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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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In the News: What’s a Museum without Objects?

A few weeks ago, a fire at the 200-year-old Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, obliterated years of Latin American history, science, and culture. Investigations revealed the extent of disrepair the museum had experienced, stemming from a lack of government funding over the past few years. Multiple news outlets reported on the museum’s use of crowdfunding to pay for expenses and lack of digitized records. A public museum, this spurred international outcries over budget cuts experienced by public museums, libraries, and archives worldwide. I started to think about the collection at FWMoA, what would be lost for the residents of Fort Wayne, and Indiana at large, if our museum was there one day and gone the next.

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Artist Interview: Chuck Sperry

Exhibitions Content Manager Elizabeth Goings sat down with artist Chuck Sperry, whose exhibition All Access: Exploring Humanism in the Art of Chuck Sperry, is on display at FWMoA through December 9th, 2018. Listen, or read, as Elizabeth and Chuck discuss his early career as a cartoonist, his journey to printmaking and posters, his inspirations, and his interactions with his collectors from all over the world!

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Art Term Tuesday: Nude

Well, this should be a short post. A nude is a work of art that portrays a naked human subject. All right, my work here is done. Or is it? Is there more to nudity in art beyond sheer nakedness? In this weeks Art Term Tuesday, Jack Cantey explores the term nude and what it means in art.

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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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Where are They Now? Celebrating Scholastic Alum and the Launch of the 2019 Awards Season

Today is the launch of the 2019 Scholastic Art and Writing Awards! Creative students aged 13 and up may now visit the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards site and begin entering their work into this prestigious competition. FWMoA is a Regional Affiliate of the Awards, overseeing both art and writing for Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio, which is home to some incredibly talented students and educators. We’re always happy to welcome Alumni back to the museum where their art or writing was first displayed, and we were excited to discover that one of our current interns, Aaliyah Miller, received multiple Awards during her high school career. Aaliyah graduated from Carroll High School in 2016 and has gone on to pursue a degree in Art Therapy from the University of Saint Francis. We talked about her path and perspective a couple years out from high school.

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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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Art Term Tuesday: Quilt

The majority of our collection is from a single collector, David Pottinger, who focused on “Amish Quilts” from the early 20th century, though our earliest quilt is from 1876. Amish quilts have two definitions: quilts made by Amish or Mennonite quilters or quilts made using traditional Amish techniques and fabrics. Amish Quilts have a distinct style that persists to quilters today. A dark base color, striking geometric designs, and fantastically intricate hand stitching are hallmarks of Amish Quilts, though of course not the only techniques found in these types of quilts. Quilting is often a community project, where many friends and family members gather to work together to create a single quilt. Much like glassblowing, quilting is a collaborative art that is passed down to the next generation. Mothers would teach their daughters from an early age what they knew. When you look at the quilts, see if any share similarities in color or style, were they made by people from the same family? From the same community?

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Reality Check: For Your Eyes Only

The news media loves to circulate stories of brazen museum visitors who get too close to the objects in their midst, causing some degree of harm to priceless art and antiquities. The more valuable the art, the more headlines, and the more dramatic the damage, the more shame we in the audience can heap on the hapless fools. Sensational news stories are one thing; real life “please do not touch!” incidents at FWMoA are another.

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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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