western art

Bank Of America Showcases Western Art

Filed under: Events, Art

Last month I wrote about an exhibit featuring Bank of America's contemporary art holdings in Charlotte. Should you be interested in seeing the works of another artist in the B of A holdings you'll need to travel to Kansas City, Missouri. That's where the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art will be presenting Romancing the West: Alfred Jacob Miller in the Bank of America Collection from September 25, 2010-January 9, 2011. The exhibit showcase the work of the Baltimore portraitist who in 1837 was invited on the adventure of a lifetime, tagging along with Scottish nobleman Captain William Drummond Stewart and the American Fur Company expedition on a six-month adventure to the Rocky Mountains. They trekked along the Oregon Trail to the annual gathering of the fur trade and Miller was one of the first American artists to bring the images of the American West to vivid life.

The exhibit shows 30 works on paper not seen in the public since 1964. Miler made more than 100 field sketches during the expedition, sketches that became the inspiration for at least a thousand paintings and watercolors. The six-month journey set him up for the next three decades as he received commissions for albums of watercolors and full-sized oil paintings that he produced in his studio. The works from the Bank of America Collection represent intermediary work based on his field sketches and done in preparation for the commissioned work.

"We are thrilled to share Miller's work with the general public," said Margaret C. Conrads, Samuel Sosland Senior Curator, American Art, at the Nelson-Atkins and curator of the exhibition. "Viewers will find that fact mixes with fantasy to reflect life on the frontier both as it was and as it was imagined to be."

After debuting at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art the exhibition will head to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2011.

[via Art Fix Daily]

Tags: american west, art exhibit, Art Exhibition, art exhibits, bank of america, museum exhibit, museum exhibition, nelson-atkins museum, western art

New Decor Options For Cowboys and Cowgirls

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Decor

Vintage Western photographs get a new life at WesternWare. The company has turned old photographs into useful pieces of Western home decor. Images are used in paperweights, on dishes and serving pieces, decorative pillows and lamps. Particularly charming are the handbags with selected images of cowgirls from the Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. The lamp at right shows the image "Phil Spear Cutting Out a Steer" which dates back to 1895. It is on a base of tooled red leather and sells for $870.

Tags: cowboy art, cowboys, western art, western decor, western photography, westernware