Two new exhibitions are up and running at The Biggs Museum of American Art in Dover.
In this week’s Arts Playlist, Delaware Public Media’s Kelli Steele chats with Biggs curator Ryan Grover
The first is In Fresh Air:Impressionism and the Plein Air Movement, featuring 70 paintings.
“So these are artworks that were created outside and not in an artist's studio and not on your couch but directly in front of the subjects that you were intending to capture," said Biggs curator Ryan Grover. "It’s almost kind of a way of getting back to the basics. You know when you’re in a studio, you depend a lot on your imagination or you depend on your notes.”
Grover says Plein Air captures a landscape, cityscape or person “at that moment.”
The second exhibition at the Biggs right now is Out of the Vault: Modern and Contemporary Art. It highlights pieces in the Biggs’ collections that it normally doesn’t have gallery space for.
This was kind of an exhibition by necessity," said Grover. "Typically because the Museum is on a timeline, we put a lot of these Plein Air Impressionist paintings - the ones that we do normally have out - we have them usually on the 3rd floor. But I really stole everything out of the 3rd floor and just left big, empty patches of space.”
Grover says Out of the Vault features rarely exhibited paintings, photographs, sculpture and crafts from the Post World War I period to the present day contemporary pieces.
There are 65 items in this exhibit.
Both exhibits run through June 19, 2021.
Delaware Public Media' s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Division of the Arts, a state agency dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts.
