Addison Gallery of American Art
Encyclopedia
Phillips Academy
Phillips Academy is a selective, co-educational independent boarding high school for boarding and day students in grades 9–12, along with a post-graduate year...
, Andover, Massachusetts
Andover, Massachusetts
Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. It was incorporated in 1646 and as of the 2010 census, the population was 33,201...
, is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art. The museum's purpose is to acquire, preserve, interpret, and exhibit works of art for the education and enjoyment of local, regional, national and international audiences, including the students, faculty, and community of Phillips Academy, and other students, teachers, scholars, and the general public.
History
Phillips Academy alumnus Thomas Cochran created the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in 1931 as the most extraordinary of his many gifts to the school. Guided by Cochran's goal "to enrich permanently the lives of the students," the Addison's programs demonstrate a central concern for education. The museum is a teaching resource for Phillips Academy students and faculty as well as an art center for the greater Boston area and the nation at large.By the Terms of Trust under which the Addison Gallery was founded, the museum's collection is limited to works of art or craftsmanship produced by native-born or naturalized citizens of the United States, with the following exceptions: photographs and books by other than native-born or naturalized citizens; portraits or busts of Americans and portrayals of American scenes or vessels by artists of foreign birth produced not later than 1800; pieces of pottery or glassware of whatever origin or date decorated with American scenes; and scale models of famous ships connected with the history of the United States.
Collection
The Addison Gallery of American Art's founding collection included major works by such prominent American artists as John Singleton CopleyJohn Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts, and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects...
, Thomas Eakins
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator...
, Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art....
, Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Brazil Prendergast was an American Post-Impressionist artist who worked in oil, watercolor, and monotype...
, John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings...
, John Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
James Abbott McNeill Whistler was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger...
. Aggressive purchasing and generous gifts have added works by such artists as George Bellows
George Bellows
George Wesley Bellows was an American realist painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City, becoming, according to the Columbus Museum of Art, "the most acclaimed American artist of his generation".-Youth:Bellows was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio...
, Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder was an American sculptor and artist most famous for inventing mobile sculptures. In addition to mobile and stable sculpture, Alexander Calder also created paintings, lithographs, toys, tapestry, jewelry and household objects.-Childhood:Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton,...
, Stuart Davis
Stuart Davis (painter)
Stuart Davis , was an early American modernist painter. He was well known for his jazz influenced, proto pop art paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, bold, brash, and colorful as well as his ashcan pictures in the early years of the 20th century.-Biography:He was born in Philadelphia to Edward Wyatt...
, Arthur Dove
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.-Youth and education:...
, Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.-Early life and education:Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, where his English parents had settled. He was the youngest of nine children. His mother died when he was eight, and his father remarried four years later to Martha...
, Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
, Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching...
, Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe was an American artist.Born near Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O'Keeffe first came to the attention of the New York art community in 1916, several decades before women had gained access to art training in America’s colleges and universities, and before any of its women artists...
, Jackson Pollock
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock , known as Jackson Pollock, was an influential American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. During his lifetime, Pollock enjoyed considerable fame and notoriety. He was regarded as a mostly reclusive artist. He had a volatile personality, and...
, Frederic Remington
Frederic Remington
Frederic Sackrider Remington was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in depictions of the Old American West, specifically concentrating on the last quarter of the 19th century American West and images of cowboys, American Indians, and the U. S...
, Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler
Charles Rettew Sheeler, Jr. was an American artist. He is recognized as one of the founders of American modernism and one of the master photographers of the 20th century.-Early life and career:...
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, John Sloan, Benjamin West
Benjamin West
Benjamin West, RA was an Anglo-American painter of historical scenes around and after the time of the American War of Independence...
and Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century....
.
The Addison's collection of 7,000 photographs spans the history of American photography and includes in-depth holdings of key individual artists, such as Lewis Baltz
Lewis Baltz
Lewis Baltz is a visual artist and well known photographer who became an important figure in the New Topographic movement of the late 1970s....
, Walker Evans
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
, Robert Frank
Robert Frank
Robert Frank , born in Zürich, Switzerland, is an important figure in American photography and film. His most notable work, the 1958 photobook titled The Americans, was influential, and earned Frank comparisons to a modern-day de Tocqueville for his fresh and skeptical outsider's view of American...
, Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard J. Muybridge was an English photographer who spent much of his life in the United States. He is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion which used multiple cameras to capture motion, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible...
, Carleton Watkins
Carleton Watkins
Carleton E. Watkins was a noted 19th century California photographer.Carleton Emmons Watkins was born in Oneonta, upstate New York. He went to San Francisco during the gold rush, arriving in 1851...
and Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her...
. In recent years, the Gallery has acquired significant contemporary works by Emery Bopp
Emery Bopp
Emery Bopp was an artist and long-time chairman of the Division of Art, Bob Jones University.-Early life and education:...
, Carroll Dunham, Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall is an artist born in Birmingham, Alabama. He grew up in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in Chicago where he previously taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago...
, Joel Shapiro
Joel Shapiro
Joel Shapiro is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. Shapiro is represented by The Pace Gallery in New York. He lives and works in New York City, with a summer house on the shore of Lake Champlain, in Westport, New York...
, and Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson is an African American artist and photographer who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal. Her work often portrays black women combined with text to express contemporary society's relationship with race, ethnicity and sex...
, to name a few.
Another strength is in decorative arts, with silver
Silver
Silver is a metallic chemical element with the chemical symbol Ag and atomic number 47. A soft, white, lustrous transition metal, it has the highest electrical conductivity of any element and the highest thermal conductivity of any metal...
and furniture
Furniture
Furniture is the mass noun for the movable objects intended to support various human activities such as seating and sleeping in beds, to hold objects at a convenient height for work using horizontal surfaces above the ground, or to store things...
dating back to pre-colonial America, and a collection of American Colonial model ships.
Today, the collection comprises over 16,000 works in all media, including painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, and decorative arts from the eighteenth century to the present.
Programs
A rotating schedule of exhibitions is open to students and the public alike.The Addison's core programs include: caring for and expanding a permanent collection of American art of the highest quality; producing an ambitious publication and changing exhibition program of twelve to eighteen exhibits each year; offering diverse education and community outreach programs free of charge; and supporting and encouraging living artists through a residency program.
The Addison Gallery has long served as a proving ground for new approaches to learning about art and as a national model for arts education. The Addison strives to be a place where students can learn about art, work with visiting artists and visit diverse exhibitions—all ongoing programs that reflect the museum's central focus on education. The Addison's education outreach program combines the experience of art with its practice; provides direct contact with working artists and presents the arts as a collective expression of culture. Tours, classroom instruction, gallery talks, lectures, teacher workshops, and a film series are offered to area public schools and the general public. More than 6,000 students participate in the education outreach program annually.
The Addison's association with Phillips Academy enables the collection to serve as a laboratory for teaching within the school, not only for studio and art history, but also for history, English, philosophy, and other disciplines. The integration of the museum and its collections with the academic life of the school has had a direct bearing on the emergence of prominent artists/alumni such as Carl Andre
Carl Andre
Carl Andre is an American minimalist artist recognized for his ordered linear format and grid format sculptures. His sculptures range from large public artworks to more intimate tile patterns arranged on the floor of an exhibition space Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American...
, Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell
Joseph Cornell was an American artist and sculptor, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage...
, Carroll Dunham, Walker Evans
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
, Hollis Frampton
Hollis Frampton
Hollis Frampton was an American avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, writer/theoretician, and pioneer of digital art.-Early years:Frampton was born March 11, 1936 in Wooster, Ohio...
, Peter Halley
Peter Halley
-Early Life and Career:Halley first came to prominence as a result of the geometric paintings rendered in intense day-glo colours that he produced in the early 1980s. His practice as an artist is usually associated with minimalism, neo-geo, and neo-conceptualism...
, Mel Kendrick
Mel Kendrick
Mel Kendrick , is an American artist, known primarily for his sculptural work in wood, bronze, rubber, paper and, most recently, cast concrete. Kendrick's work reflects a deep fascination with process, space, and geometry...
, John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin (artist)
John Dwyer McLaughlin was an American abstract painter. Based primarily in California, he was a pioneer in minimalist and hard-edge painting.-Life:...
, Frank Stella
Frank Stella
Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, significant within the art movements of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.-Biography:...
, and George Tooker
George Tooker
George Clair Tooker, Jr. was a figurative painter whose works are associated with the Magic realism and Social realism movements...
.
Exhibitions
In 1935, the Addison became the first museum in America to exhibit the work of Josef AlbersJosef Albers
Josef Albers was a German-born American artist and educator whose work, both in Europe and in the United States, formed the basis of some of the most influential and far-reaching art education programs of the 20th century....
; the first to present a retrospective of John Sloan in 1938, and the first American museum to offer a solo exhibition of Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann
Hans Hofmann was a German-born American abstract expressionist painter.-Biography:Hofmann was born in Weißenburg, Bavaria on March 21, 1880, the son of Theodor and Franziska Hofmann. When he was six he moved with his family to Munich...
's work in 1948. The Addison was also one of the first American museums to actively exhibit photography, presenting images by artists such as Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott
Berenice Abbott , born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.-Youth:...
, Walker Evans
Walker Evans
Walker Evans was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera...
, and Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White was an American photographer and documentary photographer. She is best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take pictures of Soviet Industry, the first female war correspondent and the first female photographer for Henry Luce's Life magazine, where her...
.
Today the Gallery presents a combination of twelve special exhibitions and permanent collection installations per year, often serving as the only New England venue for nationally touring shows, and represent a wide range of art, across time and media.