NEWS
FENIMORE ART MUSEUM REOPENS APRIL 1 WITH NEW EXHIBITIONS
Cooperstown, New York — Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York reopens for the season on Friday, April 1 with new exhibitions including Al Hirschfeld: Caricaturist to the Stars (April 1–September 11, 2022), North by Nuuk: Greenland After Rockwell Kent— (April 1–December 31, 2022), and Ralph Fasanella: Americans Unseen (April 1–September 18, 2022). The museum presents a total of nine new exhibitions this year alongside its world-renowned collections of fine art, folk art, and Native American art, which includes The Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art. Admission is free for ages 19 and under—sponsored by the Robert and Esther Black Family Foundation with the support of Richland County Foundation.
Fenimore Art Museum, nestled on the shore of picturesque Otsego Lake, offers visitors to the village of Cooperstown an opportunity to experience a wide variety of world-class art in an idyllic, small-town setting.
For more information on Fenimore Art Museum’s 2022 exhibitions and programs visit FenimoreArt.org. The museum is open April 1–December 31, 2022. Spring hours (April 1–May 6): 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday (closed Mondays). Summer hours begin May 7: open daily 10:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m.
Exhibitions opening April 1, 2022:
Ralph Fasanella: Americans Unseen
April 1 – September 18, 2022
Ralph Fasanella (1914-1997) is best known for his large, dynamic paintings of American politics and urban life that include crowds of people involved in struggle, protest, or celebration. These crowds, however, are mostly made up of many individuals whom the artist knew personally. Fasanella’s portraits are a lesser-known body of work, but are in fact, the building blocks for his famous works. This exhibition, the first of its kind, explores Fasanella’s portrait-making as a vital tool for staying connected with people in an intimate, emotional, personal way, in order to give meaning to their collective actions in society at large. It includes more than two dozen works spanning more than thirty years.
North by Nuuk: Greenland After Rockwell Kent—
April 1 – December 31, 2022
Photographer Denis Defibaugh presents his journey from Nuuk to the settlement of Illorsuit, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, following Rockwell Kent’s earlier footsteps and offers a fresh look at timeless Greenland. Defibaugh’s revealing documentary photographs, made during 2016–17, introduce a changing country and its cultural continuity in response to Kent’s 1930s historic writings and images made during his residence in Greenland. Gallery text and video include native language speakers as well as Kent’s lantern slides.
The exhibition is supplemented with etchings and prints from Rockwell Kent’s Greenland sojourn, on loan from the University of Plattsburgh, and artwork from the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art.
Sponsored in part by Nellie and Robert Gipson.
Al Hirschfeld: Caricaturist to the Stars
April 1 – September 11, 2022
Al Hirschfeld (1903-2003) started his career at the age of 17 and continued drawing to the end of his life. During his eight-decade career, Hirschfeld gained fame by illustrating the actors, singers, and dancers of Broadway plays, films, and popular entertainment. His portfolio reads as a who’s who of 20th-century entertainers.
Drawn from the Nocciolino collection, the exhibition features 20 original large prints of Hirschfeld’s drawings of well-known performers. Many of the prints contain his signature “Nina” motif hidden in the design, a sly reference to his daughter that became a national obsession.
ONGOING EXHIBITIONS:
Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art
The Coopers of Cooperstown
Fine Art from the Permanent Collection
American Memory: Recalling the Past in Folk Art
About Fenimore Art Museum
Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org.