fully realized. Intended to emit flowing water down into the basin as if trickling from the goddess’ wet hair, the figurine heads instead “dripped and spattered” water onto the floor, according to a review of the museum’s grand opening in the Boston Evening Transcript on the 16th May 1931.

Despite its failure to operate properly as a fountain, the sculpture itself is one of the Addison’s treasures. It is the first artwork people spy upon entering the building and the last thing seen upon leaving. As part of the Addison 75th anniversary, the museum asked Phillips Academy alumni to comment on their favorite pieces in the collection. Jeffrey Bush (PA class of 1946) shared this adolescent experience:

“What interested me most was the stone nymph kneeling in the entrance with no clothes on. Questions kept going through my mind. I pretended not to notice that she had no clothes on. Was this what I was supposed to do? Or was I supposed to really not notice? What about the adults who walked past her? Did they think I was really not noticing? Were they really not noticing? Or were they pretending, too? Was everyone pretending? It is many years later, and I’m an adult myself, but I still have no answers to any of these questions.”

Other alumni, clearly less bashful than Mr. Bush, joked that they patted her bottom upon leaving the museum. With or without flowing water, Venus Anadyomene continues to be a signature piece in the museum’s collection.

Fellow blogger James Sousa documented the de-installation of the fountain in a blog post on the 18th of July 2008. Such careful attention to moving the piece has been equally given to its conservation. Over the past year, conservators and engineers constructed and tested complex solutions to the fountain’s engineering, its water volume and pressure, and flow-rate, among many other details. A new plumbing/filtration system was developed to pump up to 3 gallons of water per minute through a concealed piping structure that will equally distribute water into the fountain’s surrounding marble basin and allow for better control of the flow rate. This sketch provides a detailed view of the invisible plumbing system. A water treatment system will calculate the water’s pH levels, keeping them at a constant level to limit any future deterioration of the new pipes. The new system will be a closed re-circulating system with timed controls to limit the amount of water flowing over the marble and conserve water. This detailed sketch, supplied by our engineers, reveals the elaborate internal system.

On December 16th, the Venus Anadyomene is scheduled to be re-installed in the Addison’s rotunda—reconstructing Paul Manship’s original design that dates back to 1927. Until then, we anxiously await the sound of trickling water in the Addison’s rotunda—not to mention reuniting with an exquisite work of art.

The Addison Gallery of American Art is forever grateful to the ingenuity, thoughtfulness, and patience of Phil Peterson and Dick Sullivan at Peterson Engineering P.C. as well as Adam Nesbit and his team at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center.

Posted by

Jaime DeSimone
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow

Tour of the Addison Construction Project

2009-12-14T06:00:00.001-05:00

This hand-held video gives a glimpse of the progress to date on the Addison Gallery's renovation project. Addison Director Brian Allen led a small group of staff members on a tour that highlighted the new additions and improvements to the building.

Please click below to watch the video (Flash Player is required).

Posted by

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Construction Connections: Architecture Students Visit a Building in the Making

2009-12-07T06:00:00.001-05:00

Even while closed, the Addison is able to help students make connections between their studies and the world around them. While the outside of the Addison has been completed and landscaped, the construction crew has moved their operations inside to work on systems and interior details. They were joined one evening in November by a Phillips Academy Architecture class intent on seeing the real-world applications of their in-class studies.

The students were led throughout the museum by Jennifer Greene, Project Manager with Shawmut Design and Construction and accompanied by a reporter and a photographer from the Phillips Academy’s student newspaper. Students were shown how renovations have doubled the museum’s storage space, how lowered gallery ceilings hide mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection systems, how sprinkler heads were installed in gallery ceilings while still preserving the Addison’s beloved Sol LeWitt wall drawing, and how the green roof outside the new Museum Learning Center will benefit both the environment and the museum.

Students remarked at the care that was taken in protecting and preserving the architectural details of the original museum building, from the protective covers on the floors and twists and turns of the stairwell railings to exact matching of marble to expand doorways.

While we are unable to access the works in our collection for use with classes, we are finding out that our museum building has lessons of its own to teach.

To read the article that appeared in the Phillipian about the Architecture class’s visit to the Addison, follow this link.

Posted by:

Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

Scenes from the Work Site

2009-10-19T08:26:00.029-05:00

Construction continues at the Addison and its new addition at a feverish pace, so much so that we are unable to cover everything on our website with our weekly image post. So, to bring our readers up to date, here are some additional "scenes" from the work site. Click the images to make them larger.


The tall, green fences surrounding the site have been removed and landscaping has begun in earnest. Old walkways are being reconnected (see above, left, and bottom), pavers are being laid at the base of the Addison's steps (see above, right), and new trees and shrubbery, chosen months ago, are being planted this week before winter freezes the ground. Vegetation for the green roof atop our loading dock is being placed as I write this, and we hope to have pictures of that soon.

Inside, millwork is being installed throughout all the work spaces. The display shelving in the Museum Learning Center is now in place (see above, left). Shelving and casework are almost finished in the art library (see above right). Soon, the entirety of the Addison's art book collection will be made accessible in one place for the first time. Walls are being raised and carpet put down in the staff office spaces and, finally, trucks are able to offload at our new loading dock.

And, lastly, new restrooms throughout the Addison and the addition are near completion, with tile work inspired by the 1930s era of the original building (see above, left). Each day brings another goal in the construction process to completion, and we, the staff, continue to keep our eyes on our calendars as we count the days down to our move back and our future reopening.

Posted by

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Addison in your neighborhood

2009-10-06T08:00:00.000-05:00

The Addison may still be closed for renovation, and our touring exhibition Coming of Age may have concluded, but selections from the Addison's collection can still be seen hanging on the walls of various museums across the country as we continue to lend our objects to other institutions' exhibitions.

Two of our Winslow Homers, Shepherdess (see left) and Beach Scene, will be on view at the Syracuse University Lubin House in New York City from October 30th through December 6th. This is the second venue of Syracuse University Art Galleries' show Winslow Homer's Empire State: Houghton Farm and Beyond which focuses on Homer’s summer visits to Houghton Farm in Mountainville, New York, and includes watercolors, oil paintings and drawings.

Also in New York, two of our Robert Frank photographs from The Americans can be seen in the final venue of Looking In: Robert Frank's The Americans at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This is the final venue of a tour that started at the National Gallery in Washington, DC and travelled to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before opening in New York, where it will be on view until January 3, 2010.

And, while you are at the Met, stop in at the American Stories: Paintings of Everyday Life, 1765-1915 exhibition, where our John Sloan, Sunday, Women Drying Their Hair (see right) is on view from October 12th through January 24, 2010. The show features over one hundred American narrative paintings from a variety of lenders, and it will travel to LACMA where it will be open from February 28th through May 23, 2010.

At the Fenimore Art Museum, in Cooperstown, New York, our Washington Allston Italian Landscape is part of America's Rome: Artists in the Eternal City, 1800-1900, on view now until December 31st. And, again, in New York, you can see Black Lines and Wave, Night, two of our Georgia O'Keeffes, at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, up until January 15, 2010.

Overseas, we've lent our Sol Lewitt Wall Drawing #123, to Sol Lewitt "Seven Wall Drawings" at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konstall in Stockholm, Sweden. This was an easy loan for us to coordinate: we did not physically lend any artwork, just the right to implement the wall drawing, which was executed directly on the gallery's walls by the experts from Sol Lewitt's studio.

So until we open next year, see art from the Addison where you can!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

The Museum Project

2009-09-22T06:00:00.001-05:00

- What is a collection? What kinds of things do people collect – and why?
- What does a museum collect?
- Why are museums important?

Throughout the school year, the Addison’s Education Department will be working with the Kindergarten Prep class at the Children’s Place, a Bright Horizons child care and early education center located on the campus of Phillips Academy, to explore these ideas. In addition to learning about the Addison Gallery, the students and parents of Kindergarten Prep will be visiting the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, The Robert S. Peabody Museum of Archaeology at Phillips Academy, and the Andover Historical Society, in order to connect an understanding of the value of museums to the cultural value of their own collections and to learn how to communicate these values to others through display and interpretation.

The Kindergarten Prep class started off their year with an exploration of trucks and construction. After reading books about construction and exploring photographs of the Addison’s construction site, it was time to kick off our Museum Project by visiting the Addison’s museum-in-progress. On a Friday morning in September, we ventured with Kindergarten Prep students, teachers, and parents to the Addison Gallery construction site, noticing the construction signs and a backhoe along the way.

We stood in the Addison driveway watching the workers create clouds of billowing dust from sawing new counter tops. We peered through the green fencing along the front of the museum and discussed why it was there. The students noticed that if you stood far enough back, you could see more than you could when you’re standing close, so we experimented with the views from different distances. We discussed the building materials we could see and how the newly constructed metal and glass section compares to the original brick building.

Back in the classroom, the students have turned their block area and their sand table into construction zones, complete with a fence to keep everyone safe! They will soon be sharing their own collections from home that they are documenting with their parents.

Other classes have expressed interest in joining in on the exciting and educational exploration of collections and museums – also the theme of our fall professional development workshops with teachers.

Stay tuned for updates as the classroom projects and Addison building progresses.

For more information about the Addison’s FREE education programs, click here or contact Jamie Kaplowitz at jkaplowitz@andover.edu or 978-749-4037.

For more information about the Addison building project, click here.

Posted by:

Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

Update on the Addison Expansion and Renovation

2009-09-17T06:00:00.001-05:00

I had the privilege to walk through the museum and work site (see left, click images to make them larger) recently and found myself stunned and amazed at how much progress had been made in the Addison's renovation and expansion.

The outside of the building is coming together. Brickwork is nearly complete on all exterior surfaces, including the new truck and accessible staff entrances on the north side of the addition (see right). Chapel Avenue has been reconfigured to allow tractor-trailers to easily turn and back into our new loading dock. The front steps have been reinstalled and are now sitting on a waterproof base that should keep them well-supported for years to come. The entrance to the new accessible lift in the facade is being finished off with materials to match the existing stone and brick (see below, left). And, most importantly, the metal scrim that surrounds the glass walls of the upper part of the addition is in place. With that, and with grading around the foundation nearly complete, we can now see how the final museum and addition will look like.

Inside, workers continue to run miles of wires, conduit, and pipes before the drywallers come in behind them and close up the walls. The bathrooms are being tiled. Compact storage systems, some new, some utilizing equipment we used before the renovation, are being installed in the art storage vaults (see below, right). The new super-chilled color photography storage vault has been built to protect our most fragile collections. Shelving has been delivered for the new art library space and the Museum Learning Center. Doorways have been reconfigured leading into the library, the Education offices, and the Visitor Services area, again, with materials that match the existing stone. And, in a true sign that we're nearing the end, the galleries are being painted with the colors chosen for our opening exhibition!

Just as on the exterior, glimpses of the final look of the interior are emerging from the dust and debris of construction. I felt very excited to stand in the spot where my future desk will be and get a feel for the new space I'll be working in. We can't wait until we can fill our spaces with visitors again and show off our new building. Keep watching Blog Addison for updates on the project and our reopening date!

Posted by:

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Coming of Age – Coming Home to Andover

2009-09-08T06:00:00.000-05:00

Posted by Brian T. Allen, The Mary Stripp & R. Crosby Kemper Director

With the Addison construction project nearing its close, so, too, is the Addison’s traveling exhibition, Coming of Age, which features seventy of our greatest paintings and sculptures. The show’s “grand tour” began at the Addison in the fall of 2006 and subsequently traveled to the Meadows Museum in Dallas, the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Fort Lauderdale Museum of Art. The show is currently installed at its final venue, the Museum of Fine Arts in Quebec City, where it closes on September 7th. A richer tour is hard to imagine.

The show was a landmark in so many different ways – as the most visited summer show in Italy last year, the first survey show of American art in Quebec, and the United Kingdom’s first true retrospective of American art made from the mid-nineteenth century through its triumph on the international stage a century later. Coming of Age provided tremendous publicity and visibility for us while our doors in Andover were closed.

Only a few days after it opened in London, all the major London papers – the Telegraph, the Guardian, the Times, the Financial Times, the Independent (see right) – devoted lavish and positive reviews to the show, some running a full page. This was amazing given all the things happening in the London arts scene. Many of the critics seemed genuinely surprised to find so much that was new and original about American art. Only Brian Sewall, the art critic for the Evening Standard, veered from the consensus that the show was truly wonderful and a revelation. Sewall’s review was so invective-ridden that I found myself chuckling by the time I finished it. He is a notorious contrarian and I suppose he needed to tell the other critics why they were all wrong. Even a bad review has its upside, though, since the full page of illustrations brought even more people to see the show.

In Venice (see left), though the show ran during the design biennial and the film festival, the audience was not strictly international tourists. The bulk of the visitorship was Italian, and the show’s biggest impact for Italian audiences came from the landscapes and seascapes, especially the Homers, the Hudson River pictures, and the American Impressionists we sent. Many Europeans feel the land and the sea tell the story of the American experience best. This reflects in part a significant difference between Americans and their cultures, which they often consider more consciously urban and more heavily touched by human history.

And, I still hear stories when speaking with Addison supporters (see right) who walked into the Peggy Guggenheim Collection not realizing the Addison’s treasures had travelled there as well. They were very surprised indeed!

The show was beautifully installed in every venue. It was great to see our things installed by different curators in different ways, and each installation expressed the vision they saw in the show, different audiences, different spaces, and varying design sensibilities. When the art is great, there are infinite ways to interpret it.

I saw the show this past weekend in Quebec City (see left). When I walked toward the museum, I noticed that no more than a hundred feet from the entrance marked the spot where General Wolfe died during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, shot moments after hearing that his British troops had routed the French. This battle signaled the defeat of France by Britain in the French and Indian War, and the collapse of the French colonial empire in North America. Inside the museum, the Addison’s objects told a story curiously relevant to the violent events that occurred on what is now a placid park. American art in the nineteenth century is often represented as an idiosyncratic interpretation of British art. This influence is a legacy of Wolfe’s victory over Montcalm in 1759 and the triumph of British culture in eighteenth and nineteenth century North America, much as the Battle of the Plains of Abraham marked a military victory of one colonial power over another. And yet, the Addison show continues to tell the story of America’s reception of the art of other nations as well. A major part of this story is the American embrace of French avant garde art starting with Impressionism in the 1890s and then leading to the very French-inspired movement of American Modernism in the 1920s and beyond. Some might say French culture seems to have gotten the last word after all.

And so the great Homers, Eakinses, Hoppers, the remarkable Pollock, Stella and O’Keeffe will soon be taken off the walls in Quebec, packed and on their way back to Andover, in time to join the other wonderful objects in the Addison’s permanent collection on view at the gallery’s public reopening celebrations next year. I am looking forward to seeing you there!

Oscar Palacio + Light Work

2009-08-18T12:33:00.030-05:00

One of the benefits to the museum being closed is that the Addison’s curatorial staff has had more time to pursue “outside” projects from serving as guest jurors, to presenting lectures, to writing articles for various art publications. An example of the latter is an essay in the current Light Work Annual (Contact Sheet No. 152) by curator Allison Kemmerer about new work by Oscar Palacio. Palacio was an Edward E. Elson artist-in-residence at the Addison in 2005. His new series of photographs, some of which were created while an artist-in-residence at Light Work in 2008, focuses on national monuments and historic sites and what they say—or don’t say—about American history and our national identity. In her essay, Kemmerer wrote:

“These photographs suggest that history is an ongoing dialogue between past and present, between traditional interpretations of events and the emergence of alternative perspectives, between the keepers of the eternal flame and those who wonder what other fires are burning underground, just outside the frame.”

To view other works by Palacio, check out the photographs in the Addison's collection, like Grass Over Asphalt of 2002 [illustrated] and the artist’s website at: http://www.oscarpalacio.net/.

Posted by Jaime DeSimone
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Fellow

The Accession Log

2009-08-03T07:20:00.001-05:00

One of the projects I've taken on in my "spare time," if such a concept exists in any museum environment, is to study our Accession Log and compare it to the information in our collections database.

The Accession Log is a list that tracks the objects we have formally accepted into the collection. As each object was acquired for the museum, it was entered into the log. It exists as a stack of typewritten sheets of paper held together in a felt-covered loose-leaf binder. It has that glorious scent of age that is sweet to any Registrar's senses. It was maintained at the Addison from 1928, when we started acquiring objects for the future "Addison Gallery of Art," through 1977. After that, different methods were used to track our newly acquired objects, cumulating, nowadays, in our computerized collections database, a version of which is accessible to the public on our website.

By comparing the log to the object records on our database, I've been happily able to rectify many of our inventory anomalies. It has also been interesting to see the changes in our collecting practices over the years. Early on, paintings and drawings by older, established American artists took precedence. As time went on, prints and photography, many by young, relatively unknown artists (at the time) became more prevalent. Nowadays, our collecting embraces all American artists and media, from oil on canvas to conceptual to digital media.

We still do maintain a paper record of our objects as they are acquired into the collection. I print out a list from the database after every Trustees Meeting, no longer requiring the loose-leaf and typewriter of old. I wonder, though, how future Registrars will be tracking their objects?

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Comings and Goings

2009-07-27T06:00:00.000-05:00

Hello everyone! Just a quick post about the latest staff changes at the Addison:

We have recently said "good-bye" to Maggie Adler, our Director of Development. She has left the museum to pursue a Masters Degree in the History of Art at Williams. Also, our venerable custodian, Hector Rivera, has decided to retire after fifteen years of keeping the Addison at its sparkling best. We wish them both the best of luck with all their future endeavors.

Meanwhile, the Addison has said "hello" to its newest addition, my son, Scott, who was born in June. I'm pleased to say he and his mother are doing quite well, despite my colleagues' jokes that I should catalog him as a new museum acquisition!

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives

Lorna Bieber, Artist-in-Residence

2009-07-20T15:46:00.022-05:00

How does one be an artist-in-residence without a museum in which to reside? Artist Lorna Bieber, the Addison’s spring 2009 Edward E. Elson artist-in-residence, commuted from New York for workshops with Lawrence High School art classes during the spring semester.

Bieber reinterprets anonymous images found in books and magazines through traditional and non-traditional techniques to create complex, many-layered, mural-sized photographs.

Lorna Bieber, Branches, 200-07, 114 gelatin silver prints, 9 x 6 feet, Courtesy of the artist

Working with a humanities class and a photography class, Bieber inspired LHS students to create large-scale, multi-paneled images of their own. By gaining insight into Bieber’s creative process and having the opportunity to receive individualized critique throughout their own process, students were able to not only better understand her work, but were able to expand the boundaries of their own work.

With the use of a scanner/photocopier, students enlarged, shrunk, layered, and combined their own photographs and those taken by others to create their own unique photographic installations. They considered various formats and image juxtapositions, using both Bieber, their teachers David Meehan and John Travlos, and their peers as sounding boards for ideas. Some composed works from multiple paper printouts, while others used transparencies and computer screens.

The students’ work was hung in places of prominence throughout Lawrence High School, in order to further inspire students, teachers, and visitors.

The goal of the Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence Program at the Addison Gallery of American Art is to create meaningful interactions between artists and students. Since its inception, the program has brought together thousands of students and more than fifty acclaimed artists, including Robert Frank, Trisha Brown, Abelardo Morell, Wendy Ewald, Dawoud Bey, Richard Shaw, William Wegman, Lee Mingwei, Kerry James Marshall, and Sue Williams.

For more information about the Addison’s Edward E. Elson artist-in-residence program, click here.

Posted by:

Jamie Kaplowitz
Education Fellow

Update on the Addison Expansion and Renovation

2009-07-07T06:50:00.017-05:00

Despite the dreary New England weather, construction on the Addison's addition and renovation continues on its blisteringly fast pace.

Folks driving by the museum on Main Street can now see that the glass curtain walls have been installed on the addition. (See left: click images to make them bigger.) In time, the windows will be covered by a screen of metal mesh that will serve to shade the building and provide a modern architectural design against the museum's neoclassical facade. The windows look in on the future Museum Learning Center on the first level and the new staff office area on the upper level.

The interiors of these spaces have been coming together as well. (See right: the future Museum Learning Center. Click here for the rendering of what the space will eventually look like.) With all the forms and scaffolding removed, the deep, waffle-style coffered ceilings are exposed and the gorgeous views looking out over Phillips Academy's great lawn and the future green roof garden are unhindered. Walls are going up in these spaces to create meeting rooms, offices, and storage areas. We're finally able to walk through the physical spaces that we've only been able to visualize in our minds by looking at plans on paper.

The museum's front steps are being reinstalled with improved, water-proof support underneath. (See left.) Wiring and piping throughout the original building and the addition continues. And the loading dock, the part of the buildling I've been looking forward to the most, is near completion.

Lastly, we are now hoping to reopen sometime in late April 2010. Keep an eye on the building and here for the latest on the project, and we hope to see you here visiting the museum soon!

James M. Sousa
Associate Registrar for Collections and Archives