Metropolitan Curator To Discuss Financial Realities Facing A

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Metropolitan Curator To Discuss Financial Realities Facing American Impressionist Artists in Lecture at Reynolda House Museum of American Art

Monday, March 30, 2009

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: Sharyn Turner
336.758.5580
sturner@reynoldahouse.org
or Sarah Mansell
336.758.5524
manselss@reynoldahouse.org

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. (January 15, 2009) Reynolda House Museum of American Art will present a lecture by H. Barbara Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday, April 14, at 5:30 p.m. The lecture is titled "American Impressionists and Realists: Master Multitaskers." Admission is $5, free to members and students.

The lecture is one of a series of events held in conjunction with the museum's current exhibition, "American Impressions: Selections from the National Academy Museum," on view through June 28. Reynolda House is the only venue for this exhibition outside of New York.

While the light-infused landscapes of the American Impressionists and the gritty cityscapes of Realist artists of the Ashcan School are highly desirable today, such works provided only a modest income to the artists during their careers. Art historian Weinberg will speak about the financial frustrations of such artists as William Merritt Chase, Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, and John Sloan and the professional solutions they found to support themselves.

Weinberg graduated from Barnard College with a degree in American Studies, and she earned her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University, where she specialized in American art from the last half of the 19th century. She taught at Queens College before joining the Met's curatorial staff, and she continues to enjoy sharing her knowledge of and enthusiasm for her work with the public. In 2006 she co-curated "Americans in Paris, 1860–1900," an exhibition that featured 100 paintings by 37 well-known American artists, many of whom are represented in "American Impressions."

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'Keeffe and Gilbert Stuart among its permanent collection. Affiliated with Wake Forest University, Reynolda House features traveling and original 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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