Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts to Host Opening of Four Exhibitions and a Guest Lecture in Early 2013 | Arts & Culture

Montgomery, AL—The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts will celebrate the openings of four exhibitions on Thursday, January 17, 2013 from 6 to 7 PM with an opening reception. The exhibitions are: In Company with Angels: Seven Rediscovered Tiffany Windows; Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper; Cam Langley: Glass; and William Dawson.  Following the reception, at 7 PM, Dr. Bernie Herman, professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina and exhibition curator of Thornton Dial: Thoughts on Paper, will lend his insight into the life and work of the artist, Thornton Dial.

More Information about the exhibitions:
In Company With Angels: Seven Rediscovered Tiffany Windows
January 19 through March 17
 
In 1902, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848--1933) created seven eight-foot-tall, stained-glass windows for a Swedenborgian church in Cincinnati. When the church was demolished in 1964, the windows were saved, forgotten about, and subsequently restored. Each window features an angel that represents a passage from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. The windows utilize the rich and varied palette of Tiffany’s rolled, textured, antique, opalescent, drapery, and flashed glass. While the faces and flesh of the angels were painted by hand, the rest of the windows are “plated,” an innovative technique of layering glass that imparts great depth to the imagery. The windows, reproductions of selected historical documents, and a video of the windows’ conservation treatment weave together art, history, and spirituality.


Thornton Dial
Thoughts on Paper
January 12 through March 17
 
Since the early 1990s, Thornton Dial (born1928) has produced a rich body of lyrical works on paper, often engaged with themes of gender and human relationships. The exhibition focuses on the earliest of those drawings, featuring 50 sheets with Dial’s characteristic and broadly coherent iconography of women, fish, birds, roosters, and tigers rendered in a variety of media. This pioneering exhibition presents a lesser known aspect of the work of Dial, a Bessemer, Alabama artist with an international reputation, best known for his large-scale, multi-media assemblages that deal with a wide range of charged social and political themes.
 
Cam Langley
GLASS
January 12 through March 17
 
As a participant in the American Studio Glass movement for more than 30 years, Birmingham artist Cam Langley created hand-blown objects that were both functional and formally inventive. Trained as a civil engineer at Virginia Tech, he transitioned to a career as an artist after a visit with the man recognized as the dean of the American Studio Glass movement, Harvey Littleton (American, born 1922).  Littleton organized the first glassblowing seminar on the grounds of the Toledo Art Museum in 1962, and he founded the first university-level hot glass program at the University of Wisconsin—Madison. After learning what he could from Littleton, Langley mastered the techniques of glass blowing at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, and subsequently established his hot glass studio in Birmingham.   This exhibition will feature 22 glass objects that are now a part of the MMFA’s permanent collection—a miniature survey of the artist’s career in glass blowing.  His most utilized forms are represented: single flowers, floral bouquets, goblets, stemware, and flower bowls.  A selection of loans from private collections will also be included.

William Dawson
Through March 24, 2013

Known primarily for his carved figures and totems, William Dawson (1901--1990) also created numerous paintings of animal subjects and futuristic visions of architectural spaces. Born and raised in Huntsville, Alabama, memories from his childhood on his family farm inspired much of Dawson's work, as seen in his images of birds, dogs, cats, horses, and cows. In addition to his depictions of animals, Dawson created portraits of friends, celebrities, and political figures both sculpturally and on paper.
 
After gaining wide recognition with his inclusion in the seminal 1982 exhibition, Black Folk Art in America: 1930-1980, at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, Dawson continued to create an astonishingly varied body of work throughout the rest of his life. The exhibition, William Dawson, brings one of the South's important artists to the forefront by highlighting his signature wood sculptures and his paintings alongside the playful assemblages Dawson created from an assortment of materials such as chicken bones, hair, wire, and other found objects.

The Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; and Sunday Noon to 5 p.m. Admission is free and donations are welcome. For more information, call the MMFA at 334.240.4333 or visit the website at www.mmfa.org.
 
The MMFA, a department of the City of Montgomery, is supported by funds from the City of Montgomery and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts Association.  Programs are made possible, in part, by grants from the Alabama State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Information Source: MMFA