Contemporary Alabama

June 6, 2023 – ongoing

The selection of work in this exhibition opens a small window into the world of the visual arts in Alabama. The artists included here have either been born or have lived in the state. They represent different movements and used varying methods and materials to create paintings, drawings, sculpture, glass, ceramics, jewelry, and furniture. The work shown spans from the 1950s to today and is a mere glimpse of the many talented artists associated with our state.

Support for this exhibition provided by:

City of Mobile
Alabama State Council on the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts

Decades:

Looking Back/Moving Forward

1900 – 1919
June 16 – November 25, 2023

As we look forward to celebrating MMofA’s sixtieth anniversary in October 2024,  we are launching an innovative series of exhibitions that will immerse our members and visitors in the art, history, and innovations of the decades leading up to the sixties.  This trip through time is scheduled in experiential exhibitions of two decades each, and the first, 1900 – 1919 will open June 15^th.

The period 1900 to 1919 was a time of change in the world and in art.  The Armory Show in New York City opened in 1913 and introduced many Americans to the first modern art they’d ever seen.  Our exhibition includes an homage to the Armory Show that will allow visitors to feel as if they’ve actually walked into the 69^th Regiment Armory Building on Lexington Avenue and 25^th Street and are witnessing art by the same artists who actually participated in that exhibition.

Also included in this installment of the Decades exhibitions are galleries exploring the country and cities as people moved from rural to urban areas for job opportunities; the changing roles of women in society leading up to winning the Constitutional right to vote; and a glimpse into how two artists with ties to Mobile reacted to modernism.

Visitors shouldn’t worry if they can’t remember their history lessons from the first two decades of the twentieth century because we will have timelines on our walls tracing big events and what was happening in the art world at the same time.  For added flavor, we’re screening silent films in our gallery cinema, including a movie shot from a vending cart as it travels streets crowded with more carts and kids and people everywhere.

This Decades installation, as well as the two that will follow it (all leading up to the extravaganza of the 60^th anniversary!), will recreate what it was like to be alive then, not only experiencing political and historical events but navigating the personal lives of work, home, family and leisure as well.

Support for this exhibition is provided by:

The J.L. Bedsole Foundation
City of Mobile
Alabama State Council on the Arts
National Endowment for the Arts

Passion for Collecting

The Schoenknecht-Paul Collection
donated to the Mobile Museum of Art
August 12, 2020 – Ongoing

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.

Dr. Paul Richelson
1939 – 2020
In Memoriam

European Art

From the Permanent Collection
17 – 19th Centuries

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

ASIAN ART

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.