For a Gadsden County art museum, 2019 promises to be an “exciting year” brimming with vibrant color, rich texture and vivid contrasts.
Downtown Quincy’s Gadsden Arts Center and Museum released its 2019 exhibition calendar this past week, featuring a lineup of 16 unique exhibitions that, together, cover a vast swath of artistic territory. Exhibitions range from “national scope, historically rich” collections to avant garde solo works by local and regional artists and more, museum officials say.
Heralding the new year is an internationally renowned exhibition comprised of the ubiquitous, unmistakable works of beloved American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell. “Norman Rockwell in the 1960s” opens Saturday, January 12 and runs through May.
Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the fascinating collection traces Rockwell’s artistic transformation from a “painter of the people” – capturing life’s small but extraordinary moments – into a visual commentator and activist, whose works spotlighted the civil rights movement, America’s war on poverty and even space exploration.
“Rockwell’s work united Americans around core national values like democracy, freedom, and justice in a time when it was most needed,” exhibition organizers say.
Opening in September, the museum’s major exhibition for the latter half of 2019 will be “From the Cedar Chest: Generations of Southern Quilting.” The unique exhibition showcases quilts from Gadsden, Leon, and Jefferson counties, dating as far back as the 1830s and representing multiple generations of quilters, as well as a rich tapestry of cultures and traditions from our community, museum officials say.
In addition to the major exhibitions, numerous smaller exhibitions will add “rich variety” to Gadsden Arts’ 2019 lineup, museum officials say. Returning for its 31st year this June, “Art in Gadsden” is an “increasingly competitive” juried exhibition showcasing recent art by up to 100 of the area’s top artists, according to curators.
In the Zoe Golloway Gallery, New York artist Gary Sczerbaniewicz will exhibit his hybrid architectural sculptures, replicas of brick building fragments and brick masonry façades culled from his experiences living in a Rust Belt city for more than a decade.
Polish artist Artur Popek will display a compilation of his award-winning graphic prints, each painstakingly produced using only traditional printmaking techniques – etching, aquatint, dry point, mezzotint and more.
The Golloway Gallery also welcomes “Ten Voices: A Visual Conversation,” presented by long-established artist cooperative 10 Artists Ltd.
Gadsden Arts’ Munroe Family Community Gallery, a space dedicated to exhibitions of art by local and regional artists, will feature solo exhibitions by five talented up-and-comers from our region: Leslie Wallace-Coon, Ginny Coultas, Marina Brown, Jimmy Nicholson, and Lisa Qualls.
The Bates Permanent Collection Gallery spotlights some of its most beloved pieces in “Favorites from the Permanent Collection,” opening this February. Next door, in the Bates Community Room, four exhibitions featuring works by members of the Gadsden Arts Artists Guild will alternate throughout the year.
The Gadsden Arts Center and Museum is adjacent to downtown Quincy’s historic courthouse square at 13 N. Madison Street. For more information, call the museum at 850-627-5023 or visit www.gadsdenarts.org.
Sixteen unique art exhibitions will grace the walls and galleries of downtown Quincy’s Gadsden Arts Center and Museum in 2019, including the Sara May Gallery (pictured). Photo courtesy Gadsden Arts Center
