Shelburne Museum Features 'Thrufters & Throughstones' Throughout 2010 Season

Big Heavy World got the great news this spring that Shelburne Museum hoped to bring the music of our 'Thrufters & Throughstones: The Music of Vermont's First 400 Years' project to the museum's Meeting House exhibit, to be heard all through the 2010 season. With permission from all the artists (the two-CD collection has 40 tracks!), it's happening! Visit Shelburne Museum online, and read about everything to be seen and heard there this season, below.

An exhibit of the photography of Ansel Adams is among new exhibits opening at Shelburne Museum for the 2010 season.  Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: Constructed Landscapes features over 60 extraordinary photographs by Ansel Adams, the legendary photographer of the American wilderness. His works are contrasted with those of contemporary Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who focuses on human impact on the natural world through large color images of quarries, mines, shipbreaking and other industry. Burtynsky’s work has taken him to the marble and granite quarries of Vermont, and the exhibit includes a photograph from a quarry in Barre, Vermont.

“Constructed Landscapes offers visitors two powerful artistic perspectives on the landscape. Ansel Adams iconic 20th-century work presents seemingly undisturbed nature in black and white. Edward Burtynsky’s  photographs capture the industrialized world in striking color. Both are beautiful and provocative  -- in dramatically different ways, ” said Stephan Jost, Shelburne Museum director.

Ansel Adams and Edward Burtynsky: Constructed Landscapes opens on June 19.

Shelburne Museum opens for the season on May 16 with eleven new exhibits ranging from the circus to Vermont music to contemporary ceramic arts.

Highlights include: 

Circus Day in America is a captivating and lively look at the art and experience of the American circus circa 1870-1950. Using art, artifacts, photographs and film, the exhibit evokes the sights and sounds of the circus coming to town. Circus Day in America explores the development of posters and other advertising including rare posters of freaks, sideshows and other offbeat subjects from the museum’s collection.

Alzheimer’s: Forgetting Piece by Piece is a powerful tribute to victims of Alzheimer’s expressed through textile art. The exhibit features 52 quilts, many of them made by quilters who have lost a loved one to the disease, which today afflicts approximately 5.3 million Americans.  Listening stations are included with recorded memories of local elders produced by Vermont Public Radio and National Public Radio affiliated StoryCorps.

Jay Hall Connaway: A Restless Nature is a retrospective of an exceptional 20th century New England landscape painter whose work bridges the gap between the American realists of the 19th century and the modernists of the 20th century. Connaway’s scenes of the Maine coast and the Vermont countryside in particular earned critical acclaim. He is considered, with Ogden Pleissner and Luigi Lucioni, among the most distinguished regional landscape artists of the 1930s-50s.

All Fired Up:  Six Ceramic Artists from Vermont showcases unique artist-designed installations displaying a diversity of work and providing a window into contemporary ceramics. Featuring the work of Ray Bub of Pownal, Aysha Peltz and Todd Wahlstrom of Town Hill Pottery in Whitingham, Laura Zindel of Guilford,  Stephen Procter of Brattleboro and John Brickels of Essex Junction.

Embellishments: The Art of the Crazy Quilt exhibits fine and whimsical examples from the museum’s renowned collection. Fanciful materials and needlework are showcased in these creative and cacophonous quilts from political ribbons to sequins, velvets to lavish embroidery. The exhibit includes several recently acquired quilts that will be on exhibit for the first time.

Green Mountain Medley: 200 Years of Music Made in Vermont is an audio tour of Vermont’s musical heritage from French Canadian folk music to country to the rock phenomenon Phish.  The exhibition is installed in the Meeting House, an 1840 structure relocated to the Museum from Charlotte, Vermont that housed  religious services, community gatherings, and musical performances for over 100 years.

Other new exhibitions opening on May 16 include:

• Warren Kimble’s America featuring works from the country’s best known contemporary folk artist.
• Upon a Painted Ocean: American Marine Paintings from the Collection of Shelburne Museum including Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904) and Fitz Henry Lane (1804-1865.)
• Tally-Ho! The Art and Culture of the Fox Hunt with paintings, prints, film footage, trophies, riding apparel and other artifacts that evoke the heyday of the sport in America.
• The Art of Ogden Pleissner: A Retrospective from the Collection of Shelburne Museum with over 30 rarely seen oils, watercolors and drypoints from all aspects of Pleissner’s oeuvre.
• Good Fences: Vermont Stone Walls features fine examples of a New England tradition.

Shelburne Museum is one of the finest, most diverse and unconventional museums of art, design and Americana. Over 150,000 works are exhibited in a remarkable setting of 39 exhibition buildings, 25 of which are historic and were relocated to the museum grounds.  The museum’s collection includes works by the great Impressionists Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Edgar Degas as well as a prized collection of folk art including trade signs, weathervanes and quilts. The museum is open daily from May 16 through October 24.