“With its very existence under threat, it us up to all of us to acknowledge the NEA’s importance in enriching our lives by making possible invaluable programming, exhibitions, and performances in our community.”

Tracy Fitzpatrick, Director of the Neuberger Museum of Art, has announced that the Museum received a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to help fund the exhibition “Romare Bearden:  Abstraction,” opening on September 10, 2017. Organized by the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, and curated by Dr. Fitzpatrick, the exhibition will focus on Bearden’s extraordinary abstract, large- and small-scale watercolors, stain paintings,  and mixed media collages, and will be accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue. Collaborating on the exhibition are the Estate of Nanette Bearden, the Romare Bearden Foundation, and DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Established by Congress in 1965, the NEA is the independent federal agency that has awarded over 100,000 grants to further creative excellence in the United States.  NEA Chairman Jane Chu commented: “The NEA is committed to advancing learning, fueling creativity, and celebrating the arts in cities and towns across the United States. Funding new projects like the Romare Bearden exhibition at the Neuberger Museum of Art represents an investment in both our local communities and our nation’s creative vitality.”

Dr. Fitzpatrick said: “We are enormously grateful to the NEA for making possible this exhibition and related programming possible. For over fifty years, the NEA has played an invaluable role in our country, recognizing and supporting the arts, and giving Americans the opportunity to participate in the arts, exercise their imaginations, and develop their creative capacities. With its very existence under threat by reactionary forces, it us up to all of us to acknowledge the NEA’s importance in enriching our lives by making possible invaluable programming, exhibitions, and performances in our community.”

She also noted that when Roy R. Neuberger, founding patron of the Neuberger Museum of Art, was president of American Federation of Arts, he was an early and vocal advocate for federal funding of the arts.  As he observed in a letter to editor, published in the New York Times on July 20, 1958 when discussions about the need for a “Federal Arts Bureau” were on the rise, “the arts need and deserve the support of private individuals, corporate and industrial entities as well as the Federal Government.”  

New Perspectives

In describing the Bearden exhibition, Dr. Fitzpatrick noted that while Romare Bearden is best known for the influential collages he produced beginning in 1964 until his death in 1988, very little attention has been paid to the body of work that immediately preceded those well-known works—extraordinary and fully abstract watercolors, mixed media collages, and stain paintings, sometimes as small as under three inches high or as large as over six feet tall.  Romare Bearden: Abstraction will correct this omission by providing the first substantive and scholarly examination of this important body of work. The scholarship produced through this project will contribute to the development of alternate storylines around the dominant narrative of post-war abstraction while at the same time revealing, for the first time, the roots of the body of work for which Bearden is best known.  Some of the abstractions Bearden produced have entered public and private collections. Many, however, have remained in storage since they were first exhibited in the 1950s.  Others have never been exhibited.  One of the most important components of this project exhibition will be the conservation and framing of those objects that have never been exhibited or exhibited only once or twice.

“Romare Bearden: Abstraction” will go on national tour after it closes on December 22, 2017 at the Neuberger Museum of Art.

The Neuberger Museum of Art opened on the campus of Purchase College, SUNY, in 1974 with a core collection donated by one of the greatest private collectors, philanthropists, and arts advocates of the twentieth century, Roy R. Neuberger.  The collection contains important works by some of our best-known artists including Milton Avery, Romare Bearden, Willem de Kooning, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Jackson Pollock.  Housed in a building designed by Philip Johnson, the permanent collection now encompasses more than 7,000 works of contemporary, modern, and African art.

Neuberger Museum of Art SPACE | 42 which opened in October, 2016 as a space for public art, is located on the ground floor of 33 West 42nd Street (across from Bryant Park) in Manhattan. It is open to the public daily: Monday–Friday, 9 am-5 pm; Saturday, 9 am-4 pm;

Sunday 10 am-6 pm.

The Neuberger Museum of Art is located at 735 Anderson Hill Road in Purchase, New York.  (Westchester)

(tel)  914-251-6100

www.neuberger.org