Museums Winter 2016

Baby, it’s cold outside! Escape the winter wonderland and warm up at one of our fun and stimulating local museums. At the Aldrich in Ridgefield…

Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, 258 Main St., Ridgefield, CT •  Painting in Four Takes: Solo exhibitions by four contemporary painters who span generations, methods and intentions: Steve DiBenedetto: Evidence of Everything focuses on the unpredictable chaos and flux of the Post-Modern world, utilizing leitmotifs including the helicopter, octopus, wheel and glass office tower. Hayal Pozanti: Deep Learning (piictured here) debuts a new series of paintings and digital animations based on the unique 31-character “alphabet” of shapes that the Turkish artist invented. Julia Rommel: Two Italians, Six Lifeguards uses a laborious choreography of cutting, sanding, wiping, expunging and overlaying to give her oil paintings an expression not unlike a life cycle. Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval combines hand-painted Plexiglas with colorful fabric patterns that the author designs digitally. Mon, Wed–Sat: 10am–5pm. Sun: 12-5pm. Through 4/3. www.aldrichart.org

Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT • Charles Harold Davis: Mystic Impressionist: A retrospective of paintings by American landscapist Davis (1856-1933). Praised for his ability to capture the shifting moods of his native Connecticut landscape, Davis exhibited at the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York and established the art colony in Mystic. The exhibition highlights the transformation Davis made from a delicate Barbizon style to an atmospheric Impressionism and the bold, expressive style of his final years. Tues-Sun: 10am-5pm. Through 1/3. Bjørn Okholm Skaarup: Carnival of the Animals features the fanciful, comical bronze sculptures of the Danish artist, whose inspiration ranges from ancient fables to art history to modern animation. Okholm Skaarup’s sculptures present a whimsical story or allegory to decipher: a cheetah using a scooter to move faster, a giraffe balancing on stilts, a kangaroo bouncing on a pogo stick. “The sculptures are a celebration of life and its many intriguing shapes and creatures, all placed in peculiar and surreal encounters between nature and culture,” explains the sculptor. Tues-Sun: 10am-5pm. Through 1/3. Secrets of Fossil Lake: Travel back in time to a lake that vanished 50 million years ago. This remarkable assemblage of fossils captures an ancient ecosystem from the time when Wyoming was covered in subtropical forests. Ferocious predatory fish, delicate feathered birds and tiny primitive horses are all preserved in astonishingly beautiful detail. Tues-Sun: 10am-5pm. Through 4/17. Images of the City: Etchings, lithographs, screen prints and photographs paint a portrait of the American city from the 20th century to the present, with scenes of iconic architecture, public art and construction. Works by Robert Rauschenberg, Brett Weston, Martin Lewis, Stow Wengenroth and others are featured. (Pictured here is View of Manhattan, a 1932 print from Paul J. Woolf) Tues-Sun: 10am-5pm. 12/12-3/6. Fierce and Fragile: Big Cats in the Art of Robert Dallet: The beauty and allure of big cats are the focus of this exhibit featuring the artist’s paintings, drawings and sketches. Highlighting the tiger, lion, leopard, cheetah, cougar, jaguar, snow leopard and clouded leopard, the show offers an in-depth look at the science and biology of big cats, while examining the conservation challenges they face today. Tues-Sun: 10am-5pm. 1/10-3/13. And Still We Rise: Race, Culture, and Visual Conversations: Using the powerful medium of story quilts, this exhibition narrates nearly four centuries of African-American history, from the first slave ships to the first African-American president and beyond. Forty quilts from artists of the Women of Color Quilters Network reveal the stories of freedom’s heroes, including Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass and the Tuskegee Airmen. Tues-Sun: 10am-5pm. 1/16-4/24. www.brucemuseum.org 

Hudson River Museum, 511 Warburton Ave., Yonkers • Dancers Among Us: Photographs by Jordan Matter: The world is the studio for Matter, who photographs dancers as they leap and twirl in unexpected settings such as streets, libraries, playing fields, coffee shops and highways. The exhibition also answers the question Matter is often asked: “Wow—how did you get that shot?” (Pictured here, Stroller Boogie) Wed-Sun: 12-5pm. Through 1/17. Barbara Morgan: Dance Photographer exhibits the work of the woman best known for her images of famed dancer Martha Graham and her dance company of the 1930s and ’40s. Morgan (1900-1992) sought to capture the essence of the human spirit as expressed in dance, and reveal the energy in the soul and the body. (Pictured here, Martha Graham, “Letter to the World”) Wed-Sun: 12-5pm. Through 1/17. Oh Panama! Jonas Lie Paints the Panama Canal looks back to 1914 and the remarkable efforts of the crews that built the Panama Canal. Lie’s lively and colorful paintings, on loan from the West Point Museum Collection, U.S. Military Academy, capture the spirit of the endeavor as well as its heroic quality and monumental scale. Wed-Sun: 12-5pm. 2/7-5/8. Thomas Doyle: if the creek don’t rise: Doyle’s small-scale sculpture of a house shows the fantastical calamities that can strike a home at any time, with people oblivious to the encroaching danger. While a swollen riverbed crosses the museum’s gallery, the flooding river is dammed by piled-up paraphernalia from the suburban home. Museum visitors peering into the house are plunged into a world that is strange and yet unsettlingly familiar. Wed-Sun: 12-5pm. 2/7-5/8. www.hrm.org

Katonah Museum of Art, 134 Jay St., Katonah •  SupraEnvironmental: Contemporary artists create enlightening and unexpected encounters with natural and man-made objects, prompting visitors to consider our positions within our environment, and the actual and imaginative relationships we have with it. Tues-Sat: 10am-5pm & Sun: 12-5pm. Through 1/24. Aaron Curry: UGLY MESS: The Los Angeles-based artist fuses his interests in the sculptures of Modernist artists Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore and Alexander Calder with 1980s mass media and skating and graffiti culture. Aluminum painted with bright colors, UGLY MESS (pictured here) operates on the boundaries between Modern and contemporary, painting and sculpture, the geometric and figuration. On the South Lawn. Tues-Sat: 10am-5pm & Sun: 12-5pm. Through 6/19. Young Artists: The 33rd annual exhibition of works by more than 400 local student artists from high schools in Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Dutchess and Fairfield counties. Aspiring artists produce, curate and mount their own exhibition. Tues-Sat: 10am-5pm & Sun: 12-5pm. 2/7-2/21. www.katonahmuseum.org

Neuberger Museum, Purchase College, 735 Anderson Hill Rd., Purchase • Liza Lou: Color Field and Solid Gray: Liza Lou challenges traditional definitions of painting, sculpture and craft in her dazzling installations made entirely of glass beads. Color Field, the artist’s largest sculpture to date at approximately 1,800 square feet, carpets nearly the entire floor of Neuberger’s largest gallery in a shimmering field of color. Originally made in South Africa with a team of 30 Zulu women artisans, the work was re-created by Lou on site at the museum. The exhibition also includes Solid Gray and Color/White canvases, a series of woven beaded works in various hues. Tues-Sun: 12-5pm. Through 2/21. After 1965: It was a watershed year in American history, with the Watts Riots, the assassination of Malcolm X, the march from Selma to Montgomery and the passage of the Voting Rights Act. During this turbulent period, the rise of New Left social movements permanently altered the cultural landscape and once-marginalized subjects gained political power.  This exhibit examines works from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, and their influences 50 years later. Tues-Sun: 12-5pm. Through 3/13. www.neuberger.org

Stamford Museum & Nature Center, 39 Scofieldtown Rd., Stamford, CT •  EXTREME ART: Massive & Miniature: An exhibition of 135 minuscule portraits and scenes from the 18th and 19th centuries juxtaposed with oversized canvases by mid-20th-century abstract artists. Painted on canvases up to nine feet high, the massive works display broad strokes and bold lines, an interesting contrast to the meticulous brushwork in the miniatures Pictured here Germany Cavalry Officer, 1804 from an unknown artist. Mon-Sat: 9am-5pm & Sun: 11am-5pm. 2/22-3/20. www.stamfordmuseum.org

Wave Hill, W. 249th St. and Independence Ave., Bronx • Benjamin Swett: New York City of Trees: A selection of photographs by Benjamin Swett, who has devoted many years to capturing the trees that make up New York City’s urban forest. For Swett, trees are as much historical artifacts as they are botanical specimens, and his portraits illustrate the important role they play in the fabric of the city and the neighborhoods in which they grow. “I try to show the trees as living objects around which associations have gathered,” Swett explains, “and to think about what the places would be like if they were gone.” Pictured here Copper Beech, 2010. Tues-Sun: 10am-4:30pm. Through 3/27. www.wavehill.org

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