February 2014

Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, NC, Features work from the Permanent Collection

The Hickory Museum of Art in Hickory, NC, is presenting Faces and Figures from the Permanent Collection in the Museum’s second floor Coe Gallery, on view through Mar. 29, 2014.

The exhibition includes sixty paintings, prints and sculptures that feature all or portions of the human body. Visitors will see new acquisitions like the untitled figure attributed to Willem de Kooning and Manimal by Jeffrey Raasch, as well as beloved favorites such as The Windowseat by Jane Peterson, Portrait of a Woman by William Merritt Chase, and Evening Limited to Memphis by Romare Bearden. North Carolina artists include Maud Gatewood, Bob Trotman, Kate Worm, Pat Viles, Ben Long, Jose Fumero, Herb Cohen, and Harold Crowell. The exhibition is sponsored by Charlotte Paint Co., Inc.

Faces and Figures is the first of six permanent collection exhibitions planned this year in honor of the Museum’s 70th Anniversary. The Hickory Museum of Art was founded in 1944 by artist Paul Austin Wayne Whitener (1911-1959), who also served as the first director until his untimely death in 1959.

The very first painting in the collection was Burke Mountain, Vermont by Frederick Ballard Williams (1871-1956), and was purchased in 1944 by A. Alex Shuford, Jr., who told Whitener, “If you’re going to have a museum, you’ve got to have paintings.” Burke Mountain, Vermont will be featured this spring in the show 7 Painters Launch 70 Years in the Whitener Gallery.

The Hickory Museum of Art continues to collect American art, and has a collection of over 2,000 art objects. The museum holds special collections in Southern Contemporary Folk Art, Hudson River School paintings, and studio art pottery and glass.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the Museum at 828/327-8576 or visit (www.hickoryart.org).

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