Skude 360 Degrees: An Exhibition of Paintings by Severin Haines
Curated by Hannah Haines

Boknfjell
Severin Haines
2007
oil on canvas
36" x 36"

The New Bedford Art Museum is pleased to present the first major American one-person painting exhibition in 10 years by Fairhaven artist and UMass Dartmouth art educator, Severin Haines.

SKUDE 360° is an engaging and seductively beautiful array of 38 oil paintings and pastel studies focused on the dramatic land, shore and townscapes of his native Skude, located on the southwest coast of Norway. The exhibit also serves as a visual memoir of the site of Haines’ boyhood.

Sig Haines, as he is known locally, earned his BFA from the Swain School of Design in New Bedford in 1968, then went on to earn his MFA in Painting from Yale University in 1972. For several years, he taught at Swain and then continued as an art educator at UMass Dartmouth when it established itself in the SouthCoast.

He has exhibited widely in the region, as well as in Norway. And to extend public interest in Haines’ artistic reputation and career, SKUDE 360° will travel to the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle next winter.

Haines is a colorist painter who has always been inspired by nature. A rare combination of a representational artist, with a priority interest in the interaction of colors as the agent for creating visual space and depth, SKUDE 360° represents Haines at his creative and artistic peak. Not only will the exhibit be of interest to aficionados and connoisseurs of painting, but equally for our Norwegian community as they peruse the vivid images of their homeland.

SKUDE 360° is curated by the artist’s daughter, Hannah Haines, who is known regionally as a celebrated graphic designer. Ms. Haines has created a spectacular 44-page, full-color catalog for the exhibit, which will be available in the NBAM gift shop for a donation of $20.

In addition, NBAM will offer two free-to-the-public Artist Talks, on Saturday, March 1, at 2 p.m. and on Thursday, March 13, at 7 p.m.

Opening February 14

Paper Cuts, Pottery and Primitives: Polish Folk and Decorative Arts
Guest Curated by Agata & John Caron

 

With this exhibit of Treasured Objects, NBAM welcomes viewers to the rich, vibrant and creative energy of Polish artists — both folk artists working in the colorful Polish vernacular style as well as decorative artists responding with a uniquely Polish interpretation to general European stylistic periods and trends.

The first connecting thread of the exhibit is Polish decorative and industrial arts, largely unknown and unheralded in the United States.

Objects included in the exhibition span the broad European cultural trends of the 20th Century — from the lithe Art Nouveau (known as the Secesja, or Secession, in Poland) of the turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries to the prevalent masculine Art Deco style of the 1920s and 1930s to funky Modernist postwar styles, influenced in part by the space race and the Soviet Sputnik.

 

A second thread of the exhibition is the fertile creativity of unschooled Polish folk artists. Until World War II, Poland was one of the great peasant societies of Eastern Europe. It was this peasant tradition, suffused with the pageantry and ceremony of the Roman Catholic church, which produced the broad variety of sacred and secular objects — delicate painted Easter eggs, folk Christmas tree ornaments, the universal figure of the Chrystus frasobliwy, “sorrowful Christ,” reverse-glass paintings, wood carvings, pottery and paper cuts — that viewers of the exhibit will encounter.

Zapraszamy! (You are invited) ... to discover a glimpse of the artistic creativity of Poland!