The Gadsden Arts Center & Museum is pleased to host Norman Rockwell in the 1960s, an exhibition of prints and tearsheets organized by the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, focusing on illustrations he created for magazines during that turbulent decade. In 1963, the artist ended his almost 5 decade-long association with The Saturday Evening Post and began to search for new artistic challenges. Rockwell left behind his beloved story-telling scenes popular in The Post and threw himself into the visual documentation of social issues and current events like school integration, the moon landing, and the murder of civil rights workers. Visit the Exhibition Page for more information and upcoming events associated with Norman Rockwell in the 1960s.
Gary Sczerbaniewicz creates small sculptural works that showcase hybrid architecture as the subject matter. His scale-model replicas of brick building fragments and brick masonry façade catalogue a range of vignettes that have been culled from his experience living in a rust-belt city for more than a decade. In this grouping of works, disconnected doors, blocked windows, shadows of staircases, collapsed walls, eroded rooflines, and bloated surfaces shrug off their originally designed roles and stand as petrified strata which seem to gently mock the beholder.
Leslie Wallace-Coon takes inspiration from everyday life, of the visible world of people, animals, and her surroundings. Her sculptures and bas-reliefs tell stories of the humorous contractions and extremes of relationships she witnesses between people and their pets. Domestic animals are an inspiration because of the humorous, physical, and “superimposed” human characteristics she sees in them. Her goal as an artist is to create work that compels the viewer to look, laugh, and become caught up the details. Wallace-Coon has work in public and private collections in the region and owns the Bowery Art Gallery in Apalachicola.
On display is the first of the four 2019 exhibitions from Gadsden Arts Artists Guild members. View work by Nancy Adams, Karole Curtis, Wendy Devarieux, Carole Fiore, Brenda Francis, Mark Georgiades, John R. L. Isaacs IV, Michele Tabor Kimbrough, Brenda B. Martin, William McKeown, Pam McLean, Kent Putnam, Roger Raepple, Maria A. Renzulli, Stephen Revell, Robert Dewitt Smith, Chuck Stannard, and Siroos Tamaddoni. The Gadsden Arts Center & Museum Artists Guild was formed to provide an opportunity for local and regional artists to exhibit their artwork year-round, participate in educational seminars and critiques, and volunteer their time helping with Gadsden Arts fundraising events and educational programming. The Guild has over 50 members who live throughout the region and work in a variety of mediums including glass, mixed media, oil, acrylic, watercolor, photography and pen & ink. Learn more about the Artists Guild here.
In the 20th century, Coca-Cola became part of the fabric of American life. For over 70 years, Coca-Cola remained at a fixed 5¢ for a glass or bottle, which, combined with active advertising made it widely popular. For decades, the Coca-Cola corporation and bottlers distributed limited edition small scale die-cast iron trucks for advertising in communities. In addition to trucks, The Coca-Cola Company was featured on toys and games, dolls, trucks, bikes, scooters, trains, and board games. The trucks on display, some date from the 1930s, are on loan from one of the largest private collections in the region.
Nine significant works on paper by the most famous American Southern Vernacular artist, Thornton Dial, Sr., are on display in the Gadsden Arts Center & Museum’s Bates Permanent Collection Gallery. While Dial’s large-scale assemblages and sculptures have gained much attention, his drawings and paintings on paper have a particularly unifying style and concentration of subject matter. Most of these works feature women, often with an animal, like a tiger, fish, or bird, and speak to the relationships between men and women. His drawings are lyrical with female forms floating in space, twisting around tigers, executed in bold out-of-the-tube watercolors, or in soft charcoal and pencil lines. In his 2011 book exclusively about Dial’s works on paper, Bernard L. Herman writes that the first quality a viewer perceives when encountering Dial’s drawings, “is movement at once balletic and ballistic, where dance and power coalesce.” Learn more about Thornton Dial's work here.
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