Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist

Love jazz and blues? Bessie Smith and Langston Hughes? Experience the world of Aaron Douglas (1899–1979), one of the most influential visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance. Aaron Douglas: African American Modernist, on view through August 3, 2008, is the first nationally touring retrospective that brings together more than eighty rarely seen works by the artist. Douglas combined angular cubist rhythms, seductive art deco style, and traditional African and African American imagery to develop his own unique visual vocabulary, which was part of a rich interchange between the visual arts, music, dance, literature, and politics. His bold paintings, murals, and book illustrations opened doors for African American artists in Harlem and beyond and made a lasting impact on American modernism.

Color as Field: American Painting 1950–1975

View our new exhibition, Color as Field: American Painting, 1950–1975 now through May 26, 2008. This show is the first ever full-scale examination of the sources, meaning, and impact of the Color Field movement. Color Field painting, which emerged in the United States in the 1950s, is characterized by pouring, staining, spraying, or painting thinned paint onto raw canvas to create vast chromatic expanses. These works constitute one of the crowning achievements of postwar American abstract art. The exhibition includes forty beautiful and impressively scaled paintings by such major figures as Gene Davis, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski.

Come See Obata's Yosemite

In 1927, Chiura Obata (1885–1975) visited Yosemite National Park and the Sierra Nevada, where he made approximately 100 drawings in pencil, watercolor and sumi ink. Between 1928 and 1930, while Obata was in Tokyo, he transformed these California landscape watercolors and sketches into a limited-edition portfolio titled "World Landscape Series." Obata's Yosemite, on view now through June 1, 2008, features twenty-seven prints and watercolors and a series of twenty progressive proofs. This display is the first time the artist's prints have been publicly exhibited on the East Coast. Joann Moser, senior curator for graphic arts, is the curator of the exhibition.

Pictured 1st: Sam Gilliam, Green Web, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 90 1/2 x 39 3/4 in. (230.0 x 101.0 cm), Gift of the Woodward Foundation

Pictured 2nd: Chiura Obata, Tadeo Takamizawa, Before Thunderstorm, Tuolumne Meadows, 1930, color woodcut on paper, image: 11 x 15 5/8 in. (27.9 x 39.8 cm) , Gift of the Obata Family