EASTON, MD.- The Academy Art Museum in Easton, Maryland has opened two new exhibitions, Miró in New York, 1947: Miró, Hayter and Atelier 17 and Norma Morgan: Enchanted World, which will be on display through July 8, 2021 in the galleries and August 1, 2021 online.
Miró in New York, 1947: Miró, Hayter and Atelier 17 explores a group of little-known etchings Joan Miró made with influential British printmaker Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17, the New York outpost of his seminal printmaking studio in Paris. Both Miró and Hayter were key participants in the community of artists in Paris who ultimately formed the core of international movements in contemporary art from the 1930s to 1945.
In the 1940s many of these artists, including Hayter, moved to New York to escape the horrors of the Nazi occupation of Paris. There, the confluence of these émigrés and the ingenious and energetic American artists who created Abstract Expressionism fueled the relocation of the center of the art world to New York. Works will be drawn from the Museum’s Permanent Collection and loans from Dolan/Maxwell Gallery, Philadelphia, and private collections. The exhibition catalogue includes the wide breadth of experimental and collaborative work done at Atelier 17, with pieces by Fred Becker, Terry Haass, Gabor Peterdi, Anne Ryan, Yves Tanguy, Helen Phillips, Alice Trumbull-Mason, and others, all of whom worked in Atelier 17 alongside Hayter and Miró.
In July, the Museum presents a double bill of Miró Makes a Color Print and On and Around Miró by avant-garde filmmaker Tom Bouchard. Miró Makes a Color Print pictures Joan Miró as he works at Atelier 17 in New York on a print – the subject of Academy Art Museum’s Spring 2021 exhibition, Miró in New York, 1947. On and Around Miró is a more expansive record of the artist’s work and studio. The film screenings, which will be held on July 1 at 11 a.m. and July 2 at 7 p.m. are free.
Norma Morgan: Enchanted World is an exhibition of the late artist’s prints, watercolors, paintings and drawings, and spans over 30 years of her prolific yet under-studied career. The exhibition highlights Morgan’s ability to convey a spiritual experience through her landscape and portraiture work and to effortlessly transition from formal observation to magical wonder. While her prints are a testimony to her mastery as a printmaker, her mid-career paintings, which include experimental materials such as Day-Glo acrylic, shine a light on the artist’s inquisitive mind and inventive inner world.
Morgan’s unique visual language invites the viewer to step back to take in the entirety of her layered compositions and to look closer and notice the figures hiding in them. One of the two African-American women artists to study with Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, Morgan was a trailblazer as an artist and printmaker. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Library of Congress; the National Gallery of Art, and others. The Academy Art Museum is proud to present this exhibition with loans from the Kerry and C. Betty Davis Collection of African American Art, Mr. Donnell and Mrs. Dorothea Walker Collection of African American Art, Mr. Freddie Styles, Mr. Darryl Love, and Dolan/Maxwell. The exhibition catalog will feature essays by art historians Dr. Amalia Amaki and Dr. Christina Weyl.
