NMWA unwraps birthday present to self today

Wednesday, May 16, 2007

By Richard Anderson

Who said birthday parties need to be limited to one day? The National Museum of Wildlife Art turns 20 years old this year, and it plans to mark the milestone all summer long.

In fact, the season-long party gets underway today, when admission will be free to any and all. In addition to getting to spend quality time with all that art, visitors can win T-shirts, memberships and other prizes in a raffle, refreshments will be served, a slide show will tell the tale of the institution’s history, and NMWA Curator of Art Adam Harris will unveil a recently acquired painting by Georgia O’Keeffe, “Antelope.”

Events continue into the evening with a public reception at 5:30 p.m., a champagne toast at 6:15, and a slide show-lecture by National Geographic’s star photographer William Albert Allard at 8. All events are free, except Allard’s presentation, part of the Photography at the Summit Evening Lecture Series, which costs $7 for non-members.
One of the many ways art museums measure their success is in terms of their collections, according to Dr. James McNutt, NMWA’s president and CEO. By that standard, Jackson Hole’s art museum has done an excellent job, amassing more than 4,000 items.

The collection of sculptures, paintings, drawings, etchings and prints spans the centuries, including works by European masters such as Delacroix, Dürer, Géricault, Goya, Rodin and Rembrandt; household names of the 20th century like Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder and Ansel Adams; and, works by artists with local connections including Olaus Murie, Conrad Schwiering, John Clymer, Greg McHuron, Bill Sawczuk, Jim Morgan – and of course Carl Rungius.

And now, the museum is proud to include Georgia O’Keeffe in its collection.
O’Keeffe, born on Nov. 15, 1887, in Sun Prairie Wis., is one of American’s best-known female artist. Her most famous works feature flowers, rocks, shells, skulls set in desert landscapes. The organic shapes invoke both sex and death; the settings both sooth with a serene quiet and haunt with an eerie desolation.

“Antelope,” the museum’s new acquisition, dates from 1954 and features a pronghorn skull, its empty sockets beholding an empty expanse of desert, the characteristic black-clad horns rising, still beautiful to behold, defying the rosy horizon of another dying day.

“Earlier skull paintings showed the bones floating, disembodied, in the sky or juxtaposed them against other objects, like a brightly colored flower,” Curator Harris wrote in a soon-to-be-published catalog of the museum’s permanent collection. “The earthy ‘Antelope’ is more temporal … speaks directly to the relationship between all living things and the earth that supports us, but that will eventually reclaim us.”

O’Keeffe mentioned the painting in a letter that Harris quotes: “... it is so different than the other things and I think one of the best.”

Harris said the work was offered to the museum by a dealer in Santa Fe. “Our first reaction was we liked the fact that it’s a pronghorn skull,” he said, “since we have those animals migrating through here every year. And it’s a great example of a Georgia O’Keeffe that would fit in with our collection and what we’re trying to do.”

Harris suggested the new O’Keeffe is a sign of the museum’s robustness at 20. “We’ve been ramping it up in terms of the exhibits we’ve been doing and the art work we’ve been acquiring, both in terms of the core of wildlife art, like Rungius, and in terms of these other artists we’ve been collecting in the greater history of American art, like the O’Keeffe and the Edward Hicks [one of Hicks’s ‘Peaceable Kingdom’ paintings] we got a couple years ago.”

In next five to 10 years, he continued, the museum hopes to put together more touring shows, to take its collection to other museums and institutions around the country, and use its collection as outreach.
In the shorter term, 20th anniversary festivities will continue throughout the summer with “From Sketch to Painting,” using works by Scott Christensen, Bob Kuhn and Tucker Smith to show the different ways an artist’s concept evolves to a final product; “Remington & Russell Revisited: Celebrating the Art of Two American Masters”; and a series of events celebrating Western culture through August.
For more information about the museum’s summer season, visit www.wildlifeart.org or call 733-5771.

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Fat. Poor. Rich. Disabled. Labels make it easy to jump to conclusions and judge people. White. Latino. Black. Indian. But photographs have a way of getting past such judgments. A photograph can show a human face, a human family, a human condition, and suddenly, for all but the hardest hearts, it’s impossible not to make a human connection.

Jackson PFLAG – Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays – brings the touring photo-and-text display “Loves Makes A Family: Portraits of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender People and their Families” to the Teton County Library’s gallery.

The show opens Monday with a reception 5:30-7 p.m. at the library and hangs through June 1. It is free to everyone during the library’s regular hours.

“Love Makes A Family ...” features photos by Gigi Kaeser depicting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in universal family settings. In excerpts from interviews conducted and edited by Peggy Gillespie, family members speak candidly about their lives, their relationships, and the ways they cope with the realities of prejudice, bias and intolerance on a day-to-day basis.

“At a time in history when gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people continue to fight for basic human rights – including the right to legally marry, the right to lead a Boy Scout troop, the right to have access to partner health benefits, and the right to be adoptive and foster parents – ‘Love Makes a Family …’ helps cut through all the political arguments right to the heart of the issue by showing the love, caring and connection that are so basic to all families,” PFLAG’s Mark Houser wrote about the show.

See www.familydiv.org for more information.

Contact the Teton County Library at 733-2164; call Houser and PFLAG at 733-8349 or safeschools@wyoming.com.

NMWA’s newly-acquired “Antelope,” Georgia O’Keeffe, 1954, copyright Georgia O'Keeffe Museum.

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NMWA unwraps birthday present to self today | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat

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