Category: Exhibitions & Collections

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Treasures from the Vault: Chuck Sperry

Today’s treasure comes from one of FWMoA’s hottest artists, Chuck Sperry. Sperry has been on the rock poster scene for over 20 years and his unique style has resulted in legions of fans who flock to his gallery openings for the chance to purchase one of his sumptuous prints. The women he features are synonymous with fantasized beauty – full lips, mysterious expressions, lithe figures, and perfectly tousled red ringlets. Justice, the print in FWMoA’s collection, embodies Sperry’s oeuvre.

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“Just Some of the Things He Loved”: An Art Collector’s Gift to the Fort Wayne Art School

When the name Hamilton is mentioned in the context of Fort Wayne history, we tend to think of the famous female cousins – Agnes, Edith, Alice, Norah, and sometimes Jesse, but most are less acquainted with their cousin, James Montgomery Hamilton.  James (1876-1941) was the son of Allen and Cecilia (Frank) Hamilton.  Though his name is not as familiar, and details of his life are less known, his generosity and devotion to his boyhood home left a lasting mark on Fort Wayne and on our Museum.

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Treasures from the Vault: Janet Fish

Fish’s decision to focus on still life painting was an interesting one. For centuries there has been a hierarchy of subject matter in art – histories or dramas have been the most highly regarded, followed by portraiture, and then the lowly still life. This latter genre was often viewed as quaint and trite, something light and palatable that female painting hobbyists could do in their spare time when not taking care of the home or their children. While some artists have attempted to raise the status of still lives through history – 17th and 18th century Spanish and Flemish still life painters, for example, whose paintings rival photography in their level of detail and perfection – the genre failed to ever move up the ladder. Fish likely knew that she was tackling an almost impossible subject, but it’s possible that that’s what drew her to it: in a modern world with an abundance of abstract painters, still life painting was a true challenge that she could make her own.

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Treasures from the Vault: Margaret Burroughs

Burroughs’ work in the visual arts took the form of painting, some sculpture, and a large body of relief prints.  In Black Venus, Burroughs surely sought to reinterpret Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli’s iconic Birth of Venus.  Dr. Alain Locke, along with other Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and writers, set out to redefine their image as the New Negro, which would counter the stereotypes associated with Jim Crow America.  They challenged artists to forge a new, authentic iconography for a re-envisioned identity.  The arts would draw inspiration from the South, the Caribbean, and pre-colonial Africa—their true cultural roots.  Burroughs borrowed compositional elements from Botticelli’s painting of the classical goddess rising from the sea, but provides a renewed definition of beauty by replacing her fair hair and complexion with a rich, dark skin tone. 

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Karl Bolander: The Hobby King

Surprising things often turn up in our archives, and the story of the first Director of the Fort Wayne Art School & Museum is one of those. When Theodore Thieme, president of the Wayne Knitting Mills, gave his home on Berry Street to the Fort Wayne Art School in 1921, he mandated some conditions before the transfer of his property could occur. One condition was that the Museum would become a formal part of the institution, others described the new board, constitution, and memberships, and, finally, it was agreed that the school would have a Director. Until then, the Board of Control had recruited an array of instructors, but had not appointed an executive. Now, with the added responsibilities of the Museum, a large endowment, and growing enrollment, it was necessary that the school and museum have a leader.

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Off the Cuff: Fort Wayne’s Past in a Portrait

Whoever is shown in this painting, parts of it were painted well and parts of it show a great lack of skill or a disinterest in accurately depicting parts of the picture. This painting was commissioned to local painter Horace Rockwell, who made a modest living in the business of commercial portraiture and occasionally executed nearly life-sized family portraits like that of the Hanna family. Rockwell, exercising the style of the time that people should be depicted naturally and without idealization, paid special attention to the faces of the Hanna family and rather skillfully shows how these people probably looked in real life. Ironically, the bodies of these people look quite unnatural, lacking anatomically correct bone structure and proportion. Feet look more like wooden wedges, shoulders slump like shapeless sacks of flour, and the youngest Hanna in the portrait is shown to have only four toes.  Rockwell has problems with his composition as well. An empty spot in the middle of the painting leaves an awkward division between the sitters, and almost no attention is paid to the background, which the artist has chosen to resolve by painting it a flat brown with no clue to tell us where this family is sitting.

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Winslow Homer takes FWMoA Back to School

It’s that time of year again: Back to School! While students of all ages cling to their final vestiges of freedom, we at FWMoA welcome this time of year. It’s when our galleries fill up again with tour groups and brighten our days. I was one of those kids excited to go back to school—I could learn and see my friends? Yes, please! I can see you shaking your head and smiling about how that eager little girl ended up in a museum (where she can now learn literally every day of the year) but I’m not the only one! There are artists who look back on school days with fondness, and one of them is on display just in time for the school year to start: Winslow Homer.

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Treasures from the Vault: Robert Stackhouse

Over the course of his 30+ year career, Stackhouse has refined his style. He almost exclusively crafts around the forms of ships and snakes, believing that a great artist doesn’t need an abundance of new information. He’s found what works for him, and if it’s not broken, he doesn’t plan on fixing it.

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Treasures from the Vault: Polaroid Pictures

Today, we are more accustomed to posting digital images on social media than printing photographs and putting them in albums.  Recently, companies like Polaroid and Fujifilm have manufactured a line of retro looking cameras, like the Fujifilm Instax Mini, that produce prints almost immediately without the need for a darkroom.  Perhaps it is a mixture of nostalgia and novelty that has caused a resurgence in popularity with these instant print cameras.  

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