Keith Haring – Radiant Vision is a must-see. It is a complete immersion into the history and legacy of artist Keith Haring (1958-1990). The Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York did a phenomenal job presenting this traveling exhibition of artwork from the Cassenelli Preston Collection organized by PAN Art Connections, Inc.

Haring was an advocate for healthcare, happiness and children. His work lives on courtesy of The Keith Haring Foundation. If you have never heard of him, you will have seen his imagery in magazines, on billboards and in coloring books.

This is a life history of an artist’s trajectory, tragically shortened by an Aids related death. His career spanned only ten years but it left an indelible mark. The exhibition resonates with emotion. It is incredibly beautiful and powerful.

There is a participation section, as well as an activity book for children to enjoy. Merchandise in the gift shop includes a Haring diary, which I will read this summer.

The exhibition continues through September 6, 2021.

The Fenimore Art Museum –

5798 STATE HIGHWAY 80 (P.O.BOX 800)
COOPERSTOWN, NY 13326
607-547-1400
INFO@FENIMOREART.ORG

Hours of operation –

MONDAY	10am–5pm
TUESDAY	10am–5pm
WEDNESDAY	10am–5pm
THURSDAY	10am–5pm
FRIDAY	10am–5pm
SATURDAY	10am–5pm
SUNDAY	10am–5pm
________________
Fenimore Cafe	11am–3pm

Related Programs

The Public Has a Right to Art: Keith Haring’s Art & Activism
Tuesday, July 27, 7:00–8:00pm EST
A live Zoom lecture about Keith Haring’s art and activism, led by Dr. Leesa Rittelmann. More info…

Keith Haring 3-Day ‘Funshop’ for Kids (ages 6-8)
Mon-Wed, July 19-21, 9:30–11:30am
Young artists will explore the colorful and expressive art of Keith Haring. More info…

Keith Haring 3-Day Illustration Workshop for Kids (ages 9-12)
Mon-Wed, July 19-21, 1:30–4:00pm
A series of projects inspired by the bold, expressive artwork of Keith Haring and the artists and illustrators who inspired him. More info…

Eugene and Clare Thaw began collecting Native American art in 1987 when they lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico. They donated the collection to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York where it currently resides in the downstairs gallery across from the Herb Ritts exhibition.

The life of Eugene V. Thaw is eloquently reviewed in an obituary written by Holland Carter for the New York Times, which I have included in this post. It documents a man’s life-long passion for the arts. His dedication to collecting, amassing more like, and also preserving and selling art is a gift to the world.

In this case, American Indian clothing, jewelry, pottery, and both decorative and functional objects depict the powerfully dignified beauty of a culture/civilization. Although the collection began in the Southwest, the Thaws expanded it to include every region of the US. The pieces are exquisitely displayed via region.

I am especially drawn to the costume, the leather hides, the intricate beadwork and the colors. Just fabulous!

Thank you, Mr. & Mrs. Thaw, for your life’s work and vision – preserving American history through the beauty of its art. <3

The Fenimore Art Museum is open today 10am – 5pm.

5798 STATE HIGHWAY 80 (P.O.BOX 800)
COOPERSTOWN, NY 13326
607-547-1400
INFO@FENIMOREART.ORG

****From the New York Times website

Eugene V. Thaw, Influential Art Collector and Dealer, Is Dead at 90

By Holland Cotter

January 5, 2018

He was born on Oct. 27, 1927, in Washington Heights in Manhattan. His father was a heating contractor, his mother a schoolteacher. They named him for the socialist leader Eugene Victor Debs, who had died the previous year.

As a young teenager, Mr. Thaw took drawing classes at the Art Students League on West 57th Street in Manhattan. But he did not pursue the hands-on practice of art.

“I can’t create the objects I crave to look at,” he later said, “so I collect them.”

After graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx at 15, he entered St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., and began making day trips to art museums in nearby Washington.

Returning to New York in 1947, he took graduate classes in art history at Columbia University with Millard Meiss and Meyer Schapiro. He also followed the city’s contemporary-art scene, getting an early immersion in Pollock’s work at the Betty Parsons Gallery.

Having neither the money nor the social connections generally required to be a museum curator in those days, Mr. Thaw decided on selling art as a career option.

In 1950, with a loan from his father, he opened a gallery above the Oak Room of the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street. He gathered stock in part by rummaging through antique stores and hanging out at small auction houses.

His wares were eclectic. To keep the doors open, he sold Nabis prints and Toulouse-Lautrec posters. But he also researched Rembrandt drawings, handled some Native American material and mounted the first solo show of a newcomer named Joan Mitchell.

In 1954, he moved to Madison Avenue, where he shared a floor with a carpet dealer and a beauty salon. That same year he married Clare Eddy, his gallery assistant, who suggested that when he found things he really liked, he keep them rather than sell them.

With that, his parallel career as a collector began in earnest. It would take him, often in partnership with his wife, in many directions. Although drawings were a lifelong passion, he also built what he termed “subcollections” of 18th-century French faience (a type of tin-glazed earthenware), bronzes from the ancient Eurasian steppes, medieval European ornaments and architectural models, all of which found homes in museums. In 2002, the Eurasian bronzes were part of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

During these early decades, he was mentored by some of the great dealers and collectors of an older generation, including Pierre Matisse and Janos Scholz, and worked closely with contemporaries like Leo Castelli and Sidney Janis. In 1962, Mr. Thaw became a founding member of the Art Dealers Association of America, which he once described as “a fractious, individualistic, secretive, eccentric but talented group of venture capitalists.”

From teachers and colleagues he learned useful sales tricks, one of which involved collaboration with the renowned conservator Mario Modestini. Mr. Thaw would bring clients to Mr. Modestini’s studio and sell paintings “from Mario’s easel, having him clean passages in front of their eyes to reveal truth as old varnish and dirt disappeared.”

Before long, these clients included major museums — the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery in Washington — and private buyers like Paul Mellon and Norton Simon, whose Pasadena museum Mr. Thaw did much to shape.

His closest institutional tie was to what is now the Morgan Libraryand Museum, which in the 1950s was one of the few New York museums to have a curator of drawings. In 1975, after the museum had expanded its acquisition parameters to include 19th-century work, the Thaws decided that the Morgan would be the recipient, in incremental allotments, of their ever-growing holdings. The Morgan exhibition “Drawn to Greatness: Master Drawings From the Thaw Collection,” which opened in September and closes on Sunday, marked the completion of the gift, encompassing more than 400 sheets.

Among them were works by modern and contemporary artists in whom Mr. Thaw took particular interest. In the 1950s, on summer vacations in East Hampton, N.Y., Clare Thaw had struck up a friendship with the painter Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock’s widow. With Ms. Krasner’s cooperation, Mr. Thaw began preparing the multivolume Pollock catalogue raisonné, an annotated listing of all the artist’s known works, in the 1970s, hiring the art historian Francis V. O’Connor as co-author.

At Ms. Krasner’s death in 1984, Mr. Thaw served as executor of her estate and helped establish the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, which gives grants to artists in need.

The Thaws had established their own foundation, the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust, in 1981, using the proceeds from the sale of a single van Gogh painting. The trust supports the arts, the environment and, of particular importance to Ms. Thaw, animal rights.

By then Mr. Thaw was preparing to retire as a dealer, discouraged by the direction the field had taken. “The astronomical growth in wealth over the last generation has fueled merely an interest in treating art as a financial asset,” he wrote.

In 1987, the Thaws moved from their farm in Cherry Valley, in Otsego County, to Santa Fe, N.M. There they began collecting Native American art, eventually acquiring more than 1,000 objects. They later gave the entire collection to the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y., not far from Cherry Valley. A wing designed by Hugh Hardy was built in 1995 to house it.

The Thaws returned to Cherry Valley five years ago, and Ms. Thaw died there in June at 93.

They also lived for many years in an art-filled ground-floor duplex apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan. An article in The New York Times in 2007 said the home “could be mistaken for a museum,” where, among paintings and other art objects, framed drawings by Rembrandt, Goya, Degas, Delacroix, Picasso and Matisse lined the walls.

Mr. Thaw is survived by a son, Nicholas, and a granddaughter.

In the months after his wife’s death, Mr. Thaw focused on seeing the Morgan drawing show through to completion. It is, effectively, a record of his history as a dealer and collector, and of theirs as a couple.

In parting with art that he had devoted his life to collecting, Mr. Thaw was matter-of-fact.

“After I’ve owned them and learned about them, I don’t need them anymore,” he told The Times in 1994. “They’re with me, and I can give them away.”

***From the Fenimore website

EUGENE AND CLARE THAW: A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE

April 2 – December 31, 2019

Discover the most outstanding items from the Thaw Collection American Indian Art. Objects of transcendent beauty that span the continent—from the Arctic to the Southwest, and from the Eastern Woodlands to the Pacific West–encompassing close to 2,000 years of artistic tradition and innovation in North America.

	Fanning \| Karen Tash… on Sensu
	Karen Tashkovski on Flowers
	Judith Hand on Flowers
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Karen Tashkovski

Tag Archives: Fenimore Art Museum

Keith Haring Immortalized

The Thaw Legacy

****From the New York Times website

Eugene V. Thaw, Influential Art Collector and Dealer, Is Dead at 90

***From the Fenimore website

EUGENE AND CLARE THAW: A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE

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***From the Fenimore website

EUGENE AND CLARE THAW: A MEMORIAL TRIBUTE

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Visual Artist