Date: 1/30/2007

Contact: Allison Sheridan, University Museums, (515)294-3342

 

At the Farm House Museum…
A special exhibition, The Early Years: The Founding Model Farm and the College, will celebrate the earliest days at Iowa State College through the reinstallation of portions of the permanent collection. Refreshments will be provided and curator-led tours will take place every half hour. Farm House Museum is located on Farm House Lane, central campus.
At the Brunnier Art Museum…
A brand new exhibition, What’s Your Legacy?, presents 150 important legacies created by Iowa State’s greatest over the last 150 years. The exhibition will showcase portrait works of art from Iowa State University’s art collection as well as other museum and private collections. Rodin: In His Own Words, Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, continues through April 29. Refreshments will be provided and docent-led tours will take place every half hour. The Brunnier Art Museum is located on the 2^nd floor of the Scheman Building, Iowa State Center.
The Art on Campus Collection…
Tours of selected works of Art on Campus will be given on the hour from 11am to 3pm. Groups will meet their guides in Morrill Hall on the first floor (look for signs), and each tour will include a selection of different public works of art. Morrill Hall is located on Morrill Road, central campus.
At the Christian Petersen Art Museum…
Inaugural exhibitions at the Christian Petersen Art Museum include The Art Students League of New York: Highlights from the Permanent Collection and Christian Petersen: Urban Artist, 1900-1934. Tour this new University Museums facility and learn more about Christian Petersen’s early years on the east coast. Refreshments will be provided and tours will take place every half hour. The Christian Petersen Art Museum is located in Morrill Hall on Morrill Road, central campus.

Special guests for the night include the following Art on Campus artists: Andrew Leicester, Tom Stancliffe, Deborah Masuoka, Elizabeth Miller, John Preston, Bill Barrett, Mary Muller, Rebecca Ekstrand, Michaela Mahady, William King, Andrea Mykelbust and Stanton Sears, JaneAnn Stout, Gary Bowling, David Dahlquist, Ellen Wagener, and William Barnes. The program will begin at 8:30 with Mary Petersen, daughter of Charlotte and Christian Petersen, Beverly Hills, FL; Lynette L. Pohlman, Director, University Museums; Nancy Gebhart, ISU ’04, former Margaret Davidson University Museums Intern, St. Louis, MO; and Emily Ghrist, ISU ’05, former Margaret Davidson University Museums Intern, Des Moines, IA.

Christian Petersen (1885–1961) spent the last half of his career in Iowa, from 1933 through 1955, and was consequently viewed as a Midwestern, regionalist artist. However, after his family’s emigration from Denmark when he was nine years old, Christian Petersen was raised on the East Coast where he was artistically trained. His earliest training was at the Newark Technical School and the Fawcett School of Design in New Jersey. Further studies included classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Art Students League in New York City. Around 1920, he took an apprenticeship with Boston sculptor Henry Hudson Kitson. Christian Petersen then maintained an active design and fine arts studio for over a decade in Attleboro, Massachusetts. This exhibition examines Christian Petersen’s early career and illustrates his evolution from craft designer to fine art sculptor and how this development ultimately lead him to Iowa State College.

The Art Students League of New York: Highlights from the Permanent Collection
(March 22–May 9, 2007)

As one of America’s oldest art schools, the Art Students League of New York attracted outstanding talents as teachers and prepared young artists who left their marks on twentieth-century American art. In the League’s historic building on New York’s West 57th Street, Georgia O’Keeffe studied with William Merritt Chase, Jackson Pollock worked under the guidance of Thomas Hart Benton, and Louise Nevelson enrolled in the classes of George Grosz and Hans Hofmann. This selection of seventy-five works from the school’s permanent collection documents its esteemed heritage and reflects art movements of the last one hundred and twenty-five years, from late nineteenth-century figure drawings to 1930s social realist prints to pop and abstract paintings, and works by contemporary students and instructors. Inevitably, the works capture events and trends in the nation’s history.