Contributions from Friends of the Foundation support education programs for area schools, special entertainment events for families, exhibitions, preservation of the art collection and the historic facility, and help keep the museum open and free to the public six days a week.
Friends of the Foundation receive discounts on museum activities, classes and Gift Shoppe purchases, as well as invitations to gala previews and special events.
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March 10- May 31, 2012
Thirty-five Years of Great art: Part I is the first of three exhibitions scheduled for 2012 designed to celebrate the 35th anniversary of the opening of the Owensboro Museum of Fine Art. The exhibitions will feature highlights of the permanent collection acquired by the museum since it opened in 1977. The collection includes American, European, Asian, African and Australian painting, sculpture and decorative arts dating from the late 1600’s to the present.
Exhibited in the Carnegie Wing are the museum’s holdings of early Kentucky painting and includes some of the most celebrated artists with connections to the Commonwealth by birth, education or residency. Featured are the major American painter Frank Duveneck (1848-1919); early tonalist painters Carl Christian Brenner (1838-1888) and Harvey Joiner (1852-1932); the American impressionist painter Paul Sawyier (1865-1917); watercolorist Frank English (1854-1922) and Robert Burns Wilson (1850-1916), an artist known equally for poetry, as author of “Remember the Maine”.
Also in the Carnegie Wing are three galleries of contemporary American art featuring painting, sculpture and 20th century studio art glass. A special collection includes five paintings documenting the Owensboro riverfront as it appeared from the early 19th to mid 20th centuries by the late Kentucky painter Harlan Hubbard (1900-1988).
Major works from the museum’s collection on display in the John Hampden Smith Decorative Arts Wing are the bronze, “Dancer Looking at the Sole of her Right Foot”, by French Impressionist master, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) and a landscape by the Hudson River School painter, Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904).
Important portraits also in the Decorative Arts Wing include paintings of George IV of England by Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830) and an historically important portrait of Joseph Hamilton Daveiss, attributed to one of America’s most recognized early painters, Charles Wilson Peale (1741-1827). It depicts the Revolutionary War hero after whom Daviess County is named.
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March 10- May 31, 2012
An exhibition of liturgical art features more than two dozen works of stoneware sculpture and includes fourteen Stations of the Cross, Tabernacle, Processional Cross, Tabernacle Lantern, Baptismal Font and assorted Eucharistic vessels given to the museum by the St. Bernadette Church, Prospect, Kentucky.
The collection, commissioned by the church in the mid 1980’s, is by Bardstown, KY, painter and ceramist Jim Cantrell, whose works in a religious genre are featured in churches, monasteries and cathedrals throughout the southeastern states.
