“The Fountains at Night,” 1893, by Winslow Homer
This spring we are pleased to announce, with appreciation, our receipt of grants from the Andrew Wyeth Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, in support of several ambitious upcoming exhibitions and scholarly projects at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. Generous funding from the Wyeth Foundation for American Art will support the catalogue for the Museum’s upcoming summer 2015 exhibition, Night Vision: Nocturnes in American Art, 1860-1960 (June 27 through October 18, 2015). The first major museum survey dedicated to scenes of the night in American art, Night Vision provides insight into artists’ fascination with the experience of the hours between dusk and dawn, ranging from the dawn of electric illumination to the beginning of the Space Age.
“Three Designs for Stained Glass Windows, ca. 1538, by Dierick Vellert and Workshop
A recent grant from Samuel H. Kress Foundation will enable the BCMA to engage an emerging scholar to research and develop catalogue entries related to James Bowdoin III’s old master drawings collection. This work will make an important contribution to the development of an online scholarly catalogue of these works, which formed the first public collection of drawings in the United States.
“Runaways,” 1993, by Glen Ligon. One of a series of ten lithographs.
Finally, the development of and programming for our summer 2016 show, This is a Portrait if I Say So: Reimagining Representation in American Art, 1912–Today, will benefit from a major two-year grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Spanning approximately one hundred years of American art, This is a Portrait if I Say So, will bring together approximately seventy-five works by leading American artists from museums and private collectors. It explores how pictorial abstraction has provided new conceptual models for the rendition of personal identity from the early twentieth century until the present day.
Each of these important projects provides new ways of understanding and of sharing with our audiences historic, modern, and contemporary art and of generating new research about our own collections. None would be possible without the important contributions of the Wyeth, Kress, and Luce Foundations. We take pride in the encouragement and recognition this support offers the museum.
