donald meyer, curator

 

    In the Fall of 2009, I was asked by the executive committee at Woodmere Art Museum to provide exhibitions to fill the completely unscheduled five gallery spaces resulting from the recent and sudden emptying of the director/curator positions. 

    The period to be filled was from August 2010 through March 2011 and the gallery space to be filled comprised the entire museum, made up of  the five separate exhibition areas.  The period was to be separated into Summer exhibitions August 21-October 17, 2010, and Fall exhibitions November 6, 2010-March 6, 2011. 

    I designed and curated  four exibitions:

    First , “Kindred Spirits: Woodmere Art Museum and the Philadelphia Sketch Club”, an exhibition of historic members of the PSC in the WAM permanent collection, which opened January 2010, scheduled to run through January 2011, in the museum’s Balcony Gallery.

    I then designed and curated three Summer exhibitions which opened August 21, 2010 and run to October 17, 2010:

   

“Fred Wagner, American Painter: A Family Perspective”

Click here to see the catalogue: WagnerCatalogOriginal080410.pdf;

   














“Sam Maitin: Prints and Places”

Click here to see the catalogue: SamMaitinCatalog081510:930am2.pdf; 












“Surviving Ourselves”

Click here to see the catalogue: SurvivingOurselvesCatalog082110 :1245pm.pdf, an exhibition of the work of 15 contemporary artists in the WAM permanent collection representing living membership in the Philadelphia Sketch Club,  which included my work “Hosta Triptych, August 2009” as one of that group.











   



A fifth exhibition was fully planned and scheduled, even readied for delivery from lending institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Demuth Museum in Lancaster, PA, and installation,  for the period from November 2010 through March 2011.  Entitled "Collecting Ourselves: Then, Now & <NEXT>", it was to be in celebration of Woodmere’s 70th anniversary and a definitive exposition of its mission.

With the introduction of a new Director, Dr. William Valerio, and in consultation with the exhibit’s participants, it was decided to postpone this exhibition in order to restore it to its first, broader conception and design provided in my original proposal in 2009.

















Collecting Ourselves: Then, Now & <NEXT>" is a group of three expositions separated by period but joined by insight.  

The three periods to be represented are:

a) from 1870 through 1893;  

b) from 1900 to 1935; and finally 

c) to the present, 2010.  

The insight is that a single collector’s personality and interest, joined with that of contemporary artists and their work, can have impact on international art far into their future and beyond.   

In fact, that is exactly what happened when a 19th century Philadelphian, Fairman Rogers, with his contemporaries, the painter Thomas Eakins and photographer Muybridge, drawn together by an interest amounting to obsession in the human body in motion over time, revolutionized the treatment of the human figure in art.  

Later, in the early 1930s a series of five sequential exhibitions were presented at the nascent Philadelphia Museum of Art displaying the collections of R. Sturgis and Anna Ingersoll, Samuel S. and Vera White, Maurice Speiser, Earl Horter and Bernard Davis.  As part of the focus on the personal involvement of 20th century Philadelphian art collectors, the  exhibition will show how collectors Sam and Vera White, continued involvement with the figure with such Muybridge-influenced artists as Auguste Rodin and Marcel Duchamp.  Duchamp and his circle of influence included the White’s friends and fellow-collectors and it was his treatment of the figure that has carried us, in its most profound issues, through the New York and London Schools at mid-century to the international arts of our present,  21st century patronage of installation, video, digital cinema and web art. 

    This last project is re-scheduled for 2015.

“Reinhold Edelschein,”

Click here to see the catalogue: Reinhold Edelschein PSC.pages

Also, see an interview with Edelschein, here: An exhibition of the work of Philadelphia artist Reinhold Edelschein at the Philadelphia Sketch Club defined Edelschein’s lyrical approach to abstraction from his early study with Hans Hoffman to the personal sense of proportion and harmony from his background as a classical musician.