Displaying items by tag: Vermont

The Hall Art Foundation announces an exhibition by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson being held in its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 3 May – 30 November 2014. This survey brings a focused selection of Eliasson’s sculptures, photo series, optical devices, and works on paper together with his major outdoor installation, Waterfall (2004), unveiled at the Hall Art Foundation last year.

Throughout the past two decades, Eliasson’s installations, paintings, photography, films, and public projects have served as tools for exploring the cognitive and cultural conditions that inform our perception. Ranging from immersive environments of color, light, and movement to installations that recontextualize natural phenomena, his work defies the notion of art as an autonomous object and instead positions itself as part of an active exchange with the visitor and his or her individualized experience. Described by the artist as “devices for the experience of reality,” his individual works and projects prompt a greater sense of awareness about the ways we both interpret and co-produce the world. By recreating the natural through artificial means and capturing it in both time and space, Eliasson's work encourages the renegotiation of linear perceptions of space as well as the line between reality and representation.

The Middlebury College Museum of Art in Middlebury, VT is currently exhibiting a selection of rare watercolors and drawings of Vermont by the American painter Edward Hopper (1882-1967). Best known for his depictions of urban and rural life in America, Hopper’s paintings of Vermont are not widely known and many of them have not been on public view in nearly 50 years. Edward Hopper in Vermont, which was assembled from museums and private collections, marks the first time Hopper’s Vermont works have been displayed together in their home state.

Hopper, and his wife Jo, a fellow artist who was also his model, muse, and lifelong travel companion, made five trips to Vermont during the summers between 1927 and 1938. Hopper’s early paintings from these trips depict Vermont’s most recognizable scenery – rolling green hills dotted with bright red barns and dramatic distant peaks. His later paintings focus on the White River Valley and its vast meadows, wide pastures, and everyday roadside scenes. These works are a departure from Hopper’s usual style as they lack any architectural form or signs of human presence.

Edward Hopper in Vermont will be on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art through August 11, 2013.

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and his work have been endlessly described, critiqued, analyzed, dissected, and reassembled, both during his lifetime and since he left this world almost half a century ago. He has been stereotyped by the images that stay fixed in our minds, with the late-night diner scene in Nighthawks the most noteworthy example. Nevertheless, Hopper can still offer up some surprises. One of these is that between 1927 and 1938, in his relentless search for new subjects to paint, Edward Hopper made at least five summer trips into Vermont with his wife, Josephine Nivison Hopper (1883–1968) (Fig. 1), with two extended stays on a farm in South Royalton. The less than two dozen paintings of farm buildings and rural landscapes that Hopper made in central Vermont are relatively unknown within this famous artist’s repertoire. Unique works with ties to specific times and places, they contrast sharply with Hopper’s urban paintings, and they are distinctive even in comparison to Hopper’s works from elsewhere in New England.

In 1928, novelist Sinclair Lewis purchased a three-hundred-acre farm in Barnard, Vermont, as a wedding gift for his bride, foreign correspondent Dorothy Thompson. The property, Twin Farms, which was first cultivated in 1793, soon became the hub of the couple’s sophisticated circle, who included German war refugees, film producer Karl Zuckmayer and his Austrian actress wife, Alice Herndon. Alice’s memoir of life at Twin Farms, The Little Farm in the Green Mountains, was a postwar best seller in Europe.

American antiques have been a passion for Norman and Mary Gronning since their introduction to them in Buffalo, New York, in the 1960s. As newlyweds just beginning their careers as teachers, the couple sought a way to supplement their income and decided to go into business with several friends selling second-hand furniture. In their excursions they met dealers in early American furniture and became aware of the potential value and historical importance of these objects. Intent on learning all they could, many weekends were spent visiting historic sites and museums throughout the northeast. The couple eventually began to buy and sell antiques instead of used furniture.

“Egypt,” an idyllic hill farm situated in an isolated hollow high on the slopes of Red Mountain in Arlington, Vermont, served as home base for the artist Rockwell Kent (1882–1971) and his growing family from the summer of 1919 to the summer of 1925. Arriving in Vermont on the heels of a sojourn to Alaska and buoyed by the critical and financial success of the work he had commenced there, including his travel memoir, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska, Kent quickly rose to become one of the most renowned artistic figures in America. Despite the fact that this period proved to be pivotal in the arc of Kent’s career, the artist’s seminal years in Arlington have been largely overlooked.