Community’s collective belongings. Photos by Collections Manager, John Urgo.

NEW/NOW: Michael Mahalchick: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Mar. 9–June 9, 2013
Opening Reception
Sunday, Mar. 10, 2013, 1-2:30 p.m.
Artists Remarks 1:30 p.m.

Michael Mahalchick to assemble a material portrait of the New Britain community with your help.

Michael Mahalchick moves seamlessly between the realms of sculpture/assemblage, installation, performance, music and dance, weaving chance, humor, brio and what he calls a “scavenging” aesthetic into his work. A graduate of the Tyler School of Art (BFA) and the California Institute of the Arts (MFA), he has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at PS1/MoMA, Queens, NY and the Sculpture Center, Long Island City, NY, and is currently on the visiting faculty at the Yale University School of Art.

As Mahalchick conceptualizes his installation in NEW/NOW, he invites your input and participation. Objects donated to the Museum will become the raw material for his work. Mahalchick will combine them in unexpected ways to present a cross-section of our community’s collective belongings. The artist welcomes your trinkets, hand-made treasures, decorative items, manufactured goods, heirlooms with which you are ready to part, etc. If an object could conceivably be found at a garage sale and is of reasonable size, it likely fits the bill. Please be creative and think outside the box, and you may just find your former belonging reimagined, reused, reworked and on view in the Cheney Gallery from March 9 through June 9, 2013.

The NEW/NOW Series is made possible by the generous support of Marzena and Greg Silpe.

Romolo del Deo, The Beauty of Time, 2010, Bronze (unique), 19 x 9 x 6 in., Collection of Thomas and Kathryn Cox

A Joint Venture: The Collection of Thomas and Kathryn Cox
Jan. 25–June 2, 2013
Opening Reception
Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013, 2-3:30 p.m.

Married for the last 14 years, Thomas and Kathryn Cox joined their individual collections and passion for art and have been a force of American art collecting ever since.

Drawn to paintings that celebrate the beauty and awe-inspiring wonders of nature, the Coxes have shared an affinity for traditional landscapes of churning seas and drifting clouds. Among the many highlights are 19th-century seascapes by William Trost Richards, Stanley Woodward, and Frederick Waugh as well as landscapes by Alfred Bricher, Charles Davis, John Joseph Enneking, Walter Launt Palmer, and Nelson H. White.

Over the years, Tom and Kay’s interests have also grown to include contemporary works in a variety of mediums. Today, their eclectic collection includes exquisite glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly, Dante Marioni, Lino Tagliapietra; one-of-a-kind vessels by master ceramicist Cliff Lee; still-lifes by contemporary realists including the late Stephen Brown, Jacob Collins, Graydon Parrish, Larry Preston, Michael Thiese, Dan Truth and others; a whimsical riff on history painting by Mary Dwyer; an expressive pastel portrait of a pig by Bryan Nash Gill; and a haunting and evocative sculpture by Romolo del Deo, which toured the country last year as part of The Tides of Provincetown exhibition.

Kay Cox was an outstanding Chairman of the Museum Board, providing inspired leadership and support. She and Tom have enjoyed collecting and in many ways their close connection to the Museum has helped shape the direction that their collection has taken over a decade. The Coxes are also longtime co-chairs of the American Art Circle and John Butler Talcott Society premier membership groups.

Art from the New Britain Public & Parochial Schools
May 23–June 2, 2013
Opening Reception
Thursday, May 23, 2013, 6:30-8 p.m.

For the 23rd year, the creative output of our youngest artists will be celebrated in Art from the New Britain Public & Parochial Schools. This popular exhibition will feature some 250 artists from kindergarten through high school. The artwork ranges in medium, and will include pastels, markers, collage, crayon, pencil, watercolor, oil paints, tempera, charcoal, clay, ink, and acrylics. A panel of NBMAA docents select the award winners.

Presented By:

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Divan Japonais, color lithograph, 1893, 808 x 608 mm, Herakleidon Museum, Athens Greece.

Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Aristide Bruant dans son Cabaret (in his Cabaret), color lithograph, 1893, 1273 x 950 mm, Herakleidon Museum, Athens Greece.

Toulouse-Lautrec & His World
January 12–May 12, 2013
Opening Reception
Saturday, Jan. 12, 2013
3:30-5 p.m.

For the first time out of Europe, Toulouse-Lautrec & His World begins its U.S. tour here before moving on to Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, PA.

On view from January 12–May 12, 2013 in the McKernan Gallery, this traveling exhibition is on loan from the Herakleidon Museum, in Athens, Greece and is from the collection of Paul and Belinda Firos, the Connecticut collectors who also brought us M.C. Escher: Impossible Reality in 2010.

Toulouse-Lautrec & His World is from the collection of Herakleidon Museum, Athens, Greece, www.herakleidon.com

Tony de los Reyes, Cannibal, 2009, Red bister on paper, 59 1/2 x 44 1/2 x 2 in., Collection of Bryan and Maureen Stockton.

NEW/NOW: Tony de los Reyes: Chasing Moby-Dick
Dec. 1, 2012–Mar. 3, 2013
Opening Reception
Thursday, Dec. 13, 2012, 5:30-7 p.m.

Upcoming NEW/NOW artist Tony de los Reyes has spent the last decade visually interpreting and expanding on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. He infuses the classic genre and narrative tradition of “history painting” with modern aesthetics, drawing on minimalism, abstraction, and a wide variety of media not merely to illustrate, but to “reconstruct the epic in a transitional space between literature, political history, and contemporary art.”

In constructing dramatic permutations of the text, de los Reyes creates a mythic vision of America and its enduring national obsessions, envisioning the same insatiable and self-destructive nature that defines Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab. Raw linen stained with sumi ink, pure black and white pigments, and sanguine red bister visually enhance the aura of bloodlust and violence in de los Reyes evocative and allegorical work.

De los Reyes has held many exhibitions on the West Coast and throughout the country. Last year, he received a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship Award and was named the Mid-Career Artist Fellow by California Community Foundation in recognition of his outstanding creative accomplishments.

The NEW/NOW Series is made possible by the generous support of Marzena and Greg Silpe.

Artist Eric Souther with screenshots of his YouTube video captured in the background. Art Marlon Portraits.

New Media: Eric Souther
Nov. 15, 2012–Mar. 31, 2013
Opening Reception
Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013, 5:30-7 p.m.

This November, the Museum presents Eric Souther as part of its New Media series. Known for building and utilizing his own software, Souther manipulates video and sound to explore how technology shapes experience and communication in our contemporary culture. His artwork also reveals how machines enrich the expressive means of artists. He “find[s] that creating experiences that lead to new understandings are more important than delving into the exact presentation of information,” and his Search Engine Vision “Chair” does just that.

“Chair” is a compilation of the first 1,000 videos that appear under the keyword “chair” on YouTube. Using Max/MSP and Jitter computer programs, Souther wraps the visual catalogue around a 3D chair model and maneuvers cameras to imitate the process of sifting through information online. He places the viewer in an alternative dimension where the database can be experienced “all at once as a form, an aesthetic visualization of sensory knowledge and experience,” expressing the “vastly broad potentialities of experiencing ‘chair’” and capturing the visual language created by the online community.

Souther’s aim as an artist is to question how we navigate today’s “complex system” of information overload. He “creates individual artistic explorations” of the unseen network of the digital age in which we all engage—the sharing, compiling and encountering of information—to reveal the experiences of modern life “saturated with digital information.”

Dine, Hockney and Summers: Contemporary Prints from the Paul and Teresa Kanev Collection opening reception.

Dine, Hockney and Summers: Contemporary Prints from the Paul and Teresa Kanev Collection
Oct. 19, 2012–Jan. 20, 2013
Opening Reception
Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012, 2-3:30 p.m.

Though its visibility has often been overshadowed by painting, performance and installation art, contemporary printmaking has been the focus of many artists working in the late 20th and 21st centuries. Debuting on October 19, Dine, Hockney and Summers: Contemporary Prints from the Paul and Teresa Kanev Collection aims to give greater attention to achievements in this medium. The exhibition, drawn from the collection of Dr. Paul and Mrs. Teresa Kanev, comprises approximately 20 impressive etchings, lithographs, woodblocks and cardboard reliefs by Jim Dine (b. 1935), David Hockney (b. 1937), and Carol Summers (b. 1925).

Highlights include some of Dine’s famous hearts and robes, three examples from Hockney’s The Weather Series, and Summers’ colorful woodblock landscapes. Often producing works monumental in scale, these artists have helped revolutionize printmaking as an artistic practice. Dine has become one of today’s most prolific, inventive and dedicated printmakers, with work in permanent collections worldwide. Hockney, called “Pop art’s enfant terrible” by British art critic Jonathan Jones, possesses a mastery of color that

dominates his style regardless of the many mediums in which he works. Summers has reworked the ancient technique of woodblock printing, allowing for printing on a previously unprecedented scale and championing what is now known as the “Carol Summers technique.”