Upcoming Exhibits

Greenwich Community Artists Series
Inheriting the Impressionist Tradition

June 5 to July 31, 2013

Click here for more information.

Greenwich: 
The Perspective of Time

July 17 – September 1, 2013

Greenwich: The Perspective of Time is a collaboration between the Greenwich Historical Society and The Stamford Photography Club. The show, comprised of juried images, is the result of an invitation by the Historical Society to members of The Stamford Photography Club to submit photographs that portray aspects of Greenwich history through the eye of the lens. 

The varied and fascinating images represent a visual commentary on the ever-changing face of the community and how structures, landscapes and institutions of Greenwich as they are today may not survive the next generation. Executive Director, Debra Mecky commenting on the concept, notes, “Since its invention, photography has been an invaluable medium for chronicling historical events. But photography can also raise the understanding of history to another level by evoking a feeling of time and place on a more visceral level.”

The Stamford Photography Club (originally the Stamford Camera Club, founded in 1945) provides a meeting ground for photographers of all levels. The organization regularly holds classes and conducts competitions in a variety of categories, and offers support, advice and avenues for display to photographers.

Open Wednesday through Sunday, noon to 4:00 

Admission free to members and children under six. $10 for adults; $8 for seniors and students.

The New Spirit and the Cos Cob Art Colony:
Before and After The Armory Show

From October 9, 2013 to January 12, 2014

As the centenary for the monumental 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art (the Armory Show) approaches, the Greenwich Historical Society will mark this momentous historic milestone in American art with an exhibition exploring the involvement of and the effect on the exhibiting artists of the Cos Cob art colony.

The Armory Show exposed the American art world, the public, and the press to the progressive innovators of European art for the first time. Works from Paul Cézanne to Pablo Picasso were presented alongside a wide range of works by American artists. The introduction of their radical new ideas heralded a new aesthetic and a wider acceptance of Modernism, yet no exhibition to date has explored the direct effect that the Armory Show had on artists and their artistic production.

The New Spirit and the Cos Cob Art Colony will follow the story of the Armory show--and the results of exhibiting European art, both historic and ultra-modern--alongside American art. By highlighting selected works by the Cos Cob artists from before and after the Armory Show, this exhibition will illustrate how modernism became more widely assimilated into the mainstream of American art. The show will be comprised of about 40 works of art, including a few that were shown in the 1913 Armory Show, along with archival materials and ephemera from the Greenwich Historical Society, major museums and private collections.

The exhibition will focus on Cos Cob artists D. Putnam Brinley, Childe Hassam, Ernest Lawson, Elmer MacRae, Carolyn C. Mase, Frank A. Nankivell, Henry Fitch Taylor, Allen Tucker, Alden Twachtman and J. Alden Weir, and will look at the impact that the Armory Show had on those who continued to work after the exhibition. The exhibition will also include influential pioneering artists, Theodore Robinson and John H. Twachtman, whose work was included in the Armory Show but who had died years earlier.

A number of Greenwich-area artists played important roles in the actual production of the Armory Show: MacRae and Taylor were two of the four artists who conceived the idea for the exhibition in 1911; Brinley, Lawson, Tucker, and Weir were charter members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors (AAPS), the organizing body of the Armory Show; and Brinley, Lawson, MacRae, Nankivell, Taylor, and Tucker all served as members of various committees.*

It is especially fitting for the Greenwich Historical Society to organize and mount this anniversary exhibition. Cos Cob artist Elmer MacRae, who lived and painted at the Historical Society’s Bush-Holley House, served as treasurer for the Armory Show, and the Greenwich Historical Society is a major repository for archival material from the Armory show as well as a major holder of works by MacRae, many of which will be on display.

A catalogue will accompany the exhibition with an essay by guest curator Valerie Ann Leeds.

The exhibition will complement related projects celebrating the Armory Show centennial being organized by other area institutions, such as The New-York Historical Society, the Archives of American Art, and the Montclair Art Museum, the Heckscher Museum of Art and the Phillips Collection, each of which focuses on a different aspect of this watershed event in the history of American art.

*The founding members of the Association of American Painters and Sculptors were: Karl Anderson; George Bellows; D. Putnam Brinley; J. Mowbray-Clarke; Leon Dabo; Jo Davidson; Arthur B. Davies; Guy Pène du Bois; Sherry Fry; William Glackens; Robert Henri; E A. Kramer; Walt Kuhn; Ernest Lawson; Jonas Lie; George Luks; Elmer MacRae; Jerome Myers; Frank Nankivell; Bruce Porter; Maurice Prendergast; John Sloan; Henry Fitch Taylor; Allen Tucker; and Mahonri Young.