Currently on view at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, is an exhibition recognizing the United States’ 250th anniversary. American Conversations highlights 36 lesser-known works from the museum’s collection, along with works on loan— both historic and contemporary—addressing questions like: What does it mean to be an American? How does this act of cultural formation take place? Where does it take place? And who has the power to have a voice in its making?
Stephen Hopkins Hensel (1921-1979), Séance, 1948. Oil on canvas, 49 x 26 in. Gift of Antonio Barcello Vert in memory of Stephen Hopkins Hare, 1980.11. Photo by Luc Demers.
Devon Zimmerman, curator of modern and contemporary art at the museum, shares that he wanted the project to draw principally from the permanent collection and to be continually evolving. “It is not intended as a survey of American art from the past 150 years—the purview of the museum as an institution of modern and contemporary art—but rather was conceived as a constellation of discrete ‘conversations’ between pairs of artworks about themes, myths, historical moments and values in American art and life,” he explains.
The conversational, or organizational, structure of the show grew from Zimmerman’s interest in how context and perspective change the way we experience art. “In the exhibition, for example, you see a seascape by contemporary artist Rashid Johnson alongside a Winslow Homer drawing of a rescue party at sea: two artists’ visions of the ocean, and its loaded meanings from two different perspectives and periods of time,” he says. “If you substitute the Homer with a work by impressionist painter Charles Woodbury, or contemporary artist Katherine Bradford, your relationship to the Johnson shifts dramatically.”
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Still Life with Eel, ca. 1917. Oil on canvas, 29 x 24½ in. Gift of Mrs. William Carlos Williams, 1967.26. Photo by Luc Demers.
Marguerite Zorach (1887-1968), Mountain Brook, ca. 1917. Oil on canvas, 26½ x 23½ in. Gift of the Artist, 1965.14. © The Zorach Collection, LLC. Image courtesy Ogunquit Museum of American Art.
He continues, “This constant reflection on perspective—how others see the world, how we see the world—and the understanding that empathy is necessary to have a conversation, to truly listen, is at the core of this exhibition. We have also been fortunate to partner with Art Bridges, which will bring several significant works of the 20th century, including paintings by Philip Guston, Barkley Hendricks and Jack Whitten. These loans will allow us to recontextualize works in the collection, in the hope that visitors familiar with the museum and these objects will see them through a different perspective as well.”
Take, for example, Séance, 1948, by Stephen Hopkins Hensel, which is part of the exhibition section titled Seeing Beyond. “This striking work reflects on artists’ desires to seek out heightened spaces and forms of experience as a counterweight to the regimented and ordered existence of modern life,” Zimmerman says. “For many artists working in the United States, this search for renewed perception drew on occult thought, psychology and speculative ways of knowing that challenged rational explanations of the world. Hensel’s interest in the séance followed a broader cultural fascination with mediums in the United States at the start of the 20th century. The profession promised access to unknowable truths—visions of the future or communication with the dead—through a range of occult practices. By looking beyond conventional ideas of order and morality, the artist sought a reality that is at once unsettling and beautiful. Séance is paired with a work by contemporary artist Van Hanos, which utilizes surrealist technique to reflect on the strangeness of our current virtual world.”
Walt Kuhn (1877-1949), Sleeping Girl, 1922. Oil on canvas, 54 x 42 in. Gift of Mrs. Walt Kuhn, 1953.14. Image courtesy of the Ogunquit Museum of American Art.
Marsden Hartley’s Still Life with Eel, circa 1917, appears in the section of the exhibition called Flowers of Love—in which artists reflect on their own relationships to love through the symbolic language of flowers—set in dialogue with a piece by contemporary artist Lujan Perez. We also see Marguerite Zorach’s Mountain Brook, circa 1917, in a grouping of works gathered under the theme Pay Attention, which examines the counter-impulses felt by artists against economies of attention. “The piece is paired with a work by post-war Maine painter Neil Welliver, who found similar transcendent beauty in the quiet of a babbling brook,” says Zimmerman.
American Conversations will remain on view through November 15 at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art in Ogunquit, Maine. —
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