Mobile Museum of Art and Mobile County Commission present our latest exhibition at Government Plaza.
Mobile Museum of Art is proud to present a new exhibition of unique and colorful artworks from our permanent collection. Various mediums are represented including ceramics, wood, metal, glass, prints, and painting.
Most of these pieces reflect the world around us. The ocean, birds, and other animals are a common theme among these artists. We hope you enjoy this variety of treasures and please visit us at the museum located in Langan Park at 4850 Museum Drive, Mobile, AL 36608.
To commemorate the Bicentennial of the United States, Lorillard, a division of Loews Theaters, Inc., produced the Kent Bicentennial Portfolio: Spirit of Independence in 1974. The company asked artists across the country the question, “What does independence mean to you?” Over a hundred artists answered Lorillard’s inquiry and after countless interviews, the company selected twelve artists for inclusion in the portfolio.
Unusual for a commissioned art project, the artists were given no restrictions on their creativity – be it size, color, or subject matter. The only requirement was to interpret the question, “What does independence mean to you?”
The interpretations of independence varied from artist to artist – some artists depicted the theme purely as a celebration of our country’s bicentennial, some took a historic approach, while others dove deeper. For instance, Colleen Browning reflected on what it meant to be an immigrant in the United States, while Jacob Lawrence reimagined the experience of African American parents having the freedom to vote in 1920s New Jersey during the Jim Crow era, and Fritz Scholder pointed to the irony of a people who were treated as obstacles to expansion celebrating the bicentennial.
The artists’ works were reproduced in 125 portfolios and gifted to museums across the country. Mobile Museum of Art was one of the fortunate recipients. In addition, the American Federation of the Arts (AFA) and the United States Information Agency (USIA) further commemorated the Bicentennial and traveled the portfolio to museums and other institutions across the country and internationally to Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Headwear has existed for millennia, with some of the first depictions of headwear found in Egyptian tomb paintings. Initially used as protection against the elements, headwear has evolved over time in functionality and meaning.
Headwear can be worn for various reasons such as ceremonial events, religious functions, and as fashion accessories. It can also denote an individual’s social and economic status or class, culture, religious affiliation, and other aspects of an individual’s personality.
Since the end of the 1960s, headwear, particularly hats, have faded from everyday use as a fashion accessory for many in the United States. For African Americans, however, headwear such as hats, caps, wraps, etc., have been and continue to be a major signifier of identity and culture. Headwear can also serve as a link to and appreciation of African ancestry.
In celebration of the Timeless Hats exhibition, Mobile Museum of Art is showcasing eleven African American artists and their works featuring headwear.
These works cover various mediums such as ink, mixed media, paint, ceramics, and textiles and feature regional artists such as Clifton Pearson and Bernice Sims and nationally known artists such as Romare Bearden and Jacob Armstead Lawrence. We are proud to debut a recent acquisition to our museum’s collection – a work by Robert Pruitt, a Texas-born artist who is currently working in New York City.
GIFTS represents a wide variety of works donated to Mobile Museum of Art’s permanent collection within the past twelve years. Paintings, prints, photographs, and ceramics, some of which have not been on view for many years, or in some cases ever. This exhibition will be installed in our Cochrane Gallery.
Artworks from contemporary artists such as Bruce Nauman, Jim Dine, Mel Chin, and Robert Delford Brown will hang alongside those of modernists like Pablo Picasso, Thomas Hart Benton, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, as well as many others. See for yourself the generosity of our members and patrons and the wide range of Mobile Museum of Art’s rich collection.
Charles (Chuck) Schoenknecht and Ward Paul met in college fifty years ago and have been amassing works on paper, postcards, photographs, costume jewelry, coins, books, silver tableware, paintings, glass, and ceramics ever since. One of Paul’s personal goals – which he accomplished – was to collect a representative ceramic from every commercial producer in America from the late 19th century to the 1950s. This exhibition features some of those pieces, as well as European works in styles of the times.
In Pursuit of Beauty
Rich color, paint translated into lace, light, and water, bucolic pastures and delicate china—this selection of Western European 18th and 19th century work from our permanent collection is made of these.
The artists who created these pieces were intent on astonishing their affluent patrons with tour de force technique, brilliant composition, and romantic subject matter.
Beauty was pursued in earnest. Photography, Realism, Expressionism, Abstractionism—all were yet to come. This elegant, gentrified world was not to be disturbed.
– Melissa Mutert, Curator
Mobile has a long tradition of connections with Asia. Not only did Asian goods pass through its port, the azaleas and camellias that flourish in the Azalea City (Mobile) originally came from China and Japan. In the late 19th and early 20th century many travelers, particularly Christian missionaries, made their way to and from the Far East from Mobile.
Perhaps the most famous Mobile resident with ties to Asian Art was the man who actually was responsible for the scholarly American interest in Chinese and Japanese art, Massachusetts born-Harvard educated, Ernest Fenollosa (1853-1908). For a few years after 1900 he lived in Spring Hill, with his second wife, author Mary McNeil Scott, not far from the Museum. Together they created a Japanese garden, now lost, but the currently expanding Charles Wood Japanese Garden is in-part a tribute to him. His posthumous 2 volume “Epochs of Chinese and Japanese Art” (1912) represents the first serious study of Asian art.
Sources for Asian art are many and varied. Early Chinese art such as the bronzes and ceramics were buried as grave goods to accompany the deceased in the afterlife, a continuity of ritual and daily life. The wall paintings (frescoes) and hanging scrolls and sculptures come from sanctuaries, temples, and private home altars where they were part of Buddhist worship. For the rulers and well placed individuals in the courts, exquisitely crafted bronzes, ceramics, enamels, and textiles were created and inherited. Functionality was important, but sometimes they were just beautiful objects. And for hundreds of years there have been collectors who privately displayed and enjoyed these works, usually very selectively, not en masse as is the contemporary fashion. The many appreciative foreign travelers of the last 150 years have brought them to the West.
Our collection has been built mainly through gifts, with a few purchases. Of particular significance is the recent gift of the David and Inger Duberman Collection of Chinese Cloisonné from the 16th – 19th centuries, much of which is included in this exhibition. Formed over many years of travel and diplomatic postings, David and Inger wanted this lifetime’s effort of collecting to find a new home in Mobile’s art museum.
