Press

ALBANY, N.Y. - The third installment of the Fleet Great Art Series, American Folk Art from The Metropolitan Museum, will be at the New York State Museum until April 23.

Guided exhibit tours will be offered free to the public every weekend from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. through April 2 for American Folk Art. The tours, conducted by teaching artists from the Capital Region Center for Arts in Education, are 30 minutes long and will be held every 45 minutes.

Additionally, the State Museum has organized a series of talks that will take place during the course of the exhibit. They are:

American Folk Paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2 p.m., Sunday, March 5

Carrie Rebora Barratt, Associate Curator, American Paintings and Sculpture, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, will talk about the distinguished collection that features works by Rufus Hathaway, Edward Hicks, Joshua Johnson, Ammi Phillips, and others.

Revisiting Ammi Phillips: Fifty Years of Portraiture
2 p.m., Sunday, March 12

Stacy Hollander, Senior Curator, Museum of American Folk Art, will discuss
Ammi Phillips, one of America's best known folk artists. The prolific 19th century portraitist worked between the Connecticut and Hudson rivers. Hollander will examine Phillips' artistic development through more than 50 years of portrait painting, and his role in the society he was portraying.

Collecting American Folk Art from the 1890s to 1950
2 p.m., Sunday, March 19

Elizabeth Stillinger, a noted historian in the fields of American decorative arts, will talk about the history of collecting folk art. The earliest American folk art collectors were interested in objects considered to be of little value, such as redware pottery, fraktur paintings, decoys and portraits. Yet these collectors were at the forefront of a wave of fascination in American folk art that continues to this day. Among those considered in this lecture are Henry Mercer, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Edgar and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch. Stillinger is the author of a forthcoming book titled Collecting Folk Art in America 1876-1976.

Folk Art of New York State
2 p.m., Sunday, March 26

Paul D'Ambrosio, Chief Curator at the New York State Historical Association, will trace the development of folk art in New York from the 17th century to the present. New York has always been a cultural crossroads, with a multitude of people from different backgrounds continuously contributing to the artistic heritage of the state. D'Ambrosio recently curated the exhibition Empire State Mosaic: The Folk Art of New York at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown.

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