The Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College displays a world-class collection of American art. These works provide diverse visual expressions of our cultural heritage. In this tour, students will discover how American artists portray people, places, and ideas from the 19th century through today. They will discuss how art affects us individually and contributes to our understanding of the world.
The tour will include opportunities for students to share what they observe in the works of art and make connections to their personal lives. Students will engage in interactive elements that aid in close looking and visual analysis. Tour guides (docents) will help students make connections between works of art and content covered in standards of learning.
Highlights: early portraiture, early landscapes, depicting America
Early portraiture
From colonial times into the nineteenth century, owning art was a luxury for most Americans. For those with the means and desire to buy art, portraits preserved the likenesses of family members and community leaders and conveyed status. This gallery contains a portrait of Mrs. Polly Hooper by Gilbert Stuart, who also painted several portraits of George Washington – his most famous portrait is of George Washington, a painting used as the source for the engraving of Washington on the one-dollar bill.
A portrait of Lynchburg native, Mary Elizabeth Morgan, by Virginia artist George Fitzwilson provides a contrast in style and method to Stuart’s portrait. Fitzwilson was a limner artist, or a mostly untrained (self-taught) artist for hire. Limners traveled along routes, much like a “traveling salesman” offering their services to a growing middle class. To create the portrait of Mary Elizabeth Morgan, Fitzwilson used a “stock” method, pre-painting the landscape and body, leaving only the facial features to be painted at the time of the sitting. Limners charged less than trained artists, making them attractive to the growing middle class because portraits in the home conveyed an air of refinement. This portrait gives students an opportunity to discuss proportion and scale and drawing from observation.
Self Portrait by Louise Jordan Smith, a trailblazing teacher who founded the college’s art collection, was completed while looking in the mirror on view across from the pastel painting. The three-quarter view shows a strong resemblance to Smith.
Early landscapes
For early American landscape artists, the endless expanse of the American wilderness symbolized the country’s potential for greatness. Hudson River School artists Thomas Cole, Asher Durand and John Frederick Kensett led the way with paintings of panoramic views rendered with precise detail. These serene and awe-inspiring vistas, in which a small figure often communes with nature, were intended to evoke elevated thoughts and feelings as well as immense pride in America. These landscapes provide opportunities to identify atmospheric perspective, foreground/middle ground/background, focal point and overlapping shapes.
Virginia artist Flavius Fisher’s painting Dismal Swamp is a luminous depiction of Lake Drummond, the freshwater lake at the center of the Great Dismal Swamp. The Great Dismal Swamp, a marshland in the Coastal Plain (Tidewater) region of southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina, was first surveyed by George Washington in 1763. He and investors purchased the area to “drain the swamp,” harvest the trees for lumber, and replant the land with crops. This region provided refuge for Native Americans fleeing the colonial frontier in the 1600s, and later enslaved people seeking freedom via the Underground Railroad. For many, the Great Dismal Swamp became a permanent home, where they established hidden, self-sufficient communities called maroons. Today, this region is a national wildlife refuge.
Lynchburg in 1845 by Augustus Köllner shows the city viewed from the Amherst side of the James River at a point in Lynchburg’s history when tobacco, our major industry, was transported on the James River. The landscape is detailed drawing in ink on pages pulled from a sketchbook.
John James Audubon was an ornithologist and artist fascinated with the habits of birds. He created a detailed catalog of American bird species, a massive four volume book called Birds of America. Rather than depicting scientific rendering of birds, as other ornithologists had done, Audubon rendered birds in their natural habitat, in painstaking detail. Marsh Wren, an engraving on hand colored paper, accurately depicts three birds and their oval-shaped nest. The Coastal Plain (Tidewater) region of Virginia is a temporary residence for Marsh Wrens during the spring and fall migration periods.
Highlights: Developments in portraiture, American Impressionism, experiments with texture, innovations in art
Developments in American Portraiture
The popularization of photography in the mid-1900s contributed to changes in art. Since photography could depict the world more accurately than painting, painters shifted from representing reality to portraying emotions and impressions of the subject. Students will compare portraits.
Portraiture by Thomas Eakins, William Merritt Chase, and Marion Boyd Allen convey more information about their subjects’ personalities and professions than do the earlier portraits from Gallery 2, in which depicting the sitter’s likeness in a pleasing manner was usually the sole objective. Marion Boyd Allen’s Portrait of Anna Vaughn Hyatt shows the sculptor working on a clay maquette (model) of Joan of Arc on horseback in preparation for the full-size bronze sculpture that now resides in NYC. The sculpture was the first New York City monument created by a female artist.
American Impressionism
During and following the Civil War American artists adopted many styles of European art as they flocked there to study in the famous academies. Deriving their style from French Impressionists, the American Impressionists used loose brushstrokes and a combination of warm and cool colors to capture the effects of sunlight and atmosphere. The invention of the metal paint tube in 1840 by American oil painter John Goffe Rand enabled artists to transport paints. Prior to this, paint was stored in the bladders of small animals such as pigs. To capture the quality of light, American Impressionists painted outdoors, or “en plein air” (in the open air) instead of in the studio. They were not concerned with rendering precise details. Instead, they wanted to capture the impression of a moment in time. Short, layered brushstrokes are characteristic of American Impressionism. Childe Hassam’s Early Evening after Snowfall presents New York City in the winter, while John Twachtman’s Azaleas, shows a garden in the late summer or spring.
Mary Cassatt, the only American artist invited to exhibit with the Impressionists in Paris, is known for her portraits of women and portrayals of mothers and children caught in everyday moments. Sketch of Mother and Daughter Looking at Baby is a pastel drawing created in preparation for a painting.
Some artists experimented with paint application and instead of the traditional smooth surface they left the surface textured. Frederick Waugh used a palette knife instead of a paintbrush to create the textured waves and storm clouds in Kelp Covered Rocks. Maurice Prendergast’s signature style is characterized by a heavy application of paint, a bright palette, and flattened, stylized compositions. The Idlers depicts women from “high society” leisurely enjoying an afternoon on a lake shore.
John Sloan, a member of a group of painters from the early twentieth century called the Ashcan School, reacted against the refined subject matter of Impressionism. Instead of idyllic countryside and the leisure class images, he depicted urban themes, especially the working poor. Sun and Wind on the Roof shows a laundress at work in New York City in 1915.
Highlights: abstraction, conceptual art, contemporary Native American Art, contemporary African American Art, mixed media and art media explorations, innovations in art. In this gallery students will see how artists from the 20th century through today create works of art that connect ideas, art forms, and historical or cultural themes to personal experiences.
Abstraction
Arthur Dove was part of a modern approach to making art called abstraction in which the goal is not to show an accurate depiction of a visual reality but instead use shapes, colors, lines, and forms to create a composition. Dove’s Cow #1 invites the viewer to “find” the cow in the painting.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s unique artistic vision or approach was to record abstract forms in nature and her surroundings. With exceptionally keen powers of observation, she recorded subtle nuances of color, shape, and light that enlivened her paintings, as seen in Yellow Cactus.
Helen Frankenthaler, known for inventing the “soak-stain technique,” large scale abstractions with thin washes of pigment that soak into the canvas, worked in a style called Abstract Expressionism. London Memos is an example of her signature transparent sea of color.
In a series called “Altered Landscapes,” contemporary Native American artist (Tewa/Hopi) Michael Namingha creates abstract, photography-based works that juxtapose geometric shapes in bright neon colors against black-and-white aerial photographs of New Mexico. The compositions, mounted to shaped plexiglass to create the illusion of three-dimensional works, address the devastating effects of the oil and gas industries [non-renewable energy sources] on ancestral lands. Altered Landscape #2 depicts the eroded [erosion] hills and canyons in northern New Mexico, known as Bisti/De-Na-Zin Wilderness. Translated from the Navajo language, Bisti (Bis-tie) means “a large area of shale hills.” De-Na-Zin (Deh-nah-zin) comes from the Navajo word for “standing crane.” This unique landscape of sedimentary rock is renowned for its diverse and well-preserved fossil record. Georgia O’Keeffe visited this area many times between 1936-1949 and made several famous paintings of the landscape, which she called “Black Place.”
Jacob Lawrence, one of America’s best-known African American artists, looked back to the Civil War era for inspiration when he created John Brown’s Arsenal, depicting the abolitionist’s famous Harpers Ferry, Virginia, uprising in an unexpected way. Lawrence grew up in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, an arts movement that was inspired by the Ashcan School and sought to combine realism, ethnic consciousness, and Americanism.
Regionalism
Regionalism was also philosophically related to the Ashcan School and arose in the 1930s. Rejecting abstraction, Regionalists were especially devoted to capturing scenes of rural life. They felt the places and people of America’s heartland truly captured the American spirit. Their outlook has often been linked to the country’s isolationism between World War I and World War II. Thomas Hart Benton was the most vocal proponent of Regionalism, and his painting Preparing the Bill illustrates a distinctly American scene. The image is an example of narrative art, inviting students to “read” the visual text to determine character, setting and plot, and apply visual literacy skills such as using context, inference, and prediction.
Café by Jack Levine is another narrative painting in this gallery that gives students the opportunity to apply visual literacy skills.
Mixed Media and Contemporary African American Art
Benny Andrews was one of ten children in a family of sharecroppers from Plainview, Georgia. The first in his family to attend school beyond seventh grade, Andrews created figural works using an innovative collage technique. English Teacher is an homage to his High School English teacher and the importance of education in his life. The mixed-media portrait demonstrates how portraiture has evolved since the early 1900s.
Betye Saar, one of the most significant African American female artists active today, is known for combining found materials and personal objects into assemblage. Nevermore reminds viewers of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and provides students an opportunity to consider what life was like for enslaved Africans in colonial America. The work includes a thin dress made from netting, worn by her aunt, held up by two handmade paper ravens, and black coral. This mixed-media work is another example of ways artists in the 21st century depict ideas, and in this case, using found, non-traditional materials.
Conceptual Art
Conceptual Art is art that emphasizes ideas as much as, or more than, the physical product. Conceptual artists believe that the idea is as much a work of art as the finished piece. Hans Haacke is a world-renowned conceptual artist who addresses many ideas in his work including funding for the arts, which is explored in a maquette that he created for a large sculpture called Gift Horse. A maquette is a French term that refers to the scale model that is 3-dimensional that a sculptor makes before creating the larger, finished sculpture. (As seen in Portrait of Anna Vaughn Hyatt in gallery 2)
Highlights: The 113th Annual Exhibition, Vita Wild: Contemporary Wildlife Art, features work by nine contemporary American artists whose primary focus is to depict animals in the American wilderness and their intrinsic connection to the ecosystem. The exhibition includes painting, drawings, prints, sculpture, and mixed-media works. In this gallery students will see how contemporary artists create works of art inspired by a variety of sources, subjects, and other fields of knowledge, namely environmental science, and biology. Students will be asked to consider the impact of climate change and land development on wildlife and ecosystems.
During the tour, students will focus on works by the following artists:
Adonna Khare (b. 1980): She is known for highly realistic, detailed large-scale carbon-pencil drawings of animals placed in fanciful, surreal worlds.
Shelley Reed (b. 1958): She is known for black, white, and gray large-scale paintings of animals that she repaints from 17th and 18th century paintings. Her paintings are dramatic and often place animals in ambiguous contexts.
Tom Uttech (b. 1942): He paints imaginary, woodland landscapes based on the Canadian Shield, a large expanse of land across the northern United States and South-Eastern Canada, where the ancient igneous rock that forms the core of the continent is exposed, and miles of lakes, woodland, and wildlife lie untouched by human influence.
Mark Messersmith (b. 1955): He creates paintings with wood and other mixed media elements that focus on the flora and fauna of north Florida. The large-scale, dense works juxtapose an untamed wilderness with the battle for habitat and survival, both between humans and animals and between the animals themselves. His works reference the impact of continual human expansion, dwindling natural resources, and the impact of climate change on ecosystems.
Familiarizing the students with the following vocabulary will help in preparing them for the tour.
museum: an institution dedicated to the collection, care, study, and display of works of art, history, and natural science as objects of lasting value or interest
gallery: a room or building devoted to the exhibition of works of art
label: a small card describing a work of art, usually attached to the wall next to the artwork
school: a “school” of artists is a group of individuals linked often geographically and always philosophically. Artists in a “school” or “movement” share the same approach toward technique and/or share a similar attitude regarding the purpose of making art. Sometimes a school’s philosophy is very much in synch with attitudes in society, other times a school of artists can be at odds with the rest of society.
portrait: a painting, sculpture, drawing, or other representation of a specific, recognizable person
self-portrait: a portrait depicting the artist who created it
landscape: an artistic representation of natural inland scenery
cityscape: an artistic representation of a city scene
seascape: an artistic representation of an ocean scene
abstraction: an artwork which may depict only vaguely identifiable forms or which does not feature recognizable forms at all. In other words, when you look at abstract art you often cannot tell “what it is.”
sculpture: a three-dimensional work of art
sketch: an unstudied or spontaneous drawing or painting usually used as a draft for a finished painting or sculpture. A scale model made for a sculpture or other 3D work is called a maquette.
still-life: a picture consisting predominantly of a grouping of objects
realism: to represent the external world in an objective and factual manner
representational: to represent recognizable images, but not necessarily factually or realistically. The opposite of abstract.
narrative art: art that tells a story.
folk art: works usually done by a self-taught artists. Also sometimes called “naïve” art.
mixed-media: work composed from a combination of different media or materials
collage: describes both the technique and the resulting work of art in which pieces of paper, photographs, fabric and other ephemera are arranged and stuck down onto a supporting surface (Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/collage)
assemblage: art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or bought specially (Source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/assemblage)
primary: the pure colors of red, blue, and yellow which are the source for all other colors
secondary: the colors formed by mixing primary colors; the colors orange, violet and green obtained by mixing
primary colors: red and yellow = orange, red and blue = violet, yellow and blue = green
complementary: each primary color has a complementary color which is produced by mixing the other two primary colors. The complementary color of red is green, a mixture of blue and yellow. The complementary color of blue is orange, a mixture of red and yellow. The complementary color of yellow is violet, a mixture of red and blue. Red and green are opposite to each other on the color wheel, as are blue and orange, and yellow and violet. One complementary color completes and intensifies its complementary color.
two-dimensional: possessing the measurements of length and width but lacking thickness or depth
three-dimensional: possessing the measurements of length, width, and thickness; a solid surrounded by space
foreground: the part of a picture which appears closest to the viewer
middle ground: the part of a picture between the foreground and the background
background: the part of a picture representing what lies behind objects in the foreground or middle ground
horizon line: where the sky appears to meet the ground.
linear perspective: an artistic technique used to create the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface. This is effective in landscape art because it makes the viewer feel like they can walk into the landscape.
atmospheric perspective: an artistic technique used to create the illusion of depth and distance, especially in landscapes. The artists makes objects appear less clear as they get farther away in the distance.
The following terms will enrich an understanding of the unique progression of American art as trends influence and sometimes blend with one another. These “isms” are not essential vocabulary for your Art & SOL tour.
Hudson River School
The first group of American landscape painters emerged in the 1820s and became known as the Hudson River School because many of them painted in and around the Hudson River Valley and the nearby Catskill and Adirondack Mountains. This was the first coherent American art movement, in the sense that the artists involved shared a similar outlook and approach to making art. They depicted panoramic scenes in precise detail, and regarding nature as a spiritual resource.
Luminism
The pervasive glow of sunlight in a landscape is characteristic of Luminism, a trend among mid-nineteenth-century artists who saw light as landscape’s most important binding ingredient as well as a symbol of divine presence.
Impressionism
Impressionists shared a style of painting that did not hide the brushstroke nor blobs of paint on the surface. To them, light was even more important than it had been to the earlier Luminists. In fact, for many Impressionists, capturing the quality of light, often shimmering and diffused, was more important than the subject of their painting.
Regionalism
Artists led by Thomas Hart Benton used a robust style to celebrate ordinary working people and the rhythms of rural American life, politics, and society.
Ashcan School (also known as New York Realism or The Eight)
A group of painters and illustrators interested in capturing the gritty atmosphere of urban scenes and details of the lives of ordinary working people.
Harlem Renaissance
A movement of the 1920s that marked the first period of intense activity by African-Americans in the fields of literature, visual art and music. The center of this movement was the Harlem neighborhood of New York City.
Conceptual Art
Art that emphasizes ideas as much as, or more than, the physical product. Conceptual artists believe that the idea is as much a work of art as the finished piece.
Abstract Expressionism
A form of abstract art developed by American painters in the 1940-1950s. These painting include gestural brush strokes or other forms of mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity and energy.