Bruce Presents: Slow Looking: The Visionary Botany of Andrew Wyeth
Monday November 18, 2024, 6:30 PM–7:45 PM, Gale and Robert H. Lawrence, Jr., and Pamela and Robert Goergen Auditorium
In conjunction with the Bruce exhibition Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination, curator William L. Coleman will share an insider perspective on an underrecognized aspect of the work of a widely loved artist. Wyeth’s place-based practice in the immediate environs of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and Port Clyde, Maine included a fascinating array of watercolors and drawings devoted to individual specimens of plant life that he responded to freely across the seasons. In conjunction with the artist’s surviving painting materials and correspondence and in dialogue with the dramatic changes Wyeth's country has faced in recent years, these remarkable creations speak to a model of sensitive engagement with the natural world that could not be more timely.
Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)
Buttonwood, Study for The Hunter, 1943
Drybrush watercolor, 19 ½ x 29 ½ in.
Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
© 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
Biography for William L. Coleman
William L. Coleman, Ph.D. is the inaugural Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center, based at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, PA with additional oversight of Wyeth Foundation initiatives at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, ME. He writes and teaches on the art of the United States, with a particular research focus on landscape painting’s histories. Coleman was previously Director of Collections & Exhibitions at The Olana Partnership, Associate Curator of American Art at the Newark Museum of Art, and held long-term fellowships from Washington University in St. Louis, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Smithsonian Institution. Recent projects include essays for collection catalogues of the Palmer Museum of Art and Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center and the exhibitions Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth and, in collaboration with artist David Hartt, Terraforming: Olana’s Historic Photography Collection Unearthed.
