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Paper
Paths: 20th-Century Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection
This exhibition features a selection of thirty prints, drawings, and watercolors from the Speed's permanent collection that date from the 1950s to the present day. Paper Paths examines various courses that artists have followed over the last half century – from adding new insights to the tradition of realism, to developing unique artistic vocabularies for expressing ideas and emotions, to testing the boundaries, definitions, and possibilities of abstraction. Artists represented in this exhibition include Larry Rivers, Jacob Lawrence, Audrey Flack, and Ellsworth Kelly. Behind
the Camera/Before the Lens: Black Americans and Photography This exhibition of 14 photographs features works dating from the 1860s to the 1990s, either by African-American photographers or depicting African-American subjects. The installation, including photographs by Gordon Parks, Garry Winogrand, and Nicholas Nixon, is located in the Lower Level Gallery outside of the Speed's Art Learning Center
The
Ties That Bind: The Plight of Women in Victorian England This small focus exhibition highlights two early works by the renowned British painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones. The two paintings, previously considered lost, were discovered at Hanover College in Indiana in 1994. The works were recently featured in a retrospective of Burne-Jones' work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Accompanied by works by James Jacques Joseph Tissot, Richard Redgrave, James Archer, and Simeon Solomon, this exhibition explores the theme of women in Victorian England.
Recently, a collection of paintings was discovered that includes an unknown Thomas Hart Benton painting, representing a major discovery in American art. The collection of 22 paintings, "America At Work, 1945: The Rediscovered Imperial Whisky Collection," will be shown to the public for the first time at The Speed Art Museum June 8 through July 15 in a special exhibition. Hiram Walker, once one of the world's largest distilled spirits companies, shortly after WW II, commissioned a group of well-known American painters to portray scenes on canvas from its Peoria, Illinois distillery. These paintings were for an advertising campaign to promote its Imperial brand whisky during the Post-Prohibition period of the late 1940s. The Peoria distillery shut down in 1972. Some time later, the 22 paintings in the collection moved to the Michigan offices of Allied Domecq, Hiram Walker's successor. In the shuffle of reorganization, the paintings got scattered throughout the many offices and storage closets at the company's headquarters in Southfield, Illinois. Their value remained unknown for more than half a century until Maker's Mark President Bill Samuels, Jr. discovered the collection and brought it to the attention of The Speed Art Museum's director, Peter Morrin, who confirmed the relevance of Samuels' find:"The collection is of major significance for several reasons: because of the importance of the artists included; because, miraculously, this collection of 22 works has been reassembled intact; because of unrecorded works by key artists; and, because of the insights the collection provides into the psyche of the nation at a crucial turning point in its history." So, with the gracious help of Allied Domecq, Samuels reassembled the collection in its entirety and brought it to Kentucky, with the express desire to share it with the public and the art world for the first time."I guess my life-long hobby of crawling around dusty attics and damp basements looking for antique furniture finally paid off," Samuels said. "I am also very glad that the people at The Speed Art Museum confirmed that we discovered a Thomas Hart Benton previously unknown to the 'Bentonites.' This is a collection by artists that are regional to this area, and who illustrated Kentucky's first industry on canvas. I'm glad that we can share this collection with the public." The
collection includes a work from the leading American artist of
that time, Thomas Hart Benton, who, Morrin says created Whisky
Going to the Rick House to Age "in a style that reflects
the compositional complexity of his public mural commissions.
The painting is unusual in Benton's oeuvre in its careful delineation
of industrial and architectural forms. Unrecorded and unknown,
this painting alone justifies an exhibition: it is a major rediscovery
in the artist's career." Benton is not the only artist of
note in the Hiram Walker collection. Aaron Bohrod, the leading
Chicago artist of the 1940s is included, as well as other
Stewardship, Scholarship, and a Passion for Art: The Legacy of
Dillman A. and Nancy B. Rash An exhibition featuring six works recently bequeathed to the museum from the Nancy Batson Rash and Dillman A. Rash Collection. The exhibition features paintings and works on paper by Modernist masters Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, and Maurice Utrillo.
Using a single part of the body or through an abstract image of the human figure, over 20 nationally-known contemporary artists address a wide range of issues - political, sexual, psychological, mythical, and aesthetic—all of which are grounded in the experience of the body. The paintings, sculptures, photographs, and mixed-media installations in this exhibition illuminate the depth and breadth of what it means to live, dream, and die in our skin and sinews and psyches today. |
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important
figures such as John S. DeMartelly, Ernest Fiene, Joseph Hirsch,
and Paul Sample. 
The
Body in Question: Tracing, Displacing, and Remaking the Figure
in Contemporary Art  |
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