Former name | Museum of Art of Ogunquit |
---|---|
Established | 1953 |
Location | Ogunquit, Maine |
Coordinates | 43°14′02″N70°35′20″W / 43.2338°N 70.5889°W |
Type | Art museum |
Founder | Henry Strater |
Director | Amanda Lahikainen |
Website | ogunquitmuseum.org |
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art is a small art museum [1] located on the coast in Ogunquit, Maine. The museum houses over 3,000 pieces in its permanent collection. [2]
The Ogunquit Museum of American Art collects and exhibits modern and contemporary American art. Its permanent collection includes paintings, sculpture, graphic arts, photography, and new media. It is located in its original building at 543 Shore Road in Ogunquit, Maine, and its sculpture garden overlooks Narrow Cove.
Artist and collector Henry Strater purchased land in Ogunquit formerly owned by Charles Herbert Woodbury who is widely credited with founding the art colony in the village. [3]
Initially founded by Strater as The Museum of Art of Ogunquit, the institution was incorporated on September 18, 1951, with a mission for “the broad educational interests of the public.” Architect Charles Worley of Boston designed the museum to realize the full potential of the site on the coast. Strater commissioned architect Charles S. Worley Jr. to design the building it is housed in. [4] The museum opened its doors to the public on July 25, 1953.
The first exhibition included 121 works by modern artists Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Stuart Davis, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Peggy Bacon, Walt Kuhn, Frances Lamont, Hamilton Easter Field, and William von Schlegel, and was supported with the loan of important works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art and the Downtown Gallery.
In the ensuing decades, the Ogunquit Museum of American Art has organized important exhibitions of modern and contemporary art by Edward Hopper, [5] Andrew Wyeth, Jamie Wyeth, [6] Dahlov Ipcar., [7] and Philip Koch. [8]
The museum houses over 3,000 works of art in its permanent collection. Highlights include:
Robert Laurent was a French-American modernist figurative sculptor, printmaker and teacher. His work, the New York Times wrote,"figured in the development of an American sculptural art that balanced nature and abstraction." Widely exhibited, he took part in the Whitney's 1946 exhibition Pioneers of Modern Art. Credited as the first American sculptor to adopt a "direct carving" sculpting style that was bolder and more abstract than the then traditional fine arts practice, which relied on models, Laurent's approach was inspired by the African carving and European avant-garde art he admired, while also echoing folk styles found both in the U.S. and among medieval stone cutters of his native Brittany. Best known for his virtuoso mastery of the figure, Laurent sculpted in multiple media, including wood, alabaster, bronze, marble and aluminum. His expertise earned him major commissions for public sculpture, most famously for the Goose Girl for New York City's Radio City Music Hall, as well as for Spanning the Continent for Philadelphia's Fairmount Park. After the Depression, he was also the recipient of several Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project commissions under the New Deal, including a bas-relief called Shipping for the exterior of Washington, D.C.'s Federal Trade Commission Building, commissioned by the Treasury Department's Section of Fine Arts in 1938.
William Zorach was an American sculptor, painter, printmaker, and writer. He won the Logan Medal of the Arts. He is notable for being at the forefront of American artists embracing cubism, as well as for his sculpture.
Charles Herbert Woodbury, was an American marine painter.
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin.
Yasuo Kuniyoshi was an eminent 20th-century Japanese-American painter, photographer and printmaker.
The Portland Museum of Art, or PMA, is the largest and oldest public art institution in the U.S. state of Maine. Founded as the Portland Society of Art in 1882. It is located in the downtown area known as The Arts District in Portland, Maine.
The Delaware Art Museum is an art museum located on the Kentmere Parkway in Wilmington, Delaware, which holds a collection of more than 12,000 objects. The museum was founded in 1912 as the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts in honor of the artist Howard Pyle. The collection focuses on American art and illustration from the 19th to the 21st century, and on the English Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement of the mid-19th century.
The Addison Gallery of American Art is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art, organized as a department of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts.
Dahlov Ipcar was an American painter, illustrator and author. She was best known for her colorful, kaleidoscopic-styled paintings featuring animals – primarily in either farm or wild settings.
Kenneth Hayes Miller was an American painter, printmaker, and teacher.
Zillman Art Museum-University of Maine (ZAM) is an art museum in downtown Bangor, Maine. It is part of the University of Maine, which is located in nearby Orono, Maine. The University of Maine Art Collection was established in 1946, under the leadership of Vincent Hartgen. As the initial faculty member of the Department of Art and curator of the art collection, Hartgen's goal was to provide the people of Maine with significant opportunities to experience and learn about the visual arts and their diverse histories and cultural meanings.
Edith Halpert or Edith Gregor Halpert was a pioneering New York City dealer of American modern art and American folk art. She brought recognition and market success to many avant-garde American artists. Her establishment, the Downtown Gallery, was the first commercial art space in Greenwich Village. When it was founded in 1926, it was the only New York gallery dedicated exclusively to contemporary American art by living artists. Over her forty-year career, Halpert showcased such modern art luminaries as Elie Nadelman, Max Weber, Marguerite and William Zorach, Stuart Davis, Peggy Bacon, Charles Sheeler, Marsden Hartley, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Ben Shahn, Jack Levine, William Steig, Jacob Lawrence, Walter Meigs, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and many others. Halpert later expanded her business to include American folk art, and certain nineteenth-century American painters, including Raphaelle Peale, William Michael Harnett, and John Frederick Peto, whom she considered to be precursors to American modernism.
Henry Heydenryk Jr. (1905–1994) was a Dutch American frame maker, historian, writer and designer. He was the fourth generation descendant of a family-run business, The House of Heydenryk (Heijdenrijk). Founded in Amsterdam in 1845, the company is one of the world’s oldest framing companies. The firm made and supplied reproductions and antiques to the Tate and National Gallery museums in England, the Rijksmuseum in the Netherlands and for many other important museums and private collectors including Baron Thyssen-Bornemisza and members of the Rothschild family.
The Palmer Museum of Art is the art museum of Pennsylvania State University, located on the University Park campus in State College, Pennsylvania.
Katherine Schmidt was an American artist and art activist. Early in her career, the figure studies, landscapes, and still lifes she painted drew praise for their "purity and clarity of color," "sound draftsmanship," and "individual choice of subject and its handling." During the 1930s she was known mainly for the quality of her still life paintings which showed, one critic said, "impeccable artistry." At the end of her career, in the 1960s and 1970s, she produced specialized and highly disciplined still lifes of objects such as dead leaves and pieces of crumpled paper, which, said a critic, approached a "magical realism." As an art activist she helped promote the rights of artists for fair remuneration.
Charles Goeller (1901–1955) was an American artist best known for precise and detailed paintings and drawings in which, he once said, he aimed to achieve "emotion expressed by precision." Employing, as one critic wrote, an "exquisitely meticulous realism," he might take a full year to complete work on a single picture. Early in his career he achieved critical recognition for his still lifes, in which one critic saw an "acumen of genius" working to produce "truly superb achievement of team work between eyes that see and hands that do." Later, he also became known for cityscapes in which he employed precisionist flat planes and geometric forms to show the physical structures of his subjects.
Jason Lloyd Schoener was an American painter and teacher.
Jessica F. Nicoll is an American museum director and curator and an authority on American art and culture. She serves as Director and Louise Ines Doyle '34 Chief Curator of the Smith College Museum of Art. She was previously the Chief Curator and Curator of American Art of the Portland Museum of Art.
Henry "Mike" Strater (1896–1987) was an American painter and illustrator. He was a friend of Ernest Hemingway and other figures of the Lost Generation. He was best known for his portraiture, figurative, and landscape drawings and paintings. Strater founded the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Ogunquit, Maine in either 1952 or 1953.