Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Creating and Collecting: Kansas City and Contemporary Decorative Arts

August 25 to December 5
Bloch Building, Gallery L7
Admission is Free

Robyn Nichols, American (b. 1955). Nymphaea (Water lilies) Rattle,
ca. 2008. Silver with steel shot, 5 x 6 x 5 inches (12.7 x 15.2 x 12.7 cm).
Purchase: acquired through the generosity of Sandy and Randy Rolf
in honor of Robyn Nichols and the 75th anniversary of
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2009.60

For more than four decades Kansas City has been a center for important developments in contemporary decorative arts or craft, especially in ceramics, as the setting for schools, artists, studios, galleries and collectors.

At the core of this creative energy are The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and the Kansas City Art Institute. The school has played a significant role in undergraduate art education for 125 years. Students are taught the fundamentals of art-making by established artists in a variety of media. Some students have settled in Kansas City, while others retain connections through local galleries.

The proximity of the school to the Museum and access to its important collections have strengthened the scholastic programs and inspired generations of students. Local galleries and collectors are the second major factor in Kansas City’s role as a center for contemporary decorative arts, creating a vibrant arts community that continues to grow and change.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller
in the Bank of America Collection

September 25, 2010
to
January 9, 2011

Bloch Building, Gallery L13
Tickets now available.
Admission is free from 5–9 p.m. Thursdays.

Alfred Jacob Miller, American (1810-1874), Indian Village.
Watercolor, gouache, pencil, and glazes on beige, wove paper. 8 5/16 x 11 3/4 in.
Bank of America Collection. Photo by John Lamberton.
Courtesy The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

In 1837 Alfred Jacob Miller, a Baltimore artist, accepted an invitation to join a Scottish nobleman and adventurer on a six-month journey to the Rocky Mountains. Little did Miller know that the expedition, along the Oregon Trail to the annual gathering of the fur trade, would change the course of his career. The rich experience transformed an East Coast portraitist into an artist whose name is synonymous with the American West.

Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection presents thirty engaging works on paper not seen in public since 1964 that depict legendary mountain men, American Indian life, and scenic landscapes executed in varied techniques that the artist developed over more than thirty years.

Mainly studio works in various stages of completion and in a sometimes unorthodox fusion of media, the art in this exhibition provides a window onto how Miller worked and how he envisioned the West. Miller’s West was based on his experience, but it also blended fiction with fact. The West he saw combined with an intricate web of perceptions and attitudes of his generation.

Far more than just laying out Miller’s preferred subjects, this exhibition explores the artist’s complex mix of patrons, methods, and ideas of his art and encourages us to reconsider our own understandings of the West, past and present.

After opening at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the exhibition will travel to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection is organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and is part of Bank of America’s Art in our CommunitiesTM program. Additional support is provided by the Campbell-Calvin Fund and Elizabeth C. Bonner Charitable Trust for exhibitions.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

Monet’s Water Lilies

April 9, 2011
to
August 7, 2011
This exhibition will be ticketed.

Claude Monet, French, 1840-1926. Water Lilies, ca. 1916-1926.
Oil on canvas.
Purchase: Nelson Trust, 57-26.

Claude Monet was undoubtedly the most important of all the Impressionist painters and his Water Lily paintings represent the culminating moment in his career.

Monet’s Water Lilies will re-unite the three panels of an exceptionally impressive Water Lily triptych, created by Monet between 1915 and 1926. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Cleveland Museum of Art each own one panel of the triptych and the exhibition will offer a rare opportunity to bring the works together. This will be the first time that this re-union has occurred for more than thirty years. With the single exception of a triptych in the Museum of Modern Art, this is the only triptych by Monet in the USA.

Monet’s famous garden at Giverny provided the inspiration for his Water Lily paintings. The exhibition will bring to life the importance and beauty of this garden through a range of archival photographs, as well as an early, rarely seen film from 1915, showing Monet painting outdoors in his garden.

Also included will be revelatory conservation work which highlights the extent to which Monet obsessively changed his composition over the years.

The exhibition will premiere at the Nelson-Atkins and travel to the St. Louis Museum in the fall of 2011 before traveling to the Cleveland Museum of Art at a date to be confirmed.