Exhibitions - 2010



On Their Own: Judith Brassard Brown

November 15 - February 14, 2010




Judith Brassard Brown, Maybe Someday


Excerpts from the catalog “Out of Time” (written by Leonie Bradbury and Shana Dumont). for Judith Brassard Brown's work at The Art Complex Museum.

In her portrait series, Brown connects to the universal human experience. The figurative pieces, like the landscapes, are not snapshots but rather glimpses of a person’s essence. The portraits are of individuals who have touched the artist’s life and they convey complex relationships on formal, narrative and interpersonal levels. The diptychs Dreaming of Dagny, Many Blessings and Maybe Someday pair a still life of cut flowers with a memorial portrait. The cut flowers, with the brevity of their vitality, symbolize the fleeting and unpredictable nature of human life.

Delicate vintage glass bottles were unearthed in the renovation of Brown’s house five years ago and she implemented them as visual icons. As everyday household tools, they hold traces of the people who used them. The actual paintings are small in scale and often have finished edges that give them a gem-like quality, begging viewers to pick them up. Like the bottles themselves, the paintings become objects to be treasured and handled with care.


Duxbury Art Association
Winter Juried Show

February 7 - April 11, 2010
Gala Opening - February 6



Twilight, by Danguole Kuolas, First Place, Printmaking, 2009


The Duxbury Art Association's (DAA) annual Winter Juried Show has been a mainstay of the ACM exhibition schedule since 1974. Each year, judges in multiple categories choose work to exhibit from more than 500 entries. Entries come from all over New England.

Founded in 1917 under the leadership of Charles Bittenger, the DAA today has more than a thousand members from Duxbury and neighboring towns. Located at the Ellison Center for the Arts in Duxbury, it is dedicated to providing South Shore residents access to quality art education, exhibits and special events.

Click here to see the 2009 Winter Juried Show.


Rotations: Company Paintings

February 7 - April 11, 2010



Traveling by Palaquin, mid-19th cent., painting on mica


These paintings were produced by Indian artists for Europeans. The vast majority of them were made for British patrons. Their style is mixed Indo-European using watercolor on paper and occasionally on mica. The subjects include local dress, modes of transport, trades, agriculture, deities, ceremonies and festivals.

During the last decade of the sixteenth century, English merchant ships first reached India. On the last day of the year, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted English monopoly of commerce in eastern waters to the East India Company. During the late eighteenth century, the cult of the 'picturesque and the sublime' was extremely popular in England. Indian subjects suited this preference. Following the Mysore Wars of 1767-99, more upper- middle class British men and women ventured to India. Many of them had studied drawing in England and delighted in rendering Indian scenes. These were used to illustrate books published in England. They soon realized that native artists could depict these scenes more accurately.

The majority of Company Paintings in The Art Complex Museum's collection come from Northeastern India. Our largest group comes from Patna, the capital of Bihar. In addition, Murshidabad, the capital of Bengal, was the political and commercial center of East India and the British had a strong presence there. Calcutta developed rapidly after 1774 with the Sibpur Botanic Garden founded in 1786. Benares and Lucknow were also significant painting centers. The two architectural subjects in the collection were created in Delhi and feature two magnificent Muslim monuments; the Taj Mahal in Agra and the Tomb of Shaikh Salim Chishti at Fatehpur Sikri.

All of the paintings in this exhibition date from the nineteenth century. Two are by British artists. L. Gear painted "Bombax Ceiba", a flowering tree of India in 1826. J. Shury made an engraving of an image by Jam. Forbes, Cambay, 1781 of "Traveling in a Palanquin in India" which was published in 1834. In addition to painting on paper, some works were done on mica. This technique originated in Murshidabad and then reached Patna where it became a specialty. Until the late eighteenth century, mica was used mainly for festival lanterns. Then artists realized that the transparent mica sheets could be placed over an image and easily traced. This facilitated the duplication of compositions.

The information for this exhibition comes primarily from Company Paintings: Indian Paintings of the British Period, Mildred Archer, Victoria and Albert Museum, 1992 and Room for Wonder: Indian Painting during the British Period 1760-1880, Stuart Cary Welch, The American Federation of Arts, 1978.

Alice R.M. Hyland, Consulting Curator


On Their Own: Jessica Straus

February 21 - May 16, 2010
Reception - Sunday, February 28, 1:30 - 3:30



Jessica Straus, Strainer Ball, 2009, wood, paint, found object, 11" x 5" x 5"


Jessica Straus' work proves that limitations can provide rich fodder for invention. Her widgets are crafted with the pared-down elements of hand- carved, painted balls, pegs, and jointed segments. Straus marries her hand-crafted wooden elements with found metal forms, some familiar, others enigmatic. Her inventions stretch the definition of function and celebrate the quirkiness of the individual in a joyful swipe at mass production.

Straus will also exhibit her "Little Red Dress" series. Small, carved female figures, stoically poised in various precarious positions, leave the viewer at once, alarmed and chuckling, in self- recognition. As in all of Straus' work, the line between levity and gravity is crossed and recrossed, and held in delicate balance. Educated at Brown University, Kansas City Art Institute, and Cranbrook Academy of Art, Straus now works out of her studio in the Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is a past recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council grant and a Berkshire Taconic Foundation grant.


In Pursuit of the Picturesque
American Paintings of New England and New York from The Art Complex Museum Collection

May 2 - September 5, 2010



Sanford Gifford, United States, Solitude


From the beginning of American landscape painting in the early nineteenth century, artists ventured out to the wilderness and the waters to capture the beauty of our young and robust country. They witnessed the transition from the sublime-that exalted, awesome, at times terrifying dimension in landscape painting-to the picturesque-that which is composed and visually stimulating. A common thread running throughout the century, apparent from the earliest Catskill landscapes to twentieth century paintings of the Maine coast, was a search for scenic views, for natural wonders, for tranquil tableaus that inspire love for home and country. Artists, both native and immigrant, painted the mountains, the shores and the villages in their "pursuit of the picturesque." They moved, seasonally, and in their wake, left a growing tourist industry, burgeoning artists' colonies, and for some, a respect for the land and need to protect it.

The collection of American landscapes and seascapes in The Art Complex Museum, originally the collection of Carl and Edith Weyerhaeuser, offers a superb chance for an overview of the development of the picturesque in American painting. Significantly, it contains two landscapes by Thomas Doughty, one of the first artists to paint the ideal, romantic landscape, rather than a topographical view of the land. Another important early work, Sanford Gifford's Solitude, 1849, shows the artist's debt to Thomas Cole, the founder of the Hudson River School which celebrated the grandeur and majesty of the landscape. Just as the literature of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper helped to popularize the Catskills and the Adirondack Mountains as a destination for tourists, so did the paintings of Jasper Cropsey, represented by one of his brilliantly hued autumnal scenes in the Hudson River Valley. Following in the footsteps of Cole, Gifford and Cropsey, artists such as James Macdougal Hart and Homer Dodge Martin gradually began to paint a more bucolic countryside, influenced by the French Barbizon painters. Thomas Moran, originally known for his panoramic western vistas of Yellowstone, settled with his artistic family in picturesque East Hampton, New York and formed a summer art colony. His debt to his English forebear, John Constable, emerged in such romantic small-scale works as Near East Hampton, Long Island, 1878.

The mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, as well as the rugged coastal areas of Maine and the gentler inlets along the southerly shores of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, were also scenic areas that beckoned nineteenth century painters. The advent of transportation and hotels allowed artists such as Alfred Wordsworth Thompson, based in New York, to paint New England scenes, like his nostalgic colonial Old Toll House, Road to Northfield, c.1870s. Robert Spear Dunning, known today primarily as a still-life painter in Fall River, Massachusetts, was enticed to paint several versions of the quaint village of Stowe, Vermont in 1868. Frank Shapleigh became artist-in-residence at Crawford House at Crawford Notch, New Hampshire, attracting trainloads of Gilded Age tourists to his studio, filled with colonial antiques and paintings of cows grazing or weathered houses on the hillsides. Shapleigh, the "White Mountain painter," and his good friend, John Appleton Brown, known as "Apple Blossom Brown" for his springtime views of apple trees, were typical of those who developed a formula that highlighted the charms of pre-industrial New England.

As railroads and industry increasingly encroached upon these tranquil scenes, artists such as John J. Enneking raised the issue of conservation. Enneking, a prolific painter of the New England landscape redolent with a diffused light, was also chairman of the Parks Commission in Boston and advocate for preserving the land. With his bright palette and loose brushwork, Enneking prefigured the American impressionists and from 1878-1916 was New England's highest-priced landscape painter. The French Barbizon painters elicited an artistic awakening in George Inness, who abandoned the Hudson River school for a more painterly, suggestive style. He finally transcended the landscape almost entirely in the very evocative, personal style of tonalism, apparent in his Medfield, Massachusetts landscape, On the Edge of the Wood, 1894. The tonalist painters, who sought a poetry in the landscape, tried to capture nature's intangible qualities. Alexander Helwig Wyant's The Dawn, 1885, J. Francis Murphy's Golden Sunset, 1890, and Dwight Tryon's Dawn, 1906, invoke a mood at a certain time of day, but they also reflect the artist's preoccupation with seeking the picturesque.

Pure American impressionism characterized the work of Boston painter, Dennis Miller Bunker, whose Roadside Cottage, Medfield, 1890 shows Bunker's affinity for Monet and his studies of light at different times of the day. The New York and New England landscapes provided many opportunities for impressionistic studies of nature; Guy Carleton Wiggins' October Sunlight, c.1910 is a lovely painting of the Connecticut woods. The Isles of Shoals at Dusk, 1906 is a classic Childe Hassam impressionist study of one of his favorite painting locales. George Gardner Symonds, known as a Pennsylvania impressionist, nevertheless traipsed the New England countryside for picturesque views such as Covered Bridge, c.1900. Arthur Clifton Goodwin, whose ubiquitous Boston cityscapes most often portray the Boston Common, is represented by a superbly rendered Park Street Church, c.1910.

For America's revered painters, the New York and New England landscape continued to provide a never-ending source of appealing and scenic subject matter well into the twentieth century. Summer schools and art colonies sprang up in such locales as Ogunquit, Maine and Woodstock, New York where painters, Charles Woodbury and John Carlson, respectively, taught legions of aspiring landscape seascape painters. Charles Curtis Allen brought groups of students, every summer, to capture the contours of the Green and White Mountains in broad, slashing strokes of paint. Even American modernists, like George Bellows and Charles Burchfield, sought scenic locales for their explorations in bold realism, expressionism and color theory. The ACM collection contains several spectacular canvases painted by Bellows in Maine and Woodstock, New York.

Since the 1985 exhibition of American paintings from the collection of The Art Complex Museum, many have been exhibited within a context in other exhibitions at the museum and several have been the subject of scholarly research and included in prestigious traveling exhibitions. "In Pursuit of the Picturesque" affords an opportunity to share this research with the public, as well as offer new analysis in terms of twenty-first century artistic perspectives.

Nancy Whipple Grinnell, Guest Curator


Rotations: Dutch Prints

May 2 - September 5, 2010



Adrien van Ostade (1610-1685), The Woman Spinning, 1652, etching


Prints are one of the four major parts of The Art Complex Collection. Carl A. Weyerhaeuser, the director's father and museum co-founder, took a bicycle trip through Europe as a student and fell in love with Dutch prints. The Rembrandt print, The Descent from the Cross by Torchlight, was a college graduation present.

One of the results of the Netherlands' independence from Spain in the mid-seventeenth century was an influx of cultural vitality and national pride. Artists sought to sell work to the public because large-scale commissions were no longer supported by the church or state. This led to the creation of a market for prints for the Netherlands' prosperous merchants, farmers and seafarers. Two prominent themes developed; depictions of everyday life, and landscapes.

Catherine Hunter, a former ACM curator, worked with many of the prints in this exhibit for the 1988 exhibition, Of Matter and Spirit: Dutch Prints rom the 17th Century. She notes, "Aesthetically, the Dutch printmaker developed a love of texture and austerity, an appreciation of light and dark, an exploration of line and tone. In this duality of light and shadow, of matter and spirit, the Dutch printmakers' originality thrives to illustrate an era outstanding in the history of printmaking."


On Their Own: Robert St. Pierre

May 30 - August 15, 2010



Robert St.Pierre, Vessel, 2005, spalted maple


Robert St. Pierre calls his vessels wooden pottery. They are so perfectly balanced that they look like they were turned on a lathe or thrown on a wheel. St. Pierre takes great pride in the fact that they are not. He cuts individual rings of wood, stacking and gluing them together, using only sanders and his gifted eye to make them true. He uses a wide variety of native woods, such as poplar, box elder, and spalted maple. Most of it comes from trees already downed or damaged by storms.

For many years, St. Pierre was a neighbor of The Art Complex Museum, living on St. George Street, where he tilled the saw dust from his studio into his garden soil, which was watched over by scarecrows created by his wife, Mary. Today, he works out of his home in Hayesville, North Carolina, where he and Mary have lived for the last fifteen years. His vessels are now in collections in more than twenty countries around the world.


Home Grown: Abner Harris, Andy Mowbray, Ned Vena

August 29 - November 7, 2010



Abner Harris, Birds vs. Monkeys, 2009, phosphorescent acrylic on linen


Home Grown is an exhibition of work by three artists with Duxbury roots. Abner Harris grew up off Harden Hill Lane near Halls Corner. Harris says, "I tend to show my work in untraditional venues, mainly drinking establishments about the city and underground galleries, although I have been picky, as of late, in regards to where I exhibit. All my recent sales have been word-of-mouth, many of them bartered against such varied things as high-end bicycles, legal services or cases of wine." His painting, Birds vs. Monkeys, is about the titanic struggle that exists between iron-age birds and space-age monkeys. "The conflict was born of the irreconcilable differences between the two sides, in regard to their natural traits and abilities and their different ways of dealing with the world through technology. And because I couldn't decide whether to paint monkeys or birds," he adds.

He has been living in the borough of Haringey in London for the past six years where his studio is located. He is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Andy Mowbray grew up on Temple Street. For this exhibition, he worked with quilts and Tyvek home wrap, a building product. He says, "Throughout history, the fabric and thread used by quilters have depicted scenes and motifs of historical and personal significance. The design motifs of the quilts I've been creating fluctuate between the decorative and pop cultural depictions of scenes and characters from my youth. I feel my Tyvek quilts exist and function within this tradition and serve as registers of twentieth century American culture."

Beyond their decorative beauty, traditionally quilts have also functioned as implements of warmth and comfort; they wrap, protect and insulate us, Mawbray continues. Noting that the role of Tyvek is similar in the way it wraps, protects and insulates domestic homes, he concludes, " I am interested in the dialogue, which is created when an industrial material, such as Tyvek, intersects the handmade realm of craft. For me traditional quilts and Tyvek both function in similar ways and are domestic in nature. Tyvek is an exterior material and quilts, interior. These thoughts and ideas fall in line with much of my artwork that explores and often questions both past and current notions and paradigms of masculinity and feminism."

Mowbray received his undergraduate degree from the Maryland Institute College of Art in sculpture and his M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art. He lives in South Boston.

Ned Vena grew up on Beaverbrook Lane. He says, "I arrived at using acid on mirrors primarily because I was compelled by the material. Graffiti artists use it in markers to mark glass surfaces with their tag. I was interested in bringing the material into a language of abstraction. The acid-splashing is a single act. The viewer is implicated into the work, because of the reflective surface. An image of a violent act is superimposed on the viewer's reflection and the gallery space. The splashing can be taken literally as some sort of explosion on to the space of the gallery and viewer, or rather, as a reference to the history of painting".

Vena is interested in making a singular gesture. The acid proposes a great solution for this sort of mark and the reflective nature of the surface implicates the material and viewer into a multitude of meanings. He describes how he had initially been interested in the chemical reaction that occurs when the acid hit the glass surface. "While the splashing represents an interest in gesture and possibly abstract-expressionist painting, the relationship of the shape of the mirror, its size and the simple chemical occurrence on its surface invokes an interest with minimalist practices of the 1960's," he concludes.

He graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.


Simply Shaker

September 19 - January 16, 2011
Reception - September 19 , 1:30 - 3:30



United States; New Lebanon, New York, Shaker Lap Desk, circa 1940, pine and poplar with red stain


Simply Shaker takes a look at some of the highlights of the museum's collection including chairs, desks, woodenware and a number of recent additions purchased within the last three years. The collection of Shaker furniture at The Art Complex Museum is widely recognized among authorities for its quality and fine examples of classic Shaker design. The initial interest in things, Shaker, came from Maud Moon Weyerhaeuser Sanborn, whose home in the Berkshires was close to the Hancock and New Lebanon, Shaker communities. Mrs. Sanborn became active with the restoration of Hancock Shaker Village through her friendship with its president, Amy Bess Miller. This interest was passed along to her son, Carl Weyerhaeuser, and later to his son, Charles, the ACM's current director. Their dedication to the Shaker aesthetic has resulted in a discriminating collection of furniture and artifacts of daily life. The collection currently totals more than six hundred pieces, some of which have been unanimously praised and admired. Many have been loaned to important exhibitions and their images reproduced in definitive books on Shaker furniture.


Rotations: Hiroshige

September 19 - January 16, 2011



Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858), Japan, Fuji from Mio-no-Matsubara (from Thirty-six Views of Fuji), 1858, woodblock print


Ando Hiroshige was born in Japan in 1797. Legend has it that Hiroshige was determined to become an artist when he saw the prints of his contemporary, Hokusai. More likely though, like many other low-ranked samurai, Hiroshige's salary was insufficient for his needs. This may have motivated him to look into artisan crafts to supplement his income. Between 1831 and 1832, after studying the art of printmaking for twenty years, he made his first trip down the Tokaido, or Eastern Sea Route, from Edo to Kyoto, to gather new material for his prints. The result was the extremely successful series of prints, The Fifty-Three Stages of the Tokaido, assuring Hiroshige's reputation.


Darkness Darkness

November 21 - February 13, 2011



Lance Keimig, Fore River Bridge, 2007, Lucia Pigment print 16.5x39 inches


Darkness Darkness presents the work of a varied group of artists who have all dedicated much of their creative efforts to exploring the themes of night photography. From the classical black and white photographs of Lisa Tyson Ennis to the wildly colorful "light-painted" images of Troy Paiva, from those working at the edge of darkness like Larry Schwarm to those, like Steve Harper, who inhabit the deepest corners of the night, each has their own personal vision to share.

Night photographers are a peculiar breed. As the photographs in this exhibition clearly demonstrate, the work is extraordinarily diverse. While technique, equipment, and subject matter vary from one artist to the next, there is a commonality of shared experience amongst most all night photographers. First and foremost, night photography provides an outlet for the artist to reconnect to the physical world in ways that are often lost in the hectic pace of daily routines. Tim Baskerville, founder of the night photography organization, The Nocturnes, has said, "Surrealism, the mystery of place, solitude, and a heightened sense of the nature of things - Night Photography seems a worthy vehicle, a ritual to express these themes." Night photography is a ritual, one that involves the engagement of light and time, creative vision, and circumstance. The most successful night photographs are the ones that leave the viewer with unanswered questions. The enigma and ambiguity of what is portrayed in the night photograph draws in the viewer, and leaves them longing for certainty where it doesn't exist.

The night has always been associated with the darker side of human experiences. Night transforms our notion of the world from one of routine certainty to one of mysterious unknowing. (Brave was the ancestor who stepped outside of the light of the fire circle, for he might never return.) The interplay of light, shadow and extremes of contrast heighten this uncertainty - and when the element of time is added in the form of long exposures, the night photograph is indeed a worthy vehicle to express these themes.

Lance Keimig, Guest Curator


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