KNOW/NOW: CONTEMPORARY INTERROGATIONS

For the purpose of these interrogations, the Museum has developed a series of questions for exhibiting contemporary artists in an attempt to enliven and explore the discourse between the artist and the institution – with specific focus on site, interpretation, relevance, process, and sources. Marc Swanson, whose NEW/NOW exhibition (on view until this Sunday, May [...]

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Carson Fox: “Bi-Polar” Looks Beyond Fire, Flames, and Ice

“I am interested in beauty but I mistrust it. Instead, I look for beauty that exists in tension with the material or circumstances that invent it”. This has become one of the mantras of Carson Fox, the Brooklyn-based artists whose artwork is the newest installment in the NEW/NOW exhibition series for emerging contemporary artists. The [...]

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Contemporary/Interactive Crazy Quilts

Victorian crazy quilts were textiles made for display. They adorned the public space of the parlor rather than private space of the bedroom. The compositions of these quilts did not follow traditional patterns, but were the product of the seamstress’ own sense of invention. Beyond their decorative function, Crazy Quilts had a social function. Crazy [...]

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Classical Realism Today: Christopher Pugliese

Christopher Pugliese (b. 1968) is the most recent artist featured in the NEW/NOW Gallery at the New Britain Museum of American Art. His style merges the classical with the contemporary, painting his figures with the grace and anatomical accuracy of the Old Masters while simultaneously creating an air of modern existentialism. His approach to art [...]

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Fooling the Eye with Paint

In the hierarchy of academic pursuits, still-life painting was considered the least demanding art form. Nevertheless, fruit and flower paintings, which were decorative and opulent, were widely popular in the 19th and 20th centuries. Some painters duplicated nature so convincingly that they fooled viewers into thinking that the objects they painted were real. Severin Roesen [...]

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Outside the Lines: Defining the Modern Museum

  Are museums: 1. Places to preserve history, 2. Places to establish new history, or 3. Places to encourage creative growth? Can there be a fourth choice- All of the above? The New Britain Museum of American Art (NBMAA) is an interesting example that falls into the “All of the above” category. The facilities of [...]

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Jon Rappleye’s Dreamscapes

Following the First World War, Surrealist artists, such as Salvador Dalí (1904-1989), Yves Tanguy (1900-55) and René Magritte (1898-1967) employed in their imagery “meticulous detail, recognizable scenes and objects that are taken out of natural context, distorted and combined in fantastic ways as they might be in dreams.”1 Dreams have long fascinated human beings. Many [...]

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NEW/NOW: The Elephant in the Room by Elana Herzog

The Elephant in the Room, 2010. Elana Herzog (b. 1954) Pencil, textile, metal staples, pushpins, etc. Collection of the artist The current NEW/NOW exhibition features the unique installations and works on paper of Elana Herzog, a New York based installation artist. By attaching found textiles—often shredded bedspreads and other fabrics—to walls using thousands of judiciously [...]

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Reuse, Recycle, Re-craft – Eco-friendly art

Almost daily we hear about better ways of going “green” and it appears that the trend to be environmentally friendly has hit the art world to. Artists are now beginning to find a new medium to work with: recycled objects. Their inspirations are drawn from a wide variety of subject matter, such as classical imagery, [...]

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Sandra Allen: The Portraiture of Trees

Sandra Allen, born in 1963, has been using trees as the subject of her stunning large-scale drawings since 2001. Appropriate to her work, she lives and works in the small New England town of Hingham, Massachusetts. Previously a painter, Allen now focuses entirely on drawing trees, using mostly graphite on white paper. The result is [...]

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