Vermont Business Magazine Shelburne Museum will open the 2022 season on Sunday, May 15 with a full slate of new exhibitions, programs, and refurbished historic buildings. Northern New England’s largest art and history museum will be open six days a week, Tuesdays through Sundays, from 10 am to 5 pm, including holiday Mondays, through October 16.
Stagecoach Inn and Dana-Spencer Textile Galleries at Hat and Fragrance, where two of the museum’s most important collections reside—American Folk Art and quilts—will reopen this season after updates and conservation.
This season visitors will have a special opportunity to view a major exhibition of the work of Luigi Lucioni. Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light showcases the technically sophisticated realist who favored the play of light and shadows on weathered barns and stately trees contributing to the genre termed “Yankee Modernism.” In addition, visitors can explore American art through the lens of eyewear. Eyesight and Insight: Lens on American Art explores the ways in which eyesight, vision, and eyeglasses played a role in the history of American art. Visitors of all ages will be delighted by the museum’s expansive and compelling collections of art and Americana spanning four centuries from folk art and circus collections, to carriages and decoys. This season’s exhibitions include:
Eyesight and Insight: Lens on American Art (May 15 – October 16) illuminates the history of creative response to perceptions of vision and invites new insights into the ways American artists have negotiated issues related to eyesight from the 18th to the 21st century. The exhibition features objects from Shelburne Museum’s collection as well as significant loans including works by Rembrandt Peale, George Cope, Tseng Kwong Chi and others. Surveying more than 200 years of art and technological innovation, this marks the first major museum exhibition and scholarly publication considering the myriad roles of eyeglasses and optical technologies in the history of American art. A virtual component to the exhibition has already launched on the museum’s website. To explore the online galleries, visit: https://shelburnemuseum.org/online-exhibitions/eyesight-insight/
Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light (June 25-October 16) examines the career, influences, and techniques of Italian-American artist Luigi Lucioni. A prolific painter and printmaker, Lucioni is known today for his landscape paintings, still-life works, portraiture and etchings. Modern Light is the first comprehensive exhibition of the artist’s work at a major public museum, as well as Shelburne Museum’s first monographic exhibition of Lucioni’s art since 1968. Known during his lifetime as a technically sophisticated realist who favored the play of light and shadows on weathered barns and stately trees, Lucioni contributed to the genre that art historian Bruce Robertson has termed “Yankee Modernism.” Lucioni, along with Paul Sample, Maxfield Parrish, and even Charles Sheeler and Andrew Wyeth, depicted a landscape and a people, orderly yet odd, who embodied an idealized set of “American” values in an era of great social and political change.
Museum tickets are available at the admissions desk and no pre-registration is required. The museum will be monitoring guidance from state and federal officials related to COVID-19 safety, with current information posted on the website. For full details related to reopening and COVID-19 related regulations, please visit shelburnemuseum.org
1) Shelburne Museum’s iconic Round Barn is one of 39 buildings on the museum’s 45-acre campus.
2) Luigi Lucioni, Village of Stowe, Vermont, 1931. Oil on canvas, 23 1/2 x 33 1/2 in. Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gift of the Estate of Mrs. George P. Douglas. Licensed by Bridgeman Images.
3) Edwin Romanzo Elmer (American, 1850–1923), Magic Glasses, 1891, Oil on canvas, 14 x 10 in., Collection of Shelburne Museum, Museum purchase, acquired from Richard Gipson. Photography by Bruce Schwarz.
About Shelburne Museum
Founded in 1947 by trailblazing folk art collector Electra Havemeyer Webb (1888–1960), Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, Vermont, is the largest art and history museum in northern New England and Vermont’s foremost public resource for visual art and material culture. The Museum’s 45-acre campus is comprised of 39 buildings including the Pizzagalli Center for Art and Education and Webb Gallery featuring important American paintings by Andrew Wyeth, Winslow Homer, Grandma Moses, John Singleton Copley and many more. For more information, please visit shelburnemuseum.org.
Source: SHELBURNE, Vt. (March 7, 2022) Shelburne Museum