FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Sharyn Turner
336.758.5580

or Sarah R. Smith
336.758.5524

Event will launch city-wide Six days in November festival

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (November 8, 2011) – Reynolda House Museum of American Art will host a lecture by Virginia Mecklenburg, senior curator of painting and sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and organizer of "Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum," on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 5:30 p.m. The exhibition is on view through Dec. 31, 2011 at Reynolda House, its final venue before returning to Washington, D.C.

The event is free and open to the public. For more information about this and other exhibition-related programs, please call 336.758.5150 or visit reynoldahouse.org.

Mecklenburg's lecture will kick off Six Days in November, the city-wide festival that celebrates arts and innovation. Following a welcome from Reynolda House Executive Director Allison Perkins, guests will hear from Mayor Allen Joines and Milton Rhodes, head of the Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County. "Modern Masters" will remain open for visitors following the talk.

Aided by New York art dealers and prominent art critics, American artists from the 1950s and '60s are credited with creating the first original direction in the history of American art. Mecklenburg will discuss how the artists featured in the exhibition she organized forged their ideas during the Great Depression and World War II and used abstraction to express their thoughts, feelings, and the mood of a nation undergoing massive political and social change.

Mecklenburg has organized more than 25 exhibitions, primarily of 20th-century American art. She has published works about art and artists including Edward Hopper, Carl Frieseke, George Bellows, Robert Indiana and Norman Rockwell. Similar talks at "Modern Masters" previous venues have been met with capacity crowds.

The William R. Kenan, Jr. Endowment Fund, the C.F. Foundation in Atlanta and members of the Smithsonian Council for American Art have generously contributed to "Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum."

Reynolda House Museum of American Art is one of the nation's premier American art museums, with masterpieces by Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O'Keefe and Gilbert Stuart among its collection. Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House features changing exhibitions, concerts, lectures, classes, film screenings, and other events.  The museum is located in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in the historic 1917 estate of Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband, Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Reynolda House and adjacent Reynolda Gardens and Reynolda Village feature a spectacular public garden, dining, shopping and walking trails. For more information, please visit reynoldahouse.org or call 336.758.5150.

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