Category: Past Exhibitions

Frontiers of Impressionism: Paintings from the Worcester Art Museum includes 53 works by over 30 artists—including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Max Slevogt. Together, they demonstrate Impressionism’s international allure and its national adaptations captured in subjects from Monet’s famed Giverny lily pond to the natural wonders of the Grand Canyon.

In 2024, the term “impressionism” celebrates its 150^th anniversary. Such a significant occasion inspires reflection on the profound impact that a relatively small group of artists in Paris made by positing a new mode of painting: one that favored painting outdoors over in a studio, immediacy over planning, the everyday over the grand, and the fleeting over the eternal. In doing so, the impressionists upended centuries of traditions in European art. This exhibition explores the radical impulses behind impressionism and its seemingly endless adaptability, as artists from around the world came to Paris to study and returned to their homelands, assimilating what they had absorbed and propelling the movement further. 

The Worcester Art Museum pioneered new artistic horizons by embracing impressionism early in its history. The French and American impressionism collections at the Worcester Art Museum have long drawn visitors to the galleries. The first directors purchased works by Monet from his Parisian dealer, Durand-Ruel, as well as directly from American impressionists, making the Museum one of the first in the United States to collect impressionism actively as contemporary art. Over the past 125 years, this collection has grown, encapsulating the story of the movement’s roots and emergence in France and its subsequent expansion to the United States, Germany, Scandinavia, and beyond. Highlighting more than 30 artists, including Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Camille Pissarro, Mary Cassatt, Childe Hassam, and Max Slevogt, this exhibition demonstrates impressionism’s international allure, captured in subjects as far-flung as Monet’s famed Giverny lily pond to the natural wonders of the Grand Canyon. 

The occupation of the Republic of Haiti by the US in the early part of the 20th-century lasted for more than three decades. By the time they left in the 1930s, after being mired in countless rebellions by the Haitian peasantry and a stiff opposition across the globe, Americans at home were well aware of the island to their south. Some of the cultural particularities of that nation piqued Hollywood’s interest and they did not miss on the salacious potential those unfamiliar customs could have on the public. Movies such as I Walked with a Zombie (1943) started a trend that to this day we cannot see its end, such as the international popularity of the television series The Walking Dead. Despite the cultural appropriation and misinterpretations of Haiti’s mystical traditions, the Caribbean Island captured the globe’s attention.

The opening of the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince in 1944 by an American conscientious objector and a handful of Haitian intellectuals attracted artists from all walks of life to its galleries and open air studios. Artists streamed to the Centre from Haiti’s urban and rural communities and caused an immediate sensation in the art world. Presented at first as intuitive and naïve, what the artists proposed was in fact their vision of their world as they lived and saw it. After three centuries as slave labor in sugar plantations in the French colony of St. Domingue, and after a hard won freedom where they fought the most advanced army of its day—the French Army under Napoleon, and the scorn this created in most advanced nations, they were at last free to try to recollect their memories. The paintings on view in this exhibition, created between the 1950s and 1990s, demonstrate how Haitians finally felt liberated in their ability to reconstruct what they had lost or had been forbidden for so long—to honor their gods, spirituality, and sacred traditions. Through the prism of slavery and its hardships, their visions offered something new if not fantastic.

All of this did attract attention and for a time Haiti was visited by many tourists, amongst them art enthusiasts who became passionate collectors. Their connoisseurship and support of Haitian art has benefitted the permanent collection of the Tampa Museum of Art, who now holds one the most formidable holdings of Haitian art in the US. The fact the Museum has in its holdings such a large number of excellent works of art from their neighbor to the south enables visitors, as well as the many transplanted Haitians in the region, to grasp and admire a complex history through art and the spirit of Haiti.

A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections is presented in conjunction with Reframing Haitian Art: The Arthur Albrecht Collection and curated by Edouard Duval Carrié, guest curator.

A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections and Reframing Haitian Art: The Arthur Albrecht Collection in the adjacent gallery present luminary artists frequenting the Centre d’Art since in its beginnings in the late 1940s, as well as second- and third-generation artists of the organization. Even though many of them are not strictly affiliated with the Centre, most had their beginnings there and moved onward. Collectors traveling to Haiti not only visited the Centre but other art galleries that sprung up in Port-au-Prince. A Passion for Haitian Art: The Albrecht and Heller Collections highlights two collections acquired over a similar period yet housed on opposite coasts of the US.

The Arthur Albrecht Collection, San Francisco, California

In 2022, the Arthur Albrecht Revocable Trust gifted the Tampa Museum of Art a collection of 20th-century masterworks by Haitian artists. The Albrecht Collection, comprised of 89 paintings and sculptures, and 55 pieces of related support materials, is one of the most esteemed collections of modern Haitian art and has never been on view to the public until today. Arthur Albrecht (1927–2018) was an avid collector with a deep love for Haiti. He lived with this collection in his home on San Francisco’s famed Lombard Street. Although much of his connection to Haiti and its artists is unknown, his collecting interests focused primarily on the first- and second-generation artists associated with the Centre d’Art, Haiti’s premier art school and visual art center. The collection had not left private hands until now and the paintings and sculptures were in need of care and conservation. With grant funds from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project, the Museum was able to clean and restore the collection nearly to the objects’ original condition. As seen in this gallery, conservation care revealed the pristine quality of line, form, and color that heralds this group as master artists.

The Kay and Roderick Heller Collection, Tampa, Florida and Franklin, Tennessee

Kay Culbreath Heller has Haiti in her heart. Her involvement with the island started when she worked at Hospital Bon Samaritain with Dr. William Hodges and his family in the remote small town of Limbé in northern Haiti. The art of Haiti caught her eye and imagination, and she once wrote, “Nothing prepared me for the life and vitality of Haiti.” With Beverly Sullivan of Washington, Kay found ways to promote the artists through large fundraisers and art sales stateside benefitting Haitian medical, arts, and humanitarian organizations. In 2000, Kay co-curated the first exhibition of Haitian art at the Tampa Museum of Art entitled Island Delights: The Spirit and Passion of Haitian Art.

This passion for Haiti extended to Roderick Heller, a distinguished lawyer and preservationist from Washington, DC who has employed his academic rigor to an all-encompassing project on Haiti’s art. He is assembling a catalogue raisonné of his favorite Haitian artist, Rigaud Benoit, one of the initial group of artists who joined the Centre in its early days. This is not an easy task as works of art by this artist and others are today scattered all over the world. The Hellers’ goal through international research is to help illuminate the artistic legacy and creativity of Haiti and its people.

Funds for the conservation of the Arthur Albrecht Collection were generously provided through a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project

A celebrated artist, Garry Winogrand transformed the genre of street photography in the 1960s. With his Leica camera in hand, he captured the movements, both hurried and introspective, and raw emotions of his subjects. Initially published as a monograph, the portfolio Women are Beautiful (1975) represents Winogrand’s most significant project. Comprised of 85 photographs, the series features women engaged a range of ordinary activities –walking across the street, enjoying a conversation, and dancing in a crowd. Some of the photos are direct, with the woman walking straight towards Winogrand’s lens, while others reveal the photographer observing quiet moments of solitude.

In the early 1980s, the Tampa Museum of Art established photography—with an emphasis on work created after 1970—as a primary collecting area. The collection now comprises more than 950 photographs and demonstrates how the medium evolved throughout the 20th-century. TMA’s photography collection includes works by John Baldessari, James Casebere, and Cindy Sherman, as well as the candid photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andy Warhol, and Winogrand.

This exhibition is sponsored by David Hall and Judy Tampa

Taking Pictures: Women of Independent Spirit celebrates the anonymous women who shaped the evolution of vernacular photography during the ‘analog era’ of the late 19th to the late 20th century. The result of a year long collaboration between gallerist Julie Saul and independent curator Carly Ries, this exhibition brings together photographs from the Collection of Peter J. Cohen, a photographic archive spanning the analog era from the 1890s through the 1990s.

This exhibition charts photography’s momentum across the 20th century as a medium for self expression alongside the expansion of women’s independence. As self-trained image makers and collaborative subjects, women played out new ways of being in the world both in front of, and behind, the camera. Arranged here in constellations, the photographs connect through shared gestures, shadow patterns and echoing poses of women belonging to an intersection of race, class, age, and era.

These photographs record vibrant times, magic hours, private performances, and experiments with identity. One captured moment contains countless narrative directions speckled with signifiers: a photographer’s shadow spills across a lawn, the silhouette revealing the cinched waist of a dress. Someone glances at the camera with a knowing look, or turns her face away in refusal. Another woman holds her camera at eye-level and gazes into a mirror, recording herself as the author of the image. The journey made by each image is evident on the surface of the photograph itself, with its frayed edges, creases, and scratches. Each hint offers a clue to who, when, why, with each image leading only to more questions.

On these walls, the wide range of formats and visual experimentation hint at divergent and coexisting waves of image-making across the twentieth century. The photograph records an impulse to hold still for a moment, offered to us now for a longer look. With time on our side, we can let our eyes linger on what she wanted us to see.

Taking Pictures: Women of Independent Spirit is curated by celebrated gallerist Julie Saul and Carly Ries, and brings together photographs from the Collection of Peter J. Cohen.

As part of its ongoing exhibition series exploring the intersection of art and fashion, the Tampa Museum of Art presents a series of paintings by globally renowned fashion designer Naeem Khan. Khan works independently, as well collaboratively with artist Stanley Casselman as the collective KACE, to create large-scale works inspired by his ongoing exploration of flora, light, and color. Five monumental works, comprised of paint and sequins represent Khan’s inaugural museum exhibition.

The Khan Family, steeped in the tradition of fashion and textiles for over 100 years, is renowned for their atelier in Mumbai and their luxurious couture worn by luminaries and India’s royalty. Khan arrived in New York at the age of 17, travelling to the United States with his father. A business appointment with Halston changed the course of his life as the famed designer decided on the spot that Khan would be his protégé. With Halston as his mentor, Khan became immersed in Manhattan’s art and social circles. From the atelier to Studio 54 and Andy Warhol’s Factory, Khan emerged as a designer at a pivotal moment in the 1970s where the lines between art, fashion, music, film, and celebrity were often blurred, further signifying New York City as the epicenter of creativity.

While working with Halston, Khan met Andy Warhol who frequently collaborated with Halston on his projects. Khan participated in their collaborations by drawing the flowers for their designs, specifically poppies. Warhol, like Halston, took Khan under his wing and once told the young designer, “You shouldn’t hold your pencil that way. Let me show you how to draw.” Flowers, inspired by his work and friendship with Warhol as well as the flora in his home country of India, anchor Khan’s visual language.

In 2020, painter Stanley Casselman introduced himself to Khan at one of his fashion shows and was immediately struck by the beauty and power of the designer’s work. Casselman observed that Khan’s designs could be translated into painting. Conversations lead to collaboration and today the two artists work both individually and together under the name KACE. Works, such as Jardin Chrome and Jardin d’Or, feature Khan’s elaborate sequined blooms in concert with Casselman’s gestural paint strokes. The compositions reveal the signature elements of each artists’ practice. Here, Khan’s ornate craftsmanship and Casselman’s abstract mark making unite in dazzling effect.

Khan’s solo works, Floating Flowers Pink and Silver and Floating Flowers Fuchsia and Gold, nod to his familial history with fabric, color, composition, and texture while pushing the boundaries of contemporary painting. Each flower is comprised of hundreds of sequins and beads. Delicately sewn onto silkscreen material, Khan suspends the panels one over the other, creating a sculptural quality to the paintings. Fabricated in a range of petal formations and size, Khan’s blossoms both capture and reflect light. As if suspended in space, the flowers come to life, symbolizing Khan’s creative past and his burgeoning artistic future. 

Fleurish: The Art of Naeem Khan is presented in conjunction with the Tampa Museum of Art’s annual fundraiser CITY: Fashion + Art + Culture.

This exhibition is organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art

Presenting Sponsor of No Ordinary Love: Life On Canvas