Asheville Art Museum: Summer 2022 Special Exhibitions

Asheville is an art town, boasting two separate studio & gallery districts, numerous art and craft-related museums and historic houses … and the recently expanded Asheville Art Museum. The Museum’s collection of American art of the 20th and 21st centuries presents the narrative of art and culture in western North Carolina and Southern Appalachia, within […]

Savannah’s Art Museums – Part 3. The Telfair Academy

You might expect the South’s oldest art museum to be in the capital city of one of the southern states, not in a city of 330,000 (2022). But in 1885, Savannah –with about 35,000 residents — was nearly twice the size of the second-largest city in the state, Augusta. In fact, when Savannah was established […]

Savannah’s Art Museums – Part 2. Jepson Center: The art of today, mostly.

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Part 1 (Savannah’s Jepson Center – an architectural delight) of this 3-part series about the Telfair Museums began with, “I just had a museum experience that blissed me out, from beginning to end!” The architecture enhanced the experience, to be sure, but the art absolutely held it’s own. In addition to the awesome architecture of […]

Savannah’s Art Museums – Part 1. Jepson Center: An architectural delight

How do you design a new museum to fit into a National Historic Landmark District — an area that was planned in 1733 — a neighborhood defined by a grid of streets punctuated by tree-shaded urban squares? The Jepson Center stands at the heart of Savannah’s Historic District, just steps around Telfair Square from the Telfair Academy, which is the oldest public art museum in the South (built 1819.) […]

Morgan Library Gets a Facelift … and a Garden

Commissioned in 1902 by financier John Pierpont Morgan as his private library, the Morgan Library building was completed in 1906 and is considered one of McKim, Mead & White’s finest works, perfectly embodying the Renaissance ideal of the unity of the arts through the integration of architecture, sculpture, and painting with exceptional craftsmanship and materials. […]

High Dynamic in Atlanta

Today’s High Museum of Art would be unrecognizable to the foresightful patrons who founded the Atlanta Art Association in 1905, when the population of the city numbered roughly 100,000. The High now serves 6MM Atlanta metro-area residents — plus an untold number of domestic and international visitors — and the collections and physical plant have […]

A Day and A Half in Tampa

Tampa’s downtown riverfront has bloomed in the past decade or so, with the splendid Riverwalk connecting museums, parks, restaurants and other attractions. Slip on your walking shoes and head out for a day of history, art, terrific food options and people-watching. Rivers were essential to the commercial viability and growth of cities, and from the […]

Rosa Bonheur: The Most Famous Artist You’ve Never Heard Of …

Édouard Dubufe (French, 1819-1883) Portrait de Marie-Rosalie dite Rosa Bonheur, 1857.

In the 19th-century, during her lifetime Rosa Bonheur was one of the most famous artists in all of Europe and North America. Required to obtain a cross-dressing permit in order to venture into the world of men — for the sake of her art — she took that world by storm! […]