The Addison Gallery of American Art is an academic museum dedicated to collecting American art, organized as a department of
Phillips Academy
("Not for Self") la, Finis Origine Pendet ("The End Depends Upon the Beginning") Youth From Every Quarter Knowledge and Goodness
, address = 180 Main Street
, city = Andover
, state = Ma ...
in
Andover, Massachusetts
Andover is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States. It was settled in 1642 and incorporated in 1646."Andover" in ''The New Encyclopædia Britannica''. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 15th ed., 1992, Vol. 1, p. 387. As of th ...
.
History
Directors of the gallery include Bartlett H. Hayes, Jr. (1940–1969), Christopher C. Cook (1969–1989),
Jock Reynolds (1989–1998),
Adam D. Weinberg
Adam D. Weinberg is an art museum curator and director. He has been the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art since October 1, 2003.
Education
He holds a BA from Brandeis University and a master's degree from the Visual ...
(1999–2003),
Brian T. Allen (2004–2013), Judith F. Dolkart (2014–2019), and Allison N. Kemmerer (2021-).
In the spring of 2006, the Phillips Academy Board of Trustees approved a $30 million campaign to renovate and expand the Addison Gallery. Construction on the Addison began in the middle of 2008 and was completed in 2010. The project was designed by
Centerbrook Architects & Planners Centerbrook Architects & Planners is an American architecture firm founded in 1975 and based in Centerbrook, Connecticut. Centerbrook is one of 37 active firms nationwide to have won the Architecture Firm Award, annually bestowed by the American Ins ...
.
Collection
![WinslowHomer-Eight Bells 1886](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/WinslowHomer-Eight_Bells_1886.jpg)
The Addison Gallery of American Art's founding collection included major works by such prominent American artists as
John Singleton Copley
John Singleton Copley (July 3, 1738 – September 9, 1815) was an Anglo-American painter, active in both colonial America and England. He was probably born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Anglo-Irish. Afte ...
,
Thomas Eakins
Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (; July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important American artists.
For the length ...
,
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and illustrator, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th-century America and a preeminent figure in ...
,
Maurice Prendergast
Maurice Brazil Prendergast (October 10, 1858 – February 1, 1924) was an American artist who painted in oil and watercolor, and created monotypes. His delicate landscapes and scenes of modern life, characterized by mosaic-like color, are ...
,
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more ...
,
John Twachtman
John Henry Twachtman (August 4, 1853 – August 8, 1902) was an American painter best known for his impressionist landscapes, though his painting style varied widely through his career. Art historians consider Twachtman's style of American Impr ...
, and
James McNeill Whistler. Purchasing and generous gifts have added works by such artists as
George Bellows
George Wesley Bellows (August 12 or August 19, 1882 – January 8, 1925) was an American realism, American realist painting, painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City. He became, according to the Columbus Museum of Art ...
,
Alexander Calder
Alexander Calder (; July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor known both for his innovative mobiles (kinetic sculptures powered by motors or air currents) that embrace chance in their aesthetic, his static "stabiles", and his ...
,
Stuart Davis,
Arthur Dove
Arthur Garfield Dove (August 2, 1880 – November 23, 1946) was an American artist. An early American modernist, he is often considered the first American abstract painter.. Dove used a wide range of media, sometimes in unconventional combinati ...
,
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 – September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin.
Early life and education
Hartley was born ...
,
Hans Hofmann,
Edward Hopper
Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching.
Hopper created subdued drama ...
,
Knox Martin
Knox Martin (February 12, 1923 – May 15, 2022) was an American painter, sculptor, and muralist.
Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, he studied at the Art Students League of New York from 1946 until 1950. He was one of the leading members of the N ...
,
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia Totto O'Keeffe (November 15, 1887 – March 6, 1986) was an American modernist artist. She was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers, New York skyscrapers, and New Mexico landscapes. O'Keeffe has been called the "Mother of Amer ...
,
Jackson Pollock
Paul Jackson Pollock (; January 28, 1912August 11, 1956) was an American painter and a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement. He was widely noticed for his " drip technique" of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a hor ...
,
Frederic Remington
Frederic Sackrider Remington (October 4, 1861 – December 26, 1909) was an American painter, illustrator, sculptor, and writer who specialized in the genre of Western American Art. His works are known for depicting the Western United State ...
,
Charles Sheeler
Charles Sheeler (July 16, 1883 – May 7, 1965) was an American artist known for his Precisionist paintings, commercial photography, and the avant-garde film, ''Manhatta'', which he made in collaboration with Paul Strand. Sheeler is recognized ...
,
Frank Stella
Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.
Biography
Frank Stella was born in M ...
,
John Sloan
John French Sloan (August 2, 1871 – September 7, 1951) was an American painter and etcher. He is considered to be one of the founders of the Ashcan school of American art. He was also a member of the group known as The Eight. He is best known ...
,
Benjamin West
Benjamin West, (October 10, 1738 – March 11, 1820) was a British-American artist who painted famous historical scenes such as '' The Death of Nelson'', ''The Death of General Wolfe'', the '' Treaty of Paris'', and '' Benjamin Franklin Drawin ...
and
Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Newell Wyeth ( ; July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.
In his ...
. It also has paintings by
John Kensett
John Frederick Kensett (March 22, 1816 – December 14, 1872) was an American
landscape painter and engraver born in Cheshire, Connecticut. He was a member of the second generation of the Hudson River School of artists. Kensett's signature works ...
,
Frederic Church
Frederic Edwin Church (May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900) was an American landscape painter born in Hartford, Connecticut. He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, best known for painting large landscapes, ...
,
George Inness
George Inness (May 1, 1825 – August 3, 1894) was a prominent United States, American landscape painting, landscape painter.
Now recognized as one of the most influential American artists of the nineteenth century, Inness was influenced b ...
,
Dwight Tryon, Ralph Blakelock,
John Singer Sargent
John Singer Sargent (; January 12, 1856 – April 14, 1925) was an American expatriate artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian-era luxury. He created roughly 900 oil paintings and more ...
,
Josef Albers
Josef Albers (; ; March 19, 1888March 25, 1976) was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo show at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, ...
,
Mary Cassatt
Mary Stevenson Cassatt (; May 22, 1844June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh's North Side), but lived much of her adult life in France, where she befriended Edgar De ...
, and
Phillip Guston
Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein, June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. Early in his five decade career, muralist David Siquieros described him as one of "the most promising ...
.
The Addison's collection of 7,500 photographs spans the history of American photography and includes in-depth holdings of key individual artists, such as
Lewis Baltz
Lewis "Duke" Baltz (September 12, 1945 – November 22, 2014) was an American visual artist, photographer, and educator. He was an important figure in the New Topographics movement of the late 1970s. ,
Walker Evans
Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from ...
,
Robert Frank
Robert Frank (November 9, 1924 – September 9, 2019) was a Swiss photographer and documentary filmmaker, who became an American binational. His most notable work, the 1958 book titled ''The Americans'', earned Frank comparisons to a modern-da ...
,
Eadweard Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge (; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904, born Edward James Muggeridge) was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first ...
,
Carleton Watkins
Carleton E. Watkins (1829–1916) was an American photographer of the 19th century. Born in New York, he moved to California and quickly became interested in photography. He focused mainly on landscape photography, and Yosemite Valley was a ...
,
Margaret Bourke-White
Margaret Bourke-White (; June 14, 1904 – August 27, 1971), an American list of photographers, photographer and documentary photography, documentary photographer, became arguably best known as the first foreign photographer permitted to take p ...
, and
Ansel Adams
Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advoca ...
. In recent years, the Gallery has acquired significant contemporary works by
Emery Bopp,
Carroll Dunham
Carroll Dunham (born November 5, 1949) is an American painter. Working since the late 1970s, Dunham's career reached critical renown in the 1980s when he first exhibited with Baskerville + Watson, a decade during which many artists returned to p ...
,
Kerry James Marshall
Kerry James Marshall (born October 17, 1955) is an American artist and professor, known for his paintings of Black figures. He previously taught painting at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2017, Marshall ...
,
Joel Shapiro
Joel Shapiro (born September 27, 1941 New York City, New York) is an American sculptor renowned for his dynamic work composed of simple rectangular shapes. The artist is classified as a Minimalist as demonstrated in his works, which were mostly ...
, and
Lorna Simpson
Lorna Simpson (born August 13, 1960) is an American photographer and multimedia artist. She came to prominence in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as ''Guarded Conditions'' and ''Square Deal''. Simpson is most well-known for her work in c ...
.
, the collection comprises over 22,000 works in all media, including painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, and decorative arts from the eighteenth century to the present. It also has a collection of models of American ships, including the ''
Half Moon'', ''
Mayflower
''Mayflower'' was an English ship that transported a group of English families, known today as the Pilgrims, from England to the New World in 1620. After a grueling 10 weeks at sea, ''Mayflower'', with 102 passengers and a crew of about 30, r ...
'', and the yacht ''Wanderer''.
Exhibitions
The Gallery presents a combination of twelve temporary exhibitions and permanent collection installations per year.
Recent examples include:
''American Vanguards: Graham, Davis, Gorky,
De Kooning Kooning is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Willem de Kooning (1904–1997), Dutch American artist
* Elaine de Kooning (1918–1989), American artist
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