Inventing the Middle West
Regionalist painting had three major exponents: Thomas Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John Steuart Curry. With these two artists Curry led the movement to create and celebrate what he felt was an indigenous and democratic American art--
The Fine Arts Museums are proud to celebrate the outstanding contributions to the museums by George Hopper Fitch, an ardent collector of works on paper and longtime trustee of the Fine Arts Museums, by exhibiting approximately 50 American and Mexican artworks collected by him. Over the years, Fitch has helped build the museums' collections both as a member of the museums' acquisition committee and through gifts to the museums from his personal collection.
The elegant vision of British still-life photographer Charles Jones (1866Š1959), whose work was only recently discovered, is finally shared with audiences through this exhibition of 59 gold-toned gelatin silver prints. A gardner by trade, Jones was at heart an artist and created an impressive body of work comprising of images of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. While his numerous photographs uncover both Jones's appreciation for nature and his artistic style, which exhibits elements of modernism, very little is known about his life or work.
A lively and engaging exhibition of art in all media, A Feast for the Eye celebrates and explores the vast subject of food. Still lifes, genre scenes, cartoons, photographs, and decorative arts illustrate both the serious and the humorous sides of food as a symbol of wealth, power, and status, as well as the powerlessness engendered by the lack of food.
This self-taught photographer created hundreds of glass-plate negatives that document the exotic sights and rich street life of Chinatown before its devastation in the 1906 earthquake and fire. Thirty of these works are shown as a group for the first time in an exhibition that unveils Genthe's early career as a pictorialist photographer, San Francisco's Chinatown during the turn-of-the-century, and the history of these illuminating photographs.
Interventions by Fred Wilson
The internationally-exhibited New York artist Fred Wilson is renowned for his museum "interventions," often surprising and controversial additions and alterations to conventional museum displays which attempt to challenge viewers' ideas about the traditional role of the museum. Wilson's work often forces museums to reexamine their roles as "keepers of culture,"and encourages visitors to be aware of coexisting historical and cultural facts that are seldom addressed in traditional museum diplays.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Visual Arts Exhibitions at the de Young Museum
Effets de Neige
A Tribute to Nancy Van Norman Baer
This tribute to Fine Arts Museums Theater and Dance Curator Nancy Van Norman Baer (1944-1998) will present an overview of her career and highlight the riches of the museums' Theater and Dance Collection. Objects on display from the collection include posters, costume and stage set designs, prints, and drawings.
Also included in the exhibition are works pertaining to theater and dance from the museums' permanent collection by artists as far ranging as Degas, DŸrer, Picasso, and the Walt Disney Studio.
Contemporary Works from the Saxe Collection
