The Farnsworth Art Museum Extends Paul Caponigro's Photo Exhibition

Written by Lunna Swaroviski Sunday, 09 October 2011 23:01

Rockland, Maine.- The Farnsworth Art Museum has announced that the exhibition "Paul Caponigro: The Hidden Presence of Places" has been extended and will now remain on display through January 15th. Paul Caponigro is one of America’s foremost landscape photographers. Emerging from an earlier generation of photographers that included Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Paul Strand, and his early mentor Minor White, over his fifty-year career Caponigro has successfully wedded his reverence for nature with a profound commitment to portray in his work the spiritual dimensions of the natural world – what Caponigro himself has described as “the hidden presence of places.” He has spent much of his nearly fifty-year career exploring and depicting scenes of nature and our place in it, often in places he has come to know well.

This exhibition examines bodies of work spanning his entire career, focusing on specific locales he has visited, sometimes once, sometimes repeatedly. Among them are ancient and Christian sites in Ireland, natural wonders of the American Southwest, the striking beauty of creeks and snowfalls in rural Connecticut, and his more recent work from Maine, where he has lived since 1993. Drawn almost entirely from the artist’s collection, the exhibition includes approximately sixty examples of Caponigro’s work, frequently in larger-scale examples, and some of which have not been seen before. Caponigro was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He studied with Minor White and has been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships and three grants from the NEA. His best known photograph is Running White Deer. Caponigro's first one-man exhibition took place at the George Eastman House in 1958. In the 1960s Caponigro taught photography part-time at Boston University while consulting the Polaroid Corporation on various technical research. Caponigro's work is included in the collections of the Guggenheim, Whitney, Norton Simon Museum, Museum of New Mexico and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His son, John Paul Caponigro, is a noted digital photographic artist.


Celebrating Maine’s Role in American Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum offers a nationally recognized collection of works from many of America’s greatest artists. With 20,000 square feet of gallery space and over 10,000 works in the collection, there is always something new on view at the Farnsworth. The museum has one of  the nation's largest collections of works by sculptor Louise Nevelson. Its Wyeth Center features works of Andrew, N.C. and Jamie Wyeth. The Farnsworth's library is also housed in its Rockland, ME, campus. In the 1950s a younger generation of New York artists began to summer in Maine and eventually became identified with the work they produced here, among them the painters Alex Katz, Neil Welliver, Fairfield Porter, Lois Dodd, and Yvonne Jacquette, as well as photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burkhardt. In 1969, Robert Indiana, already nationally renowned for his prints, paintings, and sculpture, and perhaps best known for his LOVE paintings, prints and sculptures.


The museum’s holdings of contemporary art have been significantly expanded, too, by donations from the Alex Katz Foundation, which include paintings by Jennifer Bartlett, Francesco Clemente, Janet Fish, Red Grooms, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Philip Pearlstein, David Salle, and Hunt Slonem, sculptures by Bernard Langlais and William Ryman, and photographs by Rudy Burkhardt. The Friends of the Collection, a group founded in 2002, whose sole purpose is to provide funds for museum acquisitions, has brought works by contemporary artists John Bisbee, Sam Cady, David Driskell, Richard Estes, Yvonne Jacquette, Alex Katz, Alan Magee, Louise Nevelson, Brian White, and others into the collection. The museum has also formed significant holdings of twentieth-century and contemporary photography, again focusing on artists who have worked in Maine. Among this group of more than 1400 photographs are works by Berenice Abbott, Rudy Burkhardt, Paul Caponigro, Joyce Tenneson, Elliot Porter, and Rockland native Kosti Ruohomaa. The Farnsworth collection is promoted through school visits, studio programs, teacher workshops, lectures, family programs, youth and adult docent programs, video and film programs and seasonal celebrations. The Maine in America collection catalogue, exhibition catalogues, articles in scholarly and popular journals, and the museum's Web site provide further access. The museum's collection is rooted in the history of Maine, its people, their occupations and values, central to the Farnsworth’s mission to celebrate Maine’s role in American art. Visit the museum's website at ... http://www.farnsworthmuseum.org

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