This summer we’re staying local: looking after our gardens, enjoying Greenwich’s shoreline, and shopping at the farmers’ markets. But in years past, well… we’ve done our fair share of international travels and brought our bounteous finds and ideas home to the Flinn Gallery in the form of regionally-specific exhibitions. Let’s take a look through our archives!
We’ve explored the world through its art, artifacts, and refined crafts from 1933’s Argentine Prints and Watercolors to 2017’s groundbreaking Cambodia: Looking Back on the Future. That show focused on the artists’ experiences of war and healing in post-war Cambodia through visual and performing arts. We’ve featured Children’s Art from Around the World: The Roy Miller Collection (1968), two shows of International Folk Art in 1996 and 2004, and an extraordinary private collection in 1992’s Chinese Cloisonne: Selections from the Audrey Love Collection.
1966 saw Latin American Perspectives celebrated with pre-Columbian sculptures rubbing shoulders with Botero and María Luisa Pacheco. We revisited the theme of mixing contemporary artists with the past in 1971’s Selected Works from Latin America, showing Pacheco again in a large group show with sculptor Marta Colvin, Sergio Gonzalez-Tornero, Roberto Berdecio, and Felix Arauz, along with a small case of early art objects providing historical context. Placing pre-colonial artwork center stage, 1981’s Pre-Columbian Art from Mesoamerica drew on loans from the museums at Yale and Princeton. We featured four South American artists, including Rafael Saldarriaga’s lush still lifes, in 2005’s Latin American Expressions, and focused our attention on the vibrant art of Cuba in 2001’s Nuevo Arte De Cuba.
Internationally renowned fiber artists were featured in 2006’s Beyond Weaving: International Art Textiles which included such luminaries as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Françoise Grossen, and Kiyomi Iwata, alongside American artists Kay Sekimachi and Lia Cook.
2015’s Fukui, Hsu, Mann, Wang brought contemporary Asian artists to the gallery for painting demonstrations. That year also saw high attendance across all ages for multimedia Japanese artist Akinori Matsumoto: Sound Sculptures which featured several special performances in addition to the soothing sounds of his bamboo sculptures. Those recent shows followed a path which began with 1968’s Contemporary Japanese Art (a title we reused in 1989), and continued with 2004’s Asian Influences. Our 1968 show, organized in conjunction with the Japanese Consulate, featured artists who went on to show at the Tokyo World’s Fair in 1970 and have been collected by numerous museums.
Greenwich Library has created a reading list if you’d like to explore international art further.
Last month we focused on Maestros Across Media and you can find even more of our artists here.