Exhibitions of Interest January/February 2010

1. 2,000 Years of Geography and Mapping at the Bruce Museum
Abraham Ortelius, Typus Orbis Terrarum, Antwerp, 1570. Private collection.

GREENWICH, CT.- The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, presents the new exhibition Writing the Earth: 2,000 Years of Geography and Mapping from January 30 through May 2, 2010. The exhibition features a selection of world maps that were printed between 1511 and 1800 and are on loan from a private collection. The show also includes a small group of maps from 1570 featuring the Americas. Many maps are startlingly accurate; many are measures of the continuing professional progress of human ignorance. Among the most endearing qualities of any old map is the degree to which its errors vastly outnumber its truths. They are all a record - in line, graphic, color, and word - of the history of the Earth as its keener, commercially ..

2. New York Harbor Quadricentennial Saluted with Extensive Exhibition
These antiquarian maps tell the story from a centuries-old perspective. Photo: Courtesy of The New York Public Library.
NEW YORK, NY.- The New York Public Library celebrates Henry Hudson and Dutch acumen with "Mapping New York's Shoreline: 1609-2009," a comprehensive exhibition featuring rare and extraordinary maps, atlases, books, journals, broadsides, manuscripts, prints, and an animation superimposing historical maps on a three-dimensional Google Earth model drawn primarily from the Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and from other New York Public Library collections. In September 1609, Henry Hudson sailed into New York Harbor and up the river that would later be named in his honor, performing detailed reconnaissance of the Valley region. Other explorers had passed by ... More

3. Metropolitan Museum, New York - Contemporary Aboriginal Painting from Australia, December 15, 2009–June 13, 2010The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, 1st floor

This installation features fourteen bold and colorful paintings created by contemporary Aboriginal Australian artists. Drawn from a private collection in the U. S., the installation provides an introduction to Aboriginal painting, which has become Australia’s most celebrated contemporary art movement and has attained prominence within the international art world. The works on view—all of which have never before been on public display—were created primarily over the past decade by artists from the central desert, where the contemporary painting movement began, and from adjoining regions, to which the movement spread. On view are paintings by prominent artists, including some of the founders of the contemporary movement, as well as emerging figures. This is the first presentation of contemporary Australian Aboriginal painting to be held at the Metropolitan Museum.

4. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, Cody, Wyoming - “Splendid Heritage” opens to the public May 1 and presents more than 140 masterworks of American Indian art from the Northeastern Woodlands, Plateau and Plains regions. The MetLife Foundation grant completes funding for the exhibition, which has also received a grant from the Wyoming Humanities Council and a donation from Naoma Tate, a member of the Historical Center’s Board of Trustees.
The 18th- and 19th-century Plains, Plateau, and Northeastern American Indian objects in the exhibition are all from the private collection of John and Marva Warnock. Pieces include beaded tobacco bags, weapons, dolls, cradles, war shirts, dresses, moccasins and more — most of which had never been on public view prior to the exhibition’s February 2009 debut at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, which spearheaded the project.

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