ANDOVER, MASS.- When the Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, opens its fall 2016 exhibitions in September, visitors will have an opportunity to explore decorative arts, textiles, sculpture, drawing, painting, and photography in four new exhibitions. Headlining the season, Making It Modern: The Folk Art Collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman, organized by the New-York Historical Society, opens on September 24 and runs through December 31. Widely recognized for his elegant and spare modernist sculpture, Elie Nadelman is less known for his pioneering interest in folk art. While he first started acquiring works after emigrating from Poland in 1914, his collecting started in earnest after his marriage to wealthy widow Viola Flannery in 1919. By 1924, the couple founded the Museum of Folk and Peasant Arts to house their burgeoning collection of American and European pieces, which numbered over 15,000 objects ranging from furniture, sculpture, paintings, ceramics, glass, iron, textiles, drawings and watercolors, and household tools. The core of their collection was purchased by the New-York Historical Society when the museum closed in 1937. This exhibition, the first to examine the Nadelmans’ seminal role in folk art collecting, will present approximately 100 objects displayed in groupings akin to those in their museum. Several examples of the artist’s sculpture will help to explore the influence of folk art on his oeuvre.

Making It Modern is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue co-authored by the curators, New-York Historical’s Vice President and Museum Director Margaret K. Hofer and Curator of Drawings Roberta J. M. Olson. This examination of the Nadelmans’ collection provides new insights into the intersection of folk art and modernism.

Leadership support for this exhibition has been provided by the Henry Luce Foundation. Generous support has also been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, Greater Hudson Heritage Network, the American Folk Art Society, and Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. The Addison's presentation of this exhibition is generously supported by the Sidney R. Knafel Fund and the Bernard and Louise Palitz Exhibitions Fund.

As a complement to Making It Modern, the Addison will draw from its permanent collection for Taking Shape: Sculpture at the Addison, opening September 17. From functional to decorative, roughhewn to painstakingly polished, representational to abstract, this group of artworks is testament to the limitless possibilities born out of artistic explorations in three dimensions. Objects in this presentation range from large weathervanes and carved signs by unidentified artists to small figures by recognized artists such as Malvina Hoffman, Alexander Calder, and Chaim Gross; from ambitious marble, stone, and bronze figurative sculpture by well-known sculptors such as Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Paul Manship, Herbert Haseltine, and Robert Laurent to important contemporary works in a variety of media by Siah Armajani, Louise Nevelson, Martin Puryear, Carl Andre, Carroll Dunham, Mel Kendrick, and Kendra Ferguson.

Also at the Addison this fall, Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams opens September 1. The exhibition debuts a recent acquisition of fifty photographs by Ansel Adams which document the Manzanar War Relocation Center in Inyo County, California. In 1943, Adams was invited to create a photographic record of this government facility, in which 10,000 men, women, and children were housed in tarpaper barracks behind barbed wire and gun towers. All were of Japanese ancestry, but most were American citizens forcibly removed from their homes and businesses and relocated to the camp by presidential order. While this series includes some of Adams’s signature iconic landscapes, it mostly comprises views of daily life, sports and leisure activities, agricultural scenes, and portraits. An important historical document and work of art, this renowned series touches on a wide range of topics from documentary photography and the politics of representation to U.S. and world history, race, and identity.

Rounding out the fall exhibitions, Eye on the Collection presents a wide range of works, both well-known and lesser-known, from the Addison’s holdings. Paintings, prints, drawings, photographs, sculptures, and mixed-media objects by artists such as Albert Bierstadt, Ilse Bing, Isabel Bishop, Mark Bradford, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, George Inness, June Leaf, Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler are included, inviting visitors to experience anew the wealth of the Addison’s collection of American art.