6.5.2010 - 9.11.2010
Taking Flight: The Birds of John James Audubon

Everyone knows or assumes they know John James Audubon and his work. It is easy to be sure that he was the first artist to study birds and turn them into high art. Not true and Birds of the Enlightenment: Predecessors and Contemporaries of J.J. Audubon proves the point brilliantly.

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Vault Series: Portraits

6.6.2008 ~ 9.11.2008
Jane Tuckerman Haunted

Jane Tuckerman's exceptional relationship with the medium of photography has resulted in a stunning array of imagery. Exploring the ritualistic, transformative, and magical aspects of various cultures, her work is both tranquil and unsettling. Though incredibly candid and humane, her art's undeniable strength is that it seeks to include the viewer in an open dialogue with both the artist and subject. She compels us to not only look, but to see in unexpected ways. While grounded in photography, Tuckerman often pushes her poignant exploration into the realms of painting, collage and sculpture.

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• Kathryn Lee Smith: Crossing the Fine White Line

1.23.2008 ~ 5.23.2008
Skude 360 Degrees: An Exhibition of Paintings by 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.

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• Paper Cuts, Pottery and Primitives: Polish Folk and Decorative Arts

9.20.2007 ~ 12.31.2007
Reclaimed & Rejuvinated: Discards Into Art

This exhibit originated from a proposal made by a regional artist on behalf of a small group of fellow artists who felt their work had a major ingredient in common — that each re-employed objects and materials that society would agree had been rejected, thrown away, used up and cast off.

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• New Works by Stephen Whittlesey
• Vault Series: Alan Johnston (Scotland)

5.31.2007 ~ 8.31.2007
Charles Henry Gifford (1839-1904) — A Local Artist's Journey

This exhibition features over 60 objects will feature art from private collections, most of which have never been exhibited publicly. A few of C.H. Gifford’s large commissioned works will be displayed alongside his “little gems” — oils, watercolors, India ink drawings, studies and sketches. By honoring one of our local artists, we will celebrate this unique period in our history when the city was brimming with a creative and entrepreneurial spirit, where artists were hard at work in their studios, supported by many art galleries and dealers, framers and gilders.

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• Transforming Art ~ As Time Goes By — Photographs by RJ Katz
• Junior Docents & Youth Art Museum Education Programs

1.20.2007 ~ 5.6.2007
Four Figurative Artists: Pamela Hoss, Laurie Kaplowitz, Anne Leone & Stacy Latt Savage

Humanly Possible brings together four artists whose work depends — and has for their entire career as artists — upon realistic representation centering on the human figure and its familiar surroundings. In a time when the public often finds abstraction and conceptual art difficult to follow, it is sometimes comforting to guarantee realistic images in an exhibition. But these artists are not your great-grandmother's realists. Their work demands a lot of looking, a lot of thought about just what is being portrayed and a further guarantee of an intellectually challenging viewing.

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• Deconstructing Liberty (It's Not Easy Being Green)
• Go Figure! / An Evolving Youth Art Exhibit

9.28.2006 ~ 12.31.2006
Masters of Watercolors: Recent Work by Members of the New England Watercolor Society

A unique exhibition of 80 prize-winning paintings by more than 50 current members of the New England Watercolor Society, representing the broad range of artistic genres and styles they practice. Known among artists as a “difficult medium” to master, the art of watercolor painting is presented in all its glory — from works of delicate intimacy and subtlety to those of bold coloration and design.

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• Mike Mazer Paints New Bedford & Other Scenes from the South Coast
• Nature Intercepted

6.1.2006 ~ 9.15.2006
Inviting Response: Celebrating Our First Decade

To mark the 10th anniversary of providing the public with opportunities to experience, understand and appreciate art, this special commemorative summer exhibition is designed to be a visual arts bridge between New Bedford's illustrious artistic and cultural past and its current and future blossoming as an arts and culture center. It is hoped that INVITING RESPONSE will reflect NBAM's role as a leader in promoting and advancing the range and importance of our region's long involvement with the visual arts.

1.28.2006 ~ 5.7.2006
Nature Interrupted

In Nature Interrupted, five artists show very diverse aspects of their concern. They may focus on a rare species in danger of extinction, such as the eagle in Osmo Rauhala’s captivating video images, or the preservation of trees threatened by disease, as in Joan Backes’ paintings of tree bark, which could, in the future, become a point of reference to a species no longer in existence. Willy Heeks’s work, even though abstract, is probably the closest to early-century nature paintings, with his layerings of colors and forms that celebrate trees, oceans, earth and skies. Dannielle Tegeder’s drawings depict a certain geometric growth as in the construction of ant colonies or mole hills — it is up to the viewer’s imagination to decide whether Tegeder’s “city” is above or under the ground. Soazic Guezennec transfers the African jungle to a suburban surrounding, embellishing it with colorful billboard images resembling a tree house, giraffe or field of orchids.

9.29.2005 ~ 12.31.2005
The Artist as Social Commentator: Prints by Honoré Daumier

Honoré Victorin Daumier (1808-1879), the French painter, sculptor and lithographer, did as much as any artist of his time to raise the political and social awareness of the citizens of France in the mid-19th century. In the span of four decades, he produced over 4,000 prints of social and political satire that reached thousands of people (many illiterate) through the illustrated journals, La Caricature and Le Charivari, and a number of lithographic albums that were produced for commercial sale.

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• Lewis Hine: The Faces of Child Labor in New Bedford 1911-1912
• INSPIRATIONS: artMOBILE & SuMmerART '05 Exhibit
• Vault Series Focus: Ragna Róbertsdóttir
  

6.6.2005 ~ 9.2.2005
Visions of Moby-Dick: 3 Contemporary Artists: Aileen Callahan, George Klauba, Mark Milloff

Three contemporary artists — Aileen Callahan, George Klauba and Mark Milloff — continue the tradition of interpreting Moby-Dick visually, illuminating it in powerful, innovative and distinctly different ways. Working in diverse media and drawing on abstraction, realism and mysticism, they each bring new understanding to Melville’s multi-nuanced and memorable novel.

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• Vault Series Focus: Ragna Róbertsdóttir.
  

2.2.2005 ~ 5.12.2005
Proviencetown: A Creative Colony

Representing a broad selection of artists from the early 1900s to the present that called Provincetown their artistic home, the collections of P-Town residents James Bakker and Russell Bigelow concentrate on this historically renowned creative colony. Nearly 100 works astutely chosen by the collectors for this NBAM exhibit focus on lesser-known artists who made significant contributions to what has become known as the Provincetown school. The selections include paintings, prints, sculpture, and photographs, and represent approximately 70 artists, of whom about half are still productive.

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• Digital Atelier: Reflective Visions, Karin Schminke, Dorothy Simpson Krause, Bonny Pierce Lhotka
  

9.18.2004 ~ 12.31.2005
John Thornton Pantings: A Retrospective

Beginning in the early 1960s, and throughout his career as an artist to the present day, New Bedford painter John Thornton has engaged in a series of evolutionary conversations — intellectual, emotional, and visual — with issues of abstraction. Each has resulted in distinctive phases or series of works that are, nevertheless, interconnected with a visual logic that invites rather than confounds insightful viewing.

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• "A Ten Year Journey" & SuMmerART Exhibit

2.1.2004 ~ 5.25.2004
A Textile Legacy ~ Celebrating Barbara A. Goldberg, Artist & Teacher

Barbara Goldberg's shibori patterned textiles are the cornerstone of this exhibition. In her work she has merged personal conceptual investigation with traditional Japanese techniques for indigo dyed linen, or sumptuously colored velvets. The simplicity of composition and color in her textiles often conceals the intense mastery of technique, which is Barbara's aesthetic signature.

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• "Vault Series Focus: Michael Cochran"
• "Traditional Costumes of the World Cultures: The Golden Triangle/Tri-works Collection of New Bedford"

9.27.2003 ~ 1.16.2004
From the Ground Up: Art of the Skateboard Culture

An exhibition of art in various mediums including local, regional, national and international art of, surrounding, created by, inspired by and about skateboarders. One of the first museum exhibits of its kind in the country, From the Ground Up: Art of the Skateboard Culture showcases the art created and inspired by the skateboard world.

5.22.2003 ~ 9.12.2003
The Etchings of R. Swain Gifford

After more than a century, American artist-etchers of the 1880s are entering a new era of appreciation, and among them Robert Swain Gifford (1840-1905) deserves perhaps the highest esteem. A resident of Dartmouth, Massachusetts, R. Swain Gifford achieved fame within the New York City art scene throughout the last decades of the 19th century. Like his friends and contemporaries Louis Comfort Tiffany, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Moran, Gifford was a pivotal character in the evolution of American landscape art.

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• Vault Series Focus: Ben Frank Moss Contemporary Etchings: Works by Seven Artists
• artMOBILE 2003

1.23.2003 ~ 5.9.2003
This is a Test

"THIS IS A TEST" is an ongoing project that has almost become for the exhibits curator a sculptural document of the history of the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS).

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• The Gregorian Collection: Oriental rugs

10.10.2002 ~ 1.10.2003
New England Sculptors Association Exhibition 2002

Sculpture, more than any other art form, engages the viewer in a physical relation to the art. With sculpture, one is challenged by a changing perception of the work when it is seen from different angles. Some will find different viewpoints especially appealing.

6.6.2002 ~ 9.27.2002
Cecil Clark Davis: A Woman Ahead of Her Time

Over the course of her rarified life, Cecil Clark Davis (1877—1955) developed into an award-winning portrait artist who painted many of the important people of her era, including flyer Charles Lindbergh, actor Lionel Barrymore, Arctic explorer Roald Amundsen and inventor Alexander Graham Bell. In many ways, she was a woman ahead of her time.

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• artMOBILE 2002 & Summer Art: "Art From Many Hands"
• Richard Harding Davis: Marion's Famous Summer Resident

Separated into three shows, 7 SouthCoast Photographers features the works of seven of the region's outstanding commercial photographers.

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• Facets of Community: A Collaboration in Art Education
• Legends and Legacies of the Irish in New Bedford