Palmer Museum of Art Hosts Exhibition Shallow Creek: Thomas Hart Benton and American Waterways
August 30, 2007
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The Palmer Museum of Art announces that the exhibition, Shallow Creek: Thomas Hart Benton and American Waterways, will be on view at the museum September 4-December 2, 2007.
Images of waterways figure prominently in the art of Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975). His depictions of rivers, streams, gullies, and creeks form a subgenre of American landscape painting, inviting us to rethink the artistic meaning and historical legacy of even the narrowest inlets. Among Benton's most significant representations of this subject matter is a body of work from 1938-42 depicting smaller, more intimate coves and creeks. The painting Shallow Creek (1938) is a lynchpin of this series, an extraordinarily personal canvas and yet one of his most symbolically charged works. This exhibition focuses on Shallow Creek, unraveling its richly expressive forms and densely loaded iconographies to reveal an underlying narrative at once markedly public and deeply private in scope. Selected paintings, drawings, gouaches, and prints by Benton will shed further light on the artist's river imagery and related subject matter.
Raised on the waterways of southwestern Missouri, Benton maintained a lifelong love affair with rivers, the physical and visual experience of which, would provide psychic sustenance throughout his life. He periodically fed his appetite for rivers through the novels and short stories of his fellow Missourian Mark Twain, whose characters figure prominently in several of Benton's most important murals. Gouaches, drawings, and prints from the latter projects are also featured in this exhibition.
This exhibition and accompanying publication, distributed by Penn State University Press, are sponsored in part by the Suzanne H. Arnold Charitable Fund and by Bruce Roth. Images available upon request.
Fore more information, please contact Leo Mazow, Curator of American Art, at 814-865-7673 or lgm11@psu.edu.
Contact: Ali Bradley, 814-863-9182, abradley@psu.edu