The Dayton Art Institute to Host Major Norman Rockwell Exhibition

Written by Linda Pero Tuesday, 01 September 2009 22:08

DAYTON, OH.- The Dayton Art Institute has announced details of a 2011 special exhibition that will celebrate the work of American icon Norman Rockwell. American Chronicles: The Art of Norman Rockwell will be on view at The Dayton Art Institute, November 12, 2011 through February 5, 2012. Organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum, located in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, this national traveling exhibition features original art from the museum’s noted collections. The exhibition chronicles Rockwell’s life and art, introducing new scholarship rooted in decades of study by Curator of Norman Rockwell Collections, Linda Pero.

The artist’s paintings, drawings, and studies span 56 years, from his 1914 interpretation of American folk hero Daniel Boone securing safe passage for settlers to the American West, to his 1970 report on American tourists and armed Israeli soldiers witnessing a Christmas Eve ceremony at the Basilica of the Nativity in Bethlehem. The exhibition invites viewers to compare their own 20th-century American experience with the events portrayed by Rockwell, and to consider how much Rockwell’s vision may have influenced theirs.

The large-scale exhibition traces the evolution of Rockwell’s art and iconography throughout his career – from carefully choreographed reflections on childhood innocence in such paintings as Day in the Life of a Little Girl (1952) to powerful, consciousness-raising images for Look in the 1960s documenting the traumatic realities of desegregation in the South. Rockwell’s artistic contributions and the impact of his images on American popular culture are explored within the context of his life and times, through in-depth exhibition commentary and a decade-by-decade installation of 42 original artworks, as well as a complete set of 323 archival Saturday Evening Post cover tear sheets spanning 47 years.

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