May 23, 2023

Turning the Feather Around: The Life and Work of George Morrison

Dr. Danielle Moretti-Langholtz, Curator of Native American Art at the Muscarelle, will present the final talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins, with a talk about artist George Morrison. Born and raised near the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in Minnesota, George Morrison (Ojibwe) had a long and distinguished career as an Abstract Expressionist painter and sculptor. This presentation will follow Morrison’s life story and his foray into the inner circle of some of the most prominent American expressionists of the day, including Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, and his return to Minnesota during the […]
May 16, 2023

Muscarelle Reads: Ninth Street Women

As part of our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins, join us for a virtual discussion of Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel, which chronicles the experiences of five women who dared to enter the male-dominated world of twentieth-century abstract painting — not as muses but as artists. Museum Director David Brashear will be joined by Gary Ryan, Director and CEO of the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, for a Zoom-based discussion of the book. No need to read the book in order to attend — bring your questions and enjoy the discussion! ABOUT THE BOOK: Five […]
April 27, 2023

Abstract Artist Lynne Mapp Drexler’s Journey from Virginia to Maine

Art historian and scholar Gail Levin will join us for the fourth talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Imagine a story of an artist who escaped from an art world rife with competition and her struggle to find herself, landing on an enchanted island, where she lived happily ever after, painting, though forgotten, for the rest of her life. She went so far as to write to a friend what her dealer could tell collectors who inquired about her: “advise them I’d become a hermit — an eccentric one and that I come to […]
April 25, 2023

The Life and Work of Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner: A Biographer’s View

Art historian and scholar Gail Levin will join us for the third talk in our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Lee Krasner once said, “I think my painting is so autobiographical, if anyone can take the trouble to read it.” Her friend and biographer, art historian Gail Levin, who first interviewed the artist when she was a twenty-two year-old graduate student, guides us on an illustrated journey from Krasner’s birth in 1908 Brooklyn to her love of nature on the Eastern End of New York’s Long Island. Levin will not only give art historical analysis, but […]
April 17, 2023

Norman Lewis, Ad Reinhardt, Adolph Gottlieb, Dorothy Dehner: Our Pictographic and Skeuomorphic Era

Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur joins us from Yale University for our second talk in the spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. Painters such as Norman Lewis, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Dorothy Dehner looked to notational stand-ins for meaning. The stick figures and simplified marks were graphic interfaces developed to be capable pictorial descriptors of more complex language systems. Interested in the research of anthropologists such as Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Mead and post-structuralist anthropologists such as Claude Levi-Strauss, artists paired these ideas with instinctive line-making. For them this pairing of rational and id-based notation systems were places of […]
April 4, 2023

Introducing Abstract Expressionism: The American Movement

David Brashear, Director of the Muscarelle Museum of Art, will set the stage for our spring Muscarelle Explorations series, Modern Masters at the Margins. As the United States worked its way through the Great Depression, an artistic energy was developed in New York, in part driven by the WPA’s public art program. A group of artists, working both uptown and downtown, began to move away from representational art and focus their efforts on new approaches to abstraction. Some were more established, and some were relative newcomers. Some were older, and some were younger. Many were men, but some were women […]