Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Tulsa art exhibit paints portrait of rural life
The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa is celebrating the start of its 75th year with an exhibition of 21 prints from the 1930s to 1950s titled “Rural America.” The works, picked from the museum’s permanent collection of 2,000 or so prints, will be shown Sunday through April 21.
The show, in the Spotlight Gallery of the Philbrook, will include prints by regionalist artists such as Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and Arkansas-born Charles Banks Wilson, a painter, teacher, historian and illustrator, as well as a printmaker.
All of the works are landscapes — some with people working the land. The body of work encompasses several types of printmaking, such as wood engraving, etching with dry point and lithography, said Tom Young, the Philbrook librarian and assistant registrar who curated the exhibition and wrote about it for Philbrook: The Magazine for Members.
Located at 2727 S. Rockford Road, the museum is in a large villa bequeathed in 1938 by oil baron Waite Phillips and his wife, Genevieve, as an art center for Tulsans. Their 72room mansion and 23 acres of grounds remain mostly intact, though museum officials have embellished the grounds over the years with additions and gardens. The Philbrook serves some 150,000 patrons a year.
Young said the Great Depression, the time period included in the exhibition, had a large impact on American printmaking. As people were not able to afford paintings, artists started doing more prints.
“They figured they could sell a $ 5 print before they could sell a $100 painting,” Young said.
The result was more artists working in the medium and a growing number of art organizations and galleries that specifically promoted the sale
of prints, such as the Associated American Artists, Woodcut Society and Prairie Print Makers. Prairie Print Makers and others would organize traveling exhibitions of the artists’ works with the idea that they would continually replace prints as they were sold.
“They would travel around to libraries, colleges, universities, museums,” Young said. In Tulsa, before the Philbrook existed as a museum, the prints were shown at the University of Tulsa and the Junior League Tea Room.
Though the Philbrook has more than 11,000 items in its permanent collection, the prints from the era of the forthcoming exhibition are “a particular strength in our collection,” Young said.
Works used to help promote the exhibition include Clare Leighton’s 1952 wood engraving Corn Pulling, John Edward Costigan’s etching Fodder (1934-37) and Minnetta Good’s lithograph The Valley. One of Young’s favorites is Luigi Lucioni’s etching Theme in White, from 1954.
Leighton’s and Lucioni’s pieces were bequests, and the others were gifts to the Philbrook. Fodder shows a family returning home after having worked in the fields all day.
“It’s looking at sort of the harsh reality of farming,” Young said. “This is survival living.” On the other hand, the included print by Wilson — the Arkansas historian and illustrator — shows a group of boys swinging on a rope over a creek.
Some of the pieces will be seen for the first time during this exhibition, said Tricia Milford- Hoyt, director of communications for the Philbrook. Only 8 percent of the museum’s permanent collection is on view at any one time, she said.
With a full breadth and understanding of the works in the permanent collection, as well as curating exhibitions in-house, “moving forward, most of our exhibitions are no longer traveling exhibitions. We’re pulling from our permanent collection or organizing an original exhibition that’s both a hybrid of our permanent collection and works on loan, or it might be works on loan but looking at it from the perspective of Philbrook,” Milford-Hoyt said.
She said the museum is moving away from the traditional museum “chronological, geographic approach” and trying to figure out how the Philbrook can create moreintegrated shows that demonstrate interesting, thoughtprovoking content.
Also this year, the Philbrook is expected to expand its presence into downtown Tulsa. The space will feature the museum’s growing collection of modern and contemporary art and design, as well as its expansive American Indian collection.