Gallery sights in USA
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St Johnsbury Athenaeum
Home to the country’s oldest art gallery still in its original form, the Athenaeum was founded in 1871 when Horace Fairbanks gave the town a library. Comprising some 9000 finely bound books of classic world literature, the library was soon complemented by the gallery, built around its crown jewel, Albert Bierstadt’s 10ft-by-15ft painting, Domes of the Yosemite. The rest of the collection consists of works by such Hudson River School painters as Asher B Durand, Worthington Whittredge and Jasper Crospey as well as dozens of copies of old masters. Bierstadt is said to have returned to the gallery every summer until his death to touch up his masterpiece.
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Berta’s & Mina’s Antiquities
This cluttered gallery, with paintings seemingly tumbling out onto the sidewalk, specializes in regional folk art, especially the works of the late Nilo Lanzas, whose daughter operates the shop. Lanzas began painting at 63 and produced an impressive body of work, most of it of an outsider art/religious bent, up until his death. Museums and serious collectors have snatched up many of Lanzas’ paintings already, but there are dozens of nice pieces, all very eye-catching and worthy of homes. Lanzas’ work is, in fact, very easy to like. His daughter, Mina, also paints and her works show alongside her father’s and a few other artists from the city and its surrounds.
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Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center
Past Hali'imaile Rd, just after the 5-mile marker, is Kaluanui, the former plantation estate of sugar magnates Harry and Ethel Baldwin, which now houses the Hui No'eau Visual Arts Center. Famed Honolulu architect CW Dickey designed the two-story plantation home with Spanish-style tile roof in 1917.
The prestigious arts club founded here in the 1930s offers classes in printmaking, pottery, woodcarving and other visual arts. You're welcome to visit the gallery, which exhibits topnotch local artists, and walk around the grounds, which include stables turned into art studios. The gift shop sells quality ceramics, glassware and original prints.
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Lowe Art Museum
Your love of the Lowe depends on your taste in art. If you’re into modern and contemporary works, it’s good. If you’re into the art and archaeology of cultures from Asia, Africa and the South Pacific, it’s great. And if you’re into pre-Columbian and Mesoamerican art, it’s simply fantastic; the artifacts are stunning and thoughtfully strung out along an easy-to-follow narrative thread. That isn’t to discount the lovely permanent collection of Renaissance and Baroque art, Western sculpture from the 18th to 20th centuries and paintings by Gauguin, Picasso and Monet; they’re also gorgeous.
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MoMA PS1
Sorry, Gaga, but New York's true icon of edge is MoMA PS1. This smaller, hipper relative of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art is a master at hunting down fresh, bold contemporary art and serving it up in a Berlin-esque, ex-school locale. Forget about pretty lily ponds in gilded frames. Here you'll be peering at videos through floorboards, schmoozing at DJ-pimped parties, and debating the meaning of nonstatic structures while staring through a hole in the wall. Expect over 50 exhibitions a year, exploring anything from Middle Eastern video art to giant mounds of thread. Nothing is predictable. Even a 2011 exhibition honoring the 10-year anniversary of 9/11 took a different…
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Motif No 1
Dock Sq is the hub of Rockport. Visible from here, the red fishing shack decorated with colorful buoys is known as Motif No 1. So many artists of great and minimal talent have been painting and photographing it for so long that it well deserves its tongue-in-cheek name. Actually, it should be called Motif No 1-B, as the original shack vanished during a great storm in 1978 and a brand-new replica was erected in its place.
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Indian Arts Research Center
Make reservations to tour the vaulted collection at the Indian Arts Research Center. The collection consists of more than 11,000 Native American artifacts, much of it pre-colonial, including textiles, baskets, jewelry and lots of pottery. It's not really displayed for public consumption, which makes the tour through the climate-controlled collection that much more interesting; you'll be surrounded by shelves packed with remnants of a time long past. The gift shop (08:00-noon & 13:00-17:00) has an outstanding selection of collection-related books by associates, faculty members and others.
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Kolb Studio
Photographers Ellsworth and Emery Kolb arrived at the Grand Canyon from Pennsylvania in 1902 and made a living photographing parties going down the Bright Angel Trail. Because there was not enough water on the rim to process the film, they had to run 4.5 miles down the trail to a spring at Indian Garden, develop the film and race back up in order to have the pictures ready when the party returned. Eventually, they built a small studio on the edge of the rim, which has since been expanded and now holds a small bookstore and an art gallery with changing exhibits.
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Historic Santa Fe Foundation
On the site of El Zagúan, an expansive territorial-style mansion purchased in 1849 by Anglo entrepreneur James Johnson, the Historic Santa Fe Foundation is an unassuming little museum on Canyon Rd, with a few interesting exhibits - old photos, potsherds and whatnot. The lovely gardens outside are also worth a look. Create your own walking or driving tour of Santa Fe's historic best by consulting the foundation's registry (available on-site and on the website) of more than 70 Santa Fe buildings considered worthy of historical preservation. Each is marked by a bronze plaque.
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Homer Council of the Arts
The cold, dark season of unemployment has inspired a saying in these parts: 'If you're starving, you might as well be an artist.' Just browsing these great galleries is a treat, and on the first Friday of the month, many break out the wine and cheese, and stay open late for a series of openings all over town.
This is just the tip of the iceberg - grab a free Downtown Homer Art Galleries flyer at the visitors center with many more gallery listings, or stop by the Homer Council of the Arts, with its own awesome gallery and information on various tours.
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Studios of Key West
This nonprofit showcases about a dozen artists' studios in a gallery space located in the old Armory building, which includes a lovely sculpture garden. Besides its public visual-arts displays, TSKW hosts readings by local authors like Robert Stone, literary and visual workshops, concerts, lectures and community discussion groups. Essentially, it has become the accessible heart of this city's enormous arts movement, and offers a good point-of-entry for visitors who want to engage in Key West's creative scene but don't have a clue where to start. You may want to call ahead before you visit in case exhibits are being installed.
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Bryan Gallery
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Italian Hall
A few doors down from the Avila Adobe is the Italian Hall, which sports a rare rooftop mural called América Tropical by David Alfaro Siqueiros, one of Mexico's great early-20th-century muralists. The 1932 work shows a crucified Native American in front of a Mayan pyramid and was so controversial back then that city fathers ordered it whitewashed immediately. The Getty Conservation Institute recently rehabilitated the mural and may possibly build a public viewing platform. Meanwhile, you can see a replica in East LA.
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Denver Art Museum
The DAM is home to one of the largest Native American art collections in the USA, and puts on special avant-garde multimedia exhibits. The Western American Art section of the permanent collection is justifiably famous.
The $110-million Frederic C Hamilton wing, designed by Daniel Libeskind, is a strange, angular, fanlike edifice. It's inspired and mesmerizing. If you think the place looks weird from the outside, look inside: shapes shift with each turn thanks to a combination of design and uncanny natural-light tricks.
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Diego Rivera Gallery
Diego Rivera's 1931 The Making of a Fresco Showing a Building of a City is a trompe l'oeil fresco within a fresco, showing the artist himself as he pauses to admire his work, as well as the work in progress that is San Francisco. The fresco covers an entire wall in the Diego Rivera Gallery at the San Francisco Art Institute, on your left through the entryway courtyard. For a memorable San Francisco vista, head to the terrace cafe for espresso and panoramic bay views.
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Purvis Young Gallery
Vagrant, convict and creator, Purvis Young (1943–2010) is Overtown’s favorite native son. Although the work in his gallery is dubbed ‘outsider’ or ‘folk’ art (i.e he didn’t go to art school), we’d just classify it as good. His paintings, often done on pieces of wood and carpet samples, portray ink-blotty mothers, horses, angels, African idols and people striving for freedom from an ambiguous captivity – a poignant and well-realized message in studio spaces that abut Miami’s poorest neighborhoods.
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Axiom
You know this place is going to be cool and cutting edge, by virtue of the fact that it is attached to the T station. Indeed, the contemporary glass and steel space is unique in Boston for its dedication to exhibiting artists who are working in the ‘new media.’ Blurring the line between technology and artistry, the exhibits explore ways to use video, audio and other unexpected media to look at the world. At the time of research, Axiom was hosting the first annual one-minute film festival.
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Cuba Ocho
The jewel of the Little Havana Art District, Cuba Ocho functions as a community center, art gallery and research outpost for all things Cuban. The interior resembles a cool old Havana cigar bar, yet the walls are decked out in artwork that references both the classical past of Cuban art and its avant-garde future. Frequent live music, film, drama performances, readings and other events go off every week. The center opens during the evening for these events; check online for more information.
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Lisa Dent Gallery
The smart old money is on Lisa Dent Gallery, purveyor of cosmopolitan sophistication and meticulous attention to craft. Dent is a bona fide curatorial star, who ditched the Whitney and the New Museum to return to her hometown, and take risks on international and local talent. Look here for major intrigue in minor details: Marcia Kure's spindly figures painted with kola-nut pigment, Jason Middlebrook's mirror-mosaic car parts, Jeong Im-yi's fastidious trompe l'oeil recreations of her studio walls.
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New Langton Arts
Strange is the norm at New Langton, where artists have done odd and occasionally unprintable things since 1975. This nonprofit is where Tony Labat stepped into the boxing ring with his critics and Harrell Fletcher distributed newspapers by teen reporters he’d commissioned to collect good news from their neighbors. Don’t miss the Musée d’Honneur Minuscule, a window box in the entryway featuring small, ambitious works, such as Jill Sylvia’s tiny cityscape made from accountants’ ledger paper.
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Self-Help Graphics & Art
The Self-Help Graphics & Art has been nurturing and promoting Latino art for the past three decades. Because of budget troubles, it's rarely open these days but the remaining staff still puts on the Southland's best and largest Día de Los Muertos (Day of the Day) celebration on November 1. The mural on the eastern wall (above Super Taco) is a recreation of David Alfaro Siqueros' controversial América Tropical on Olvera St. Call for opening hours.
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Ikenobo Ikebana Society
The oldest and largest society outside Japan for ikebana (the Japanese art of flower-arranging) has the displays to prove it: a curly willow branch tickling a narcissus in an abstract jiyubana (freestyle) arrangement, or a traditional seven-part rikka landscape featuring pine and iris. Even shoppers hell-bent on iron teapots and maneki neko (waving kitty) figurines can't resist stopping to stare at the arrangements.
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Thorne Sagendorph Art Gallery
The Thorne Sagendorph Art Gallery housed at Keene State College plays a crucial role in supporting the arts in this rural region. Its spacious skylit halls showcase rotating exhibits of regional and national artists. Sagendorph hosts an annual exhibit focusing on New Hampshire native artists. The small permanent collection includes pieces by the many national artists that have been drawn to the Monadnock region since the 19th century
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Alexander & Bonin
Since moving to Chelsea from Soho in 1997, this three-story gallery has made excellent use of its airy space with a stellar roster of artists, including several prestigious Turner Prize winners. Carolyn Alexander and Ted Bonin, the directors, can sometimes be seen at their 2nd-story desks. Recent shows include Willie Cole and the videos of Willie Doherty.
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A Gallery for Fine Photography
This impressive gallery usually has prints such as William Henry Jackson’s early-20th-century views of New Orleans and EJ Bellocq’s rare images of Storyville prostitutes, made from the photographers’ original glass plates. The gallery also regularly features Herman Leonard’s shots of Duke Ellington and other jazz legends, as well as the occasional Cartier-Bresson enlargement (available at second-mortgage prices).
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