Past
Greetings from Delaware
From Four Studios: First State Modernism
Award Winners VII
Greetings from Delaware and Other Artist Communities, features over 250 hand-made greeting cards, the majority of the Jann Haynes Gilmore and B. Joyce Puckett collection, by both regional and national professional artists. The exhibition will be filled with artful greetings manufactured and sent by artists such as, Rockwell Kent, N.C. Wyeth, Blanche Lazell, Ethel Leach, Frank Schoonover and John Sloan. The display of these cards will be highlighted by many full-scale paintings and fine-art prints by several of the featured artists.
As objects designed and often printed by professional artists, the cards of this collection display poignant and timeless visual messages through expert craftsmanship. At the same time, these artist-generated cards from Delaware, the mid-Atlantic region and throughout the country offered their admirers a unique view into little-known regions of the American art scene of the first half of the twentieth century. In a period full of changing social values and economic hardships, the cards of the Gilmore/Puckett collection demonstrate the versatility and perseverance of American artists under tremendous adversity. Perhaps more importantly, these images supplied novel interpretations of universally cherished notions of community, family, beauty, and hope at a time when Americans often needed them most, during the holidays.From Four Studios:
First State Modernism
From Four Studios: First State Modernism is the first major exhibition of the State’s Modernist art collection. The show presents key examples of works by four seminal figures in early 20th – century painting of Delaware: Jack Lewis (b. 1912), Howard Schroeder (1910-1995), Orville Peets (1881-1968) and Ethel Peets (1886-1978). Over the last ten years, the private studio collections and an assortment of personal possessions of these four professional artists have been gifted to the State’s collection. Each of these artists was professionally trained painters and art instructors in Delaware during the adventurous introduction of European Modernism into the American art scene. The extensive holdings of each of the four collections include large caches of the artists’ works, works by their artistic contemporaries, art supplies and studio tools, as well as extensive archival materials on the artists’ careers and lives.
The exhibition introduces the work of these four artists, as represented by the State’s extensive collections, within the historical context of the introduction of European Modernism. These artists’ careers are presented in light of the direct influence of the new ideas of Cubism, Social Realism, and Abstraction on the American art scene. We will elicit common threads between each of these artists that connected them to exciting external influences of the art centers of New York and Paris during the first half of the 20th century. This exhibition positions Delaware as a regional recipient of this groundbreaking influence.
For seven years the Biggs Museum has offered its galleries for the presentation of some of Delaware’s finest visual artists, craftspeople, writers and musicians with the Award Winners series of exhibitions. The summer celebration offers a home each year for a new group of winners of the prestigious Delaware Division of the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships. Monetary prizes are awarded to Delaware artists in all media whose work demonstrates an excellence above their competitors. This time-honored exhibition is among one of the best opportunities to experience the Delaware art scene.