Fall Exhibitions at the Addison Gallery

American Sculptor Paul Manship Celebrated At the Addison Gallery of American Art

Exhibition Debuts New Series of Works by Photographers Barbara Bosworth, Justin Kimball, S. Billie Mandle, and Abelardo Morell

Exploring notions of place in American art throughout its 2018–2019 program, this fall the Addison Gallery of American Art will open From Starfield to MARS: Paul Manship and his Artistic Legacy. The exhibition examines the work and influence of Paul Manship (1885–1966) through two interconnected components: Art Deco at Andover considers the Addison's historic connection with the prominent early 20th-century sculptor Paul Manship, while Starfield through Contemporary Lenses presents the work of four artists-in-residence at the Manship Artists Residency + Studios (MARS) program established this year in Gloucester, Massachusetts.
MARS is being developed as an international, interdisciplinary artists’ residency at Manship’s former summer home and studio, which he dubbed Starfield, to create new works inspired by the artist and his estate. The first class of artists-in-residence were selected by Addison curator Allison N. Kemmerer, and include acclaimed Massachusetts-based photographers Barbara Bosworth, Justin Kimball, S. Billie Mandle, and Abelardo Morell, who bring individual perspectives and aesthetic approaches to interpreting Manship’s estate and archives. These artists will also participate in the Addison’s fall 2018 Edward E. Elson Artist-in-Residence program, collaborating with students and faculty at Phillips Academy and area public schools on projects inspired by the exhibition. From Starfield to MARS: Paul Manship and His Artistic Legacy is on view from September 15, 2018 through January 20, 2019.

The Addison’s connection to Paul Manship can be traced back to its founder Thomas Cochran, who maintained a friendship with Manship and acquired many of his works for the museum’s core collection, including Venus Anadyomene (1927), which greets visitors as they enter the museum. Art Deco at Andover will bring together works by Manship from the Addison collection such as the bronze sculptures Diana (1925), Actaeon (1925), Young Indian Hunter (1926), and Flight of Night (1916), with correspondence, objects, and sketches recently uncovered at Starfield.

“It is an honor to collaborate with the Manship Artists Residency + Studios as they embark on an important initiative to revitalize Paul Manship’s summer home and studio,” said Judith F. Dolkart, the Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. “Our shared commitment to supporting living artists as well as Manship’s important connection to the founding of the Addison makes this a fitting partnership that will illuminate an important American sculptor.”

“We are thrilled to inaugurate our artists-in-residence program with the debut of this exhibition, which illustrates the endless potential of this important cultural site to inspire creativity,” added Rebecca Reynolds, president at MARS. “As stewards of Paul Manship’s estate, we look forward to breathing new life into this site and reviving its legacy as an artistic hub.”

In 1944, Manship and his wife Isabel bought 15 acres with two quarries in Lanesville on Cape Ann, a village within Gloucester, Massachusetts, approximately 30 miles east of Andover. In doing so, Manship followed
a number of prominent American artists—among them John Sloan, Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper—who sought out Gloucester for its rocky terrain, picturesque sites, and sea breezes. This summer home and studio became a center for the social life of a burgeoning artist colony, which included such renowned members as: children’s book author and printmaker Virginia Lee Burton; sculptors George Demetrios, Charles Grafly, and Walker Hancock; and painters Gabriel Clements, Ellen Day Hale, and Leon Kroll. Occupied until recently by Manship’s son and daughter-in-law, also artists, the estate was purchased in August 2017 by MARS to save the property from development and to honor the site’s legacy by renovating the facilities and establishing an ongoing residency and studio programs.

The estate still bears the marks of generations of family who lived and worked there, providing an opportunity for the selected photographers to document what was left behind. Offering an illuminating look at an important New England cultural site, Starfield through Contemporary Lenses will debut their photographic explorations in individual galleries dedicated to each artist. For more than a year, Barbara Bosworth, Justin Kimball, S. Billie Mandle, and Abelardo Morell have explored the house, grounds, outbuildings, and archives, making numerous day trips according to their own interests. An overview of their projects follows below.

Barbara Bosworth
Barbara Bosworth’s photographs exhibit a deep reverence for the American landscape, imbued with a sense of personal and collective memory, and shed light on the relationship between humans and the natural world. Bosworth’s and Manship’s interests in astronomy provided a point of departure for her series devoted to the sculptor’s estate. Over the course of a year, Bosworth made trips to document the night sky and capture the stars’ movements using a large-format camera and hour-long exposures, resulting in more than 35 velvety blue images that evoke Manship’s fascination with the world beyond the earth’s atmosphere. These photographs are accompanied by close-up images of skies depicted in paintings of New England—many of Cape Ann—from the Addison’s collection, offering another perspective on the site’s unique sense of place.
Bosworth is a professor of photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston. Her work has been widely exhibited, including retrospectives at the Denver Art Museum, the Phoenix Art Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. She has also published extensively, with titles including The Heavens (2018), The Meadow (2015), Natural Histories (2013), Trees: National Champions (2005), and Chasing the Light (2002).

Justin Kimball
Justin Kimball is known for creating beautiful and stirring images that document the remnants of lives left behind. In his recent series Elegy, Kimball photographed main streets and dilapidated buildings in small towns in Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that have faced economic decline. Inhabitants are pictured in backyards and on porches and street corners, breathing life into these otherwise downtrodden locations. In a previous series, Pieces of String, he visited the homes of the recently deceased, where he photographed ruffled sheets on an unmade bed, an indent in a worn armchair, and phone numbers scrawled on the wall beside a rotary phone. Kimball has continued this exploration inside the Manship home and studio, in a series of color photographs that capture what has been generated, collected, and ultimately left behind by generations of family members. Images of shrouded sculptures and discarded molds, caches of drawings and photographs, well-worn furniture, and bookshelves filled with volumes amassed over decades imply both the passing of time and the lingering presence of lives once lived.

Kimball teaches at Amherst College and is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship and an Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship. He has published three monographs: Where We Find Ourselves (2006), Pieces of String (2012), and Elegy (2016), and his work is held in such collections as the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the George Eastman Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

S. Billie Mandle
S. Billie Mandle’s work lingers on the traces left behind in empty, silent spaces. For previous series, she has photographed the interiors of Catholic confessional booths and Emily Dickinson’s bedroom in her historic Amherst home. Extending her practice of creating meditative photographs through a series of images, Mandle depicts corners and sparse spaces within the Manship home that appear as sculptural abstractions and capture the stillness of a space once filled with life. A second series focuses on Manship’s studio, where the artist’s son John left behind hundreds of his paintings stacked in bins. Photographed in dark, raking, and natural light, the canvases only come into focus upon close observation, provoking questions about what remains and what fades away.

Mandle is on the faculty of Hampshire College in Amherst, MA. She earned a BA in English and biology from Williams College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art. She has received a Whiting Fellowship, an Individual Artist Grant from the Brooklyn Arts Council, and an Artist Fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her photographs have been published in Aperture and exhibited widely, including at the Photography Festival in Hyères, France.

Abelardo Morell
Abelardo Morell is best known for employing the camera obscura technique to create seemingly magical optical effects on otherwise ordinary objects. The Addison exhibition marks a departure in Morell’s photographic practice. Titled After Manship, his series pays homage to Manship as the quintessential art deco sculptor, drawing inspiration from that art movement and its formative influences ranging from Arts and Crafts to Bauhaus to Native American aesthetics. To create the seven large-scale works in the exhibition, Morell employed the technique of cliché-verre, painting on sheets of glass with various forms and patterns associated with the art deco aesthetic, layering them on top of each other, and then digitally scanning the plates to create mesmerizing, kaleidoscopic abstractions.

Born in Cuba in 1948, Morell came to New York with his family in 1962. He received a BA from Bowdoin College in 1977 and an MFA from Yale in 1981. From 1983 to 2009, Morell was a professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1993, the International Center of Photography’s Infinity Award in 2011, and the Lucie Award in 2017. Morell’s work is held in numerous collections, including the Addison, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Fondation Cartier, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.

Paul Manship
Paul Manship (1885–1966) was one of America’s most significant early 20th-century sculptors, recognized both nationally and internationally. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota (as was the Addison’s founder Thomas Cochran), he studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Upon winning the Prix de Rome in 1909, he spent three formative years in Italy and traveled to Greece to study archaic and classical sculpture. By his return to the United States his work was garnering attention for its careful navigation between abstraction and representation. Manship’s first show in New York at the end of 1912 sold out and from then on his work was in high demand. Today he is best known for public commissions such as the monumental flying figure Prometheus (1934) at New York’s Rockefeller Center and the gates at the Bronx Zoo, as well as for his many individual sculptures, such as Diana and Actaeon (1925), that showcase his streamlined, classically influenced style now known as Art Deco. The Addison Gallery’s renowned collection of American art includes 12 works by Manship, among them the marble fountain Venus Anadyomene in the museum’s rotunda, five major bronzes, and six commemorative medals. In testimony to Manship’s important role in shaping the Addison’s core collection, Phillips Academy commissioned Manship to design the Armillary Sphere (1940) situated in front of the library, and an award medal commemorating former headmaster Claude Fuess.

Exhibition Organization
From Starfield to MARS: Paul Manship and His Artistic Legacy is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art in collaboration with the Manship Artists Residency + Studios (MARS). Starfield through Contemporary Lenses is curated by Allison N. Kemmerer, Mead Curator of Photography and Curator of Art after 1950. Art Deco at Andover is curated by Susan Faxon, Associate Director and Robert M. Walker, Curator of Art before 1950, Emerita.

From Starfield to MARS: Paul Manship and His Artistic Legacy is made possible through generous support from the Sidney R. Knafel Exhibition Fund and Eric (PA ‘66) and Nanny Almquist. The Addison is also grateful to media partner Boston Magazine for their support of the exhibition.

Photography Exhibition Illuminates Relationship Between the American Landscape and National Identity

Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs Draws from the Addison Gallery of American Art’s Deep Holdings in Photography

Exploring the deeper significance of America’s physical environment, Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs at the Addison Gallery of American Art examines the creative impulse to portray America’s landscapes from the dawn of photography to the present. Featuring over 150 works drawn from the museum’s expansive photography collection, the exhibition unites a range of images that interpret America’s natural and manmade features as potent symbols of a nation whose history is inextricably linked to the land, and reveals new perspectives on how America’s landscape shapes and is shaped by national identity. Whether historical or contemporary, abstract or representative, celebratory or critical, private exploration or social document, the works presented in Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs illuminate the complex and often contentious dynamic between culture and nature. Among the photographers included in the exhibition are Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Lois Conner, Marcia Resnick, Carleton Watkins, Edward Weston, and Katherine Wolkoff. The exhibition is on view September 8, 2018–March 3, 2019 and is part of the Addison’s exploration of notions of place in American art during the museum’s 2018–2019 program.

“The American landscape has come to symbolize the nation’s most profound ideals and imperfections, representing bounty and independence, overdevelopment and corporate interests,” said Judith F. Dolkart, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison Gallery of American Art. “As environmental debates continue to shape our national discourse, we look forward to providing deeper insight into America as the ‘land of opportunity’ through the lenses of the some of the most iconic photographers of the 19th through 21st centuries.”

Providing contrasting viewpoints that highlight the transformation of the American landscape through time, Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs explores topics ranging from manifest destiny and land conservation to climate change and suburbanization. Highlights include:
• Promoting development and tourism, mammoth-plate albumen prints of Yosemite such as Carleton Watkins’s Distant View of the Domes (c. 1880) highlight both the area’s sublime beauty and accessibility by presenting the wild frontier as a series of calm and classically ordered landscapes. Created 100 years later and depicting a tourist whose headscarf replicates the view of Yosemite before her, Roger Minick’s Woman with Scarf at Inspiration Point (1980) suggests the commodification of the picturesque.
• Focusing on increasingly rare fragments of untouched wilderness, ardent conservationist Ansel Adams’s grand works in black and white, such as Half Dome, Blowing Snow, Yosemite, Nat'l Park, CA (1976) reinforce the image of the American West as an unspoiled wilderness. Contrasting views such as Lewis Baltz’s series Candlestick Point (1989) and Bill Owens’s series Suburbia (1972) depict landscapes littered with industrial waste, tract house sprawl, and new homeowners blanketing dirt yards with pallets of grass, drawing our attention to the stark contrast between American myth and reality.
• Some artists look to the landscape as a site for formal and intellectual experimentation. Poetic and reductive abstractions such as Edward Weston’s Untitled (1930) attempt to reveal nature’s essence, while images such as Minor White’s Beginnings (1962) serve as expressions of inner thoughts and emotions. Conceptual images that mimic or augment the natural landscape such as John Pfahl’s Altered Landscapes (1981) and Marcia Resnick’s staged Landscape/Loftscape #13 (1976) are witty comments on both the land and the nature of photographic representation.
• Reminders that human control over nature is temporary at best, Debbie Fleming Caffery’s black-and-white series including Stormy Day Ninth Ward (2006) charts the sudden devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina; Joel Sternfeld’s After a Flash Flood, Rancho Mirago (1979) depicts a tidy suburban home hovering over the precipice of a recent mud slide that has devoured the family car; and William Christenberry’s photograph Grave with Bed as Grave Marker - Near Faunsdale, Alabama (1965) captures the slow return to nature of all man-made things.

The Addison was one of the first American museums to actively collect and exhibit photography, making its first acquisition in this medium in 1934, and exhibiting images by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, and Walker Evans, as early as the 1930s. Recognizing the importance of photography as an art form, the Addison developed expansive photographic holdings, forging a collection that today includes works by Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Dawoud Bey, Roy DeCarava, Nan Goldin, Sally Mann, Robert Mapplethorpe, Timothy O’Sullivan, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Alfred Stieglitz, and Carleton Watkins, among many others. Comprised of individual masterworks as well as multiple prints and portfolios by important photographers of the 19th and 20th centuries, the collection also boasts in- depth holdings of works by key individuals. These include the entire set of Eadweard Muybridge's The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881) and Animal Locomotion (1887); Robert Frank's pivotal series The Americans (1955); Danny Lyon’s Conversations with the Dead (1971) and The Bikeriders (1968); Bill Owens’ Suburbia (1972); as well as Cindy Sherman’s Murder Mystery Series (1976) and Laurie Simmons’s In and Around the House (1976–78). In addition, Phillips Academy alumnus Walker Evans is represented by over 150 photographs.

Contemplating the View is a companion to From Starfield to MARS: Paul Manship and His Artistic Legacy, opening at the Addison on September 15, 2018. The exhibition will examine the work and influence of the prominent early 20th-century sculptor Paul Manship (1885–1966) through two interconnected components: Art Deco at Andover considering the Addison's historic connection with Paul Manship, and Starfield through Contemporary Lenses presenting the work of four artists-in-residence at the Manship Artists Residency + Studios (MARS) program established this year in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Both exhibitions extend the Addison’s year-long exploration of place within American art and our national identity.

Exhibition Organization
Contemplating the View: American Landscape Photographs is organized by the Addison Gallery of American Art and curated by Allison N. Kemmerer, Mead Curator of Photography and Curator of Art after 1950.
This exhibition is generously supported by the Bernard and Louise Palitz Exhibitions Fund.

Also on view this fall:

The Body: Concealing and Revealing
through March 31, 2019

Drawn from the museum’s collection, this exhibition examines the ways in which artists have used the human body as a provocative tool of expression. Cropped, abstracted, veiled, and even erased, fragmented figures depicted in works by artists as varied as Alexander Archipenko, Bill Jacobson, John Singer Sargent, Beverly Semmes, Edward Weston, and Francesca Woodman suggest that the part is often more evocative than the whole. Avoiding precise likenesses and full disclosure, the artists gathered here employ blurred forms, truncated torsos, masked faces, and empty dresses to variously present the body as a site for not only visual experimentation, but also defining individual identity, constructing and challenging notions of gender and sexuality, and negotiating power.

4 x 4
through July 31, 2019

The Addison’s rich collections provide a great many points of entry for understanding the history and development of American art from the 18th century to the present. The almost limitless opportunities these afford for thematic and chronological presentations offering new interpretations are enhanced through additions to the holdings and thoughtful combinations of works. This fall, in four first-floor galleries, four curators have explored a theme, style, or artistic idiom represented in depth across the many media in the collection. This selection of works examines the representation of women, the investigation of abstraction at its introduction and, later, at mid-century, and the use of technology.

In each room, the groupings include intriguing works of sculpture—an opportunity to reflect upon the precedents for and successors to the figural work of Paul Manship, whose important works—both hallowed and innovative subjects—may be found on the second floor.

About the Addison Gallery of American Art
Devoted exclusively to American art, the Addison, which opened in 1931, holds one of the most important collections of American art in the country. Its holdings include more than 18,000 works by prominent artists such as George Bellows, Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Lorna Simpson, and Kara Walker, as well as photographers Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Eadweard Muybridge, Cindy Sherman, and many more. The Addison Gallery, located in a stand-alone building on the campus of Phillips Academy, a residential school of grades nine through 12 in Andover, Massachusetts, offers a continually rotating series of exhibitions and programs, all of which are free and open to the public. Phillips Academy welcomes visitors to its beautiful, walkable campus year-round.

The Addison Gallery of American Art is open to the public from Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., and Sunday 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. The museum is closed on Mondays, national holidays, December 24, and the month of August. Admission to all exhibitions and events is free. The Addison Gallery also offers free education programs for teachers and groups. For more information, call 978-749- 4015, or visit the website at www.addisongallery.org.