October 17, 2011
Zelda Fitzgerald, Louise Wheatley exhibitions open at Evergreen
Evergreen Museum & Library will celebrate the opening of two special exhibitions this week at a reception at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 18.
Wheatley’s ‘Crow Blanket’
The nearly 40-year career retrospective Intimate Earth: The Art of Louise Wheatley features a rotating display of 70 works by contemporary Maryland textile artist and weaver Louise Wheatley. Of astonishing intimacy and complexity, the works “provide an intimate narrative of one artist’s thoughtful and poetic evolution,” said Evergreen Director James Archer Abbott, who curated the exhibition. Wheatley’s most personal pieces—and the exhibition’s collective centerpiece—are her panels of hand-dyed, -spun and -woven threads that explore everything from lone birds to ancient parables to harvested fruits.
Fitzgerald’s ‘Female Figure With Flowers’
Zelda Fitzgerald: Choreography in Color spotlights six watercolors by the Jazz Age icon that were gifted to the university in 1971 by C. Sewell Weech, a 1915 Krieger School alumnus. Woodrow Wilson Research Fellow Laura Maria Somenzi, a junior majoring in history of art and minoring in the Program in Museums and Society, curated the exhibition, which traces “Zelda Fitzgerald’s coming into an artistic independence and an artistic language that is distinctly hers, and also as a way to claim an identity separate from her celebrity husband,” she said, referring to writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Also on view will be paintings of the artist’s borrowed from the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts; first editions of Zelda’s novel, Save Me the Waltz; and a film made in the 1950s by friends of Scottie Fitzgerald, the couple’s daughter.
The Oct. 18 opening event will feature brief remarks by Wheatley and Somenzi, who will be available to sign copies of their respective exhibition publications; an after-hours museum viewing; and a wine and hors d’oeuvres reception. Reservations are requested by emailing evergreenmuseum@jhu.edu or calling 410-516-0341. The exhibitions remain on view through Jan. 29, 2012.
For visiting information, go to museums.jhu.edu.