We are pleased to be exhibiting, once again, in this year’s Nashville Antique and Garden Show taking place February 7th-10th at the Nashville Convention Center. The theme of the show this year is a tribute to Albert Hadley who was a renowned interior designer and Nashville native. Please stop by the booth and see some of the superb new paintings we will be unveiling.

There’s no better time than high summer to enjoy visiting art museums and galleries. Escaping humidity and heat, you can step into a cool, quiet place and enjoy the experience of a local exhibition, or a rare collection from across the world. This summer, some of the most interesting exhibits can be found here in Tennessee and in neighboring states, making a short trip a refreshing way to spend your vacation days.

Locally, The Frist Center of Visual Arts has WARHOL LIVE – MUSIC AND DANCE IN ANDY WARHOL’S WORK from June 24–September 11, 2011. The exhibit presents a comprehensive exploration of the artist’s work as experienced through the lens of music and dance and boasts nearly 300 works, including objects and documents from the artist’s personal archives.

Nashville’s Cheekwood Museum and Gardens features a new sculpture project by earth artist David Wood. DAVID WOOD: DOUBLE HELIOTROPE: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN EARTH AND WATER runs from May 30 – October 31, 2011.
This installation is part of an ongoing Heliotrope series: horizontal radial wooden sculptures that engage materially, visually, and symbolically with the significance and power of the sun. The artist will be installing two pieces, Awakening and Reflection, one on land and the other on water.

Impressionism is coming to Memphis during the summer of 2011 in the form of two once-in-a-lifetime exhibitions at the Brooks Museum Of Art and Dixon Gallery And Gardens. These two top-rank art museums are partnering to present “A VERY IMPRESSIONISTIC SUMMER,” which offers audiences an opportunity to immerse themselves in the artistic world of Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, John Singer Sargent, and Jean-Louis Forain, among others.
The Huntsville Museum Of Art in Alabama offers A SENSE OF PLACE: PLEIN AIR PAINTERS OF THE SOUTHEAST, featuring work by members of the Plein Air Painters of the Southeast, an organization of professional artists bound by a common passion to promote the traditional methods of painting outdoors. From August 7 – September 23, 2011.

Last year Cheekwood hosted a beautiful exhibition called ‘Impressionists in the Garden’. In fact one of the paintings in the exhibition Stan Mabry found 20 years ago. This is an interesting article highlighting the similarities between Gardening and Painting.

History has produced some famous artists who were also avid gardeners. For instance, Impressionist painter Claude Monet (French, 1840-1926) and his colleague, Auguste Renoir (French, 1841-1911) tended flower and herb gardens at the artist colony of Argenteuil in the early 1870s. And, at Monet’s home in Giverny, the artist enlisted the aid of fellow gardeners to care for his famous water lily pond which was the subject for his paintings from the early 1890s until his death in 1926. In May of 2010, one of Monet’s famed water lillies paintings, dated 1917, sold for $24.7 million.

The Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme Connecticut is known as the Giverny of America. It was the formative art colony of American Impressionism. The original house where the artist stayed was owned by Florence Griswold. A decade ago, the Florence Griswold Museum received a gift that put the Old Lyme museum on the map as an art destination: The Hartford Steam Boiler Inspection and Insurance Company’s collection of 190 American paintings, prints, and sculptures from the 18th to 20th centuries. (Click here for full story)

As the life of the piece of art far outlives that of the collector, the provenance of a work of art can tell a fascinating story, documenting many important political and historical events.

Over the past few months we have whitnessd protests breaking out in Lybia, Egyt, Syria and in the state of Wisconsin. Widespread looting took place in Egypt. In fact The recent protests in Egypt have forced many museums to work harder in order to safeguard their art and cultural objects. The looting that took place in Cairo resulted in the loss of famous pieces dating back to the 18th dynasty. 

According to reports, the museum was only lightly guarded during the protests. While some of the stolen pieces were found outside of the museum building, others remain missing. The pieces stolen are significant objects in Egyptian history including a sculpture of King Tutenkahman and a bust of Queen Nefertiti.

Some point to a crazed collector as the brains behind such robberies. But I think the thieves just saw an opportunity to obtain precious items and choose to act on it. The ‘crazed collector’ rumor is a popular one when trying to uncover the whereabouts of cultural objects. It would be impossible to resell the stolen artifacts on the open market without running the risk of punishment by authorities.

The current exhibition at the British Museum in London is Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World and is a fabulous collection that tells Afghanistan’s history. Remarkably it was hidden during the Russian occupation of Afghanistan and then by the Taliban. In 1989 staff at the Museum in Kabul decided to hide this collection which can now be seen in London.

I hope it makes its way to the US.