John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist @ Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte + Other Venues

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist

Mint Museum Uptown, Charlotte

Through January 2, 2022

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Self Portrait, ca. 1890

Oil on canvas, 11 x 9 inches 

Private Collection

Courtesy of Martha Richardson Fine Art, Boston 

James Carroll Beckwith (American, 1852–1917)

Portrait of John Leslie Breck, 1891 

Oil on canvas, 13¼ x 17¼ inches

Collection of Max N. Berry

The Mint Museum presents the premiere of John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist, an exhibition showcasing more than 70 works by one of the first American artists to introduce Impressionism to the United States. The exhibition is the first ever organized by a museum to be dedicated to works by John Leslie Breck.

Drawn from public and private collections, as well as the acclaimed Terra Foundation collection of American art, many of the works have not been on public view in more than a century. In addition to John Leslie Breck’s landscape-inspired works, the exhibition highlights his exploration of new styles and approaches to painting in the years before his early death at the age of 38. More than 10 related paintings by John Leslie Breck’s French and American Impressionist colleagues, including Theodore Robinson, Willard Metcalf, and Lila Cabot Perry, are also featured in the exhibition.

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899) 

Chez M. Monet, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 x 22 inches 

Private Collection

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

Suzanne Hoschedé Sewing, 1888 

Oil on canvas, 18 1/8 x 21 7/8 inches. 

The Mint Museum, Gift of the Mint Museum Auxiliary and 

courtesy Heather James Fine Art. 2016.25

John Leslie Breck (American, 1860–1899)

The Sketch Class, 1890

Oil on panel, 5¼ x 7 inches.

Private Collection

The exhibition is inspired by The Mint Museum’s acquisition of John Leslie Breck’s canvas Suzanne Hoschedé-Monet Sewing. “I have been an admirer of John Leslie Breck’s beautiful, trailblazing paintings ever since my first encounter with his work at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in the late 1990s,” says Jonathan Stuhlman, senior curator of American art at The Mint Museum. “When we had the opportunity to acquire one for The Mint Museum in 2016, it was the perfect catalyst for the museum to begin organizing this exhibition — the first retrospective of his work since his death in 1899.”

“The importance of John Leslie Breck’s works and his introduction of French Impressionism to an American audience has largely gone unrecognized but is an important part of American art history,” says Todd A. Herman, PhD, president and CEO of The Mint Museum. “Through dedicated research and work by the staff at the Mint, Breck and his beautiful paintings will be brought back into the conversation of American art.”

In addition, a 208-page, fully illustrated exhibition catalogue is available. Stuhlman collaborated with leading Breck scholars Royal Leith and Jeffrey Brown to bring together Breck’s finest paintings, as well as to create the first ever monograph produced about the artist, which also includes contributions from Erica Hirshler, PhD, and Katherine Bourguignon, PhD. 

After debuting at The Mint Museum, John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist will travel to the Dixon Gallery and Gardens in Memphis, Tennessee in the winter of 2022 and the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa in the spring of 2022.

John Leslie Breck: American Impressionist is generously presented by Bank of America, with additional support provided by The Mr. and Mrs. Raymond J. Horowitz Foundation for the Arts and the Mint Museum Auxiliary. Individual support provided by Charlie and Susan Murray in honor of Welborn and Patty Alexander, and Mary and Dick Payne.

MINT MUSEUM UPTOWN

at Levine Center for the Arts

500 South Tryon Street, Charlotte, NC 28202

mintmuseum.org

Brian Rutenberg @ Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte - Point of Pine

Brian Rutenberg: Point of Pine

Jerald Melberg Gallery, Charlotte

May 1 - June 12, 2021

Jerald Melberg Gallery presents the eighth solo exhibition of new abstract landscape paintings by BRIAN RUTENBERG. With these new oil paintings on linen and paper, the artist returns once again to his reflections on the landscapes of the South Carolina Low Country.

Brian Rutenberg states: 

All of the paintings in this new series called ‘Point of Pine’ are meditations on imaginary trees as seen through veils of South Carolina Lowcountry heat. The solitary tree has been a primary image in my work for forty-five years; my first paintings were watercolors of a loblolly pine near my childhood home in Myrtle Beach...Little did I know, the directness and simplicity of those studies would provide me with a lifetime of imagery.

A South Carolina native, Brian Rutenberg received a BFA from the College of Charleston and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the College of Charleston and delivered the commencement speech in the spring of 2018. Among his numerous awards and achievements, he is a Fulbright Scholar, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and an Irish Museum of Modern Art Work Programme Recipient. Since 1985 Rutenberg has been honored with over 100 gallery and museum exhibitions across the United States, including the Hoyt Center for the Arts, Saginaw Art Museum, the Gibbes Museum of Art, Butler Institute of Art and Greenville County Museum of Art.

JERALD MELBERG GALLERY

625 South Sharon Amity Road, Charlotte, NC 28211

www.jeraldmelberg.com

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Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom @ Asheville Art Museum

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom

Asheville Art Museum

April 2 - June 21, 2021

Featuring more than 40 paintings and works on paper, Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom examines the career evolution of modern painter BEAUFORD DELANEY (Knoxville, TN 1901–1979 Paris, France) within the context of his 38-year friendship with writer James Baldwin (New York 1924-1987 Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France). The exhibition will be on view in the Asheville Art Museum’s Explore Asheville Exhibition Hall.

The works in this exhibition bring into special focus Delaney’s experiments with abstraction sparked by the artist’s 1955 move to the Paris suburb of Clamart, as well as the ways that the artist and Baldwin’s ongoing intellectual exchange shaped one another’s creative output and worldview from their first meeting in 1940 until Delaney’s death in 1979.

Metamorphosis into Freedom also calls attention to Baldwin’s role as “witness” to the painter’s evolution, which he deemed “one of the most extraordinary personal and artistic journeys of our time.” Baldwin found in Delaney a father figure, muse, and model of perseverance as a gay man of color, who opened for him the transformative possibility that a Black man could become an artist. Delaney found in Baldwin a powerful intellectual and spiritual anchor who inspired some of his finest works and who provided vital emotional support and creative validation.

“The Asheville Art Museum is excited to partner with the Knoxville Museum of Art to bring Beauford Delaney’s work this side of the Blue Ridge Mountains,” says Hilary Schroeder, assistant curator at the Asheville Art Museum. “An Appalachian-born artist, Delaney’s portraits, landscapes, and abstractions offer an important view into his experiences in both the region and abroad. Combined with materials related to his friendship with James Baldwin, Metamorphosis into Freedom presents visitors with a unique opportunity to journey through Delaney’s rich and deeply thoughtful career accentuated by materials from his sketchbooks and other ephemera.”

The wealth of powerfully vibrant works of art that Delaney produced during his fifty-year career is nothing less than a remarkable and unlikely triumph. Seemingly at every turn, he faced daunting obstacles in the surrounding environment and from within his own psyche. Although gregarious and charismatic, Delaney left behind journals and letters that afford insight into an already well-documented battle with mental illness, depression, poverty, marginalization, and loneliness. As James Baldwin once observed, Beauford Delaney “has been starving and working all his life . . . He has been menaced more than any other man I know by his social circumstances and also by all the emotional and psychological stratagems he has been forced to use to survive; and more than any other man I know, he has transcended both the inner and the outer darkness.” His artistic practice provided a steadying influence and a lifelong source of intellectual engagement and creative experimentation. To Beauford Delaney, art was an act of love and faith capable of revealing inner truths and offering entry into a world of illumination. Over the course of his career, Delaney made a winding journey through artistic territory whose technical borders and stylistic intersections have only begun to be examined and documented. The broad expressive range the painter navigated reflects his boundless creative drive and tireless pursuit of lofty and far-reaching artistic goals.

Designed to underscore the powerful presence of Baldwin in Delaney’s life, Metamorphosis into Freedom includes more than 40 works by the painter that depict Baldwin, were inspired by or dedicated to Baldwin, illustrate key turning points in Delaney’s development as described in Baldwin’s writings, or document key places and events where their ongoing dialogue unfolded. The exhibition focuses special attention to a chapter in Delaney’s studio practice in which he intensified experiments with abstraction after moving to the Paris suburb of Clamart in late 1955. The relatively quiet suburban surroundings of his new studio sparked Delaney’s pursuit of representing light in bold abstractions in which references to the physical world appear incinerated. Baldwin witnessed this exciting new development and considered Delaney’s Clamart abstractions as representing the pinnacle of his artistic achievement, and the fullest realization of his lifelong search to express metaphysical concepts of light and movement. In an essay for a 1964 show at Galerie Lambert, Baldwin noted Delaney’s extraordinary painted light was such that it “held the power to illuminate, even to redeem and reconcile and heal.”

Beauford Delaney’s Metamorphosis into Freedom is organized by the Knoxville Museum of Art, which owns the largest and most comprehensive public collection of Beauford Delaney’s art.

This exhibition is the result of an exhibition exchange between the Asheville Art Museum and the Knoxville Museum of Art, born in response to the impact of COVID-19 but hopefully the first of future collaborations of its kind that celebrate the holdings of regional institutions. The Knoxville Museum of Art, who organized Metamorphosis into Freedom, has in turn presented A Lasting Imprint: Rendering Rhythm and Motion at Black Mountain College, organized by the Asheville Art Museum.

More About Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin

During his youth, Beauford Delaney’s precocious talent was recognized by Lloyd Branson (1853–1925), Knoxville’s first full-time professional artist, who as Delaney’s mentor explained that all painting should be studies in light. It was a lesson Delaney increasingly took to heart as his studio practice and creative vision took shape years later. Branson, recognizing that African Americans had little chance of pursuing careers in the segregated South, helped send Delaney to Boston for professional training. Soon after settling in New York in 1929, Delaney attracted a distinguished circle of cultural luminaries including Georgia O’Keeffe, Henry Miller, and Willem de Kooning, yet enjoyed little commercial success.

James Baldwin entered Beauford Delaney’s world at age 15, and from the beginning the two recognized in each other kindred spirits, sojourners along a difficult road whose personal circumstances were strikingly similar. James Baldwin considered Beauford Delaney a “spiritual father,” as he once described, to whom “I owe a debt that can never be repaid,” and credited the artist as the individual most responsible for broadening his creative vision. Baldwin, in turn, inspired Delaney with his fearless social conscience and commitment to civil rights causes. The painter produced more than a dozen works depicting Baldwin or inspired by him, and the writer dedicated several novels and essays to his mentor. Baldwin wrote eloquently about Delaney and his art, noting essential qualities in the artist and musing on the implications of significant changes in his work. His vivid prose and detailed observations offer a uniquely informed and articulate perspective on key developments in the painter’s evolving studio practice.

Both Beauford Delaney and James Baldwin embraced transnational identities and, in their work, sought to reveal truths beneath surface appearances. Delaney in his portraits, for example, employed vibrant color and expressive brushwork in a way that increasingly sacrificed superficial physical qualities in order to project what he considered the more important and essential spiritual identity of the sitter. Baldwin regarded America’s social woes as the product of systemic myths that caused citizens to view themselves and each other as if through a distorted lens, and credited Delaney for teaching him “to see, and to trust what I saw.” In many cases, ordinary daily observations—reflections in puddles in the streets of Greenwich Village or the quality of light filtered through window—sparked extraordinary creative exchanges between the two that informed their individual production.

ASHEVILLE ART MUSEUM

2 South Pack Square, Asheville, NC 28801

www.ashevilleart.org

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Douglas Melini @ SOCO Gallery, Charlotte - Into the Woods - Paintings and Collages Exhibition

Douglas Melini: Into the Woods 

SOCO Gallery, Charlotte 

March 11 – April 24, 2020

DOUGLAS MELINI

Image courtesy of Douglas Melini and SOCO Gallery

SOCO Gallery presents “Into the Woods”, an exhibition of new works by artist DOUGLAS MELINI. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with SOCO Gallery. 

Influenced by an unlikely combination of Minimalism, pattern, and decoration, Douglas Melini investigates color, space, and the “abstract and pictorial nature of making an image”. He challenges how the audience views his works by opening up the visual space and distorting horizon lines. Adhering to the Bauhaus maxim “form follows function”, his artwork creates a pause for the viewer, allowing and encouraging a moment of contemplation.

For his exhibition, “Into the Woods”, Douglas Melini has created six paintings and twelve collage pieces. Inspired by the history of the lush tree and mushrooms grown in New Jersey Pine Barrens, the collages celebrate the cyclical and symbiotic relationships within the forest. The mushrooms, sourced from a dizzying array of field guides, are personified and presented larger than life. The vibrant and transparent watercolor connects the mushrooms to each other and to the surrounding world.

The colorful abstract paintings are constructed with reclaimed wood sourced from tobacco barns in North Carolina and feature layers of oil on linen and a textured build-up of acrylic stain and sealant. The natural material contrasts with the foraged wood to create two vastly different ways of interpreting visual spaces, one natural and one assembled. This theatrical juxtaposition further captures the viewer’s attention, establishing a portal to another world. Together, the paintings and the mushroom collages create one harmonious, natural biosphere.

DOUGLAS MELINI (b. 1972, American) received his BA from the University of Maryland in 1994 and his MFA from California Institute of the Arts in 1997. Douglas Melini has exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon (2018); 11R Gallery, New York, New York (2017); Feature Inc., NY, NY (2009-2014); Minus Space, Brooklyn, New York (2009); Ursula Werz, Tubingen, Germany (2005); Rocket Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2004, 1999); and Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, California (1998); among others. In 2008, Douglas Melini was awarded a Painting Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Douglas Melini’s work has been reviewed and featured in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Time Out New York, and Artcritical, and is included in private and public collections worldwide. He is represented by Van Doren Waxter, NY, NY and SOCO Gallery, Charlotte, NC. The artist currently lives and works in New Jersey. 

SOCO GALLERY

421 Providence Road, Charlotte, North Carolina 28207

socogallery.com