At the end of 2008, the Academy Art Museum was selected to receive 50 works of art from New York collectors Dorothy and Herbert Vogel as part of a national gifts program entitled The Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collection: Fifty Works for Fifty States. The Vogel Collection has been characterized as unique among collections of contemporary art, both for the character and breadth of the objects and for the individuals who created it. Herbert Vogel (1922 – 2012), spent most of his working life as an employee of the United States Postal Service, and Dorothy Vogel (b. 1935), was a reference librarian at the Brooklyn Public Library. From January 20 through April 1, 2018, the Museum will feature a combination of works that are part of the larger Vogel Collection in its Spitaleri Gallery.
The Vogel gift, and the resulting exhibitions such as this, was many years in the making. The National Gallery of Art has worked closely with Dorothy and Herbert Vogel since 1991, when it acquired a portion of their collection, through partial purchase and gift from the Vogels.
“Gifts such as this and its subsequent display are energizing to the community,” says Academy Art Museum Curator Anke Van Wagenberg, “As our audience well knows, the Vogel gift changed the future of the Academy Art Museum and other recipient institutions by strengthening its collection of contemporary holdings.”
The best-known aspects of the Vogel Collection are minimal and conceptual art, such as the numerous sheets by Richard Tuttle or the sculptural work of Cheryl Laemmle and John Francis Torreano. This exhibition makes clear, however, there are many figurative and expressionist works by artists, such as Lucio Pozzi, Mark Kostabi, Peter Hutchinson, and Moshe Kupferman, to name just a few. These works blend nicely with the Museum’s other strong contemporary holdings. In addition to the Spitaleri Gallery selections, the Museum’s Calvert Gallery will be dedicated purely to small works on paper by Richard Tuttle, whose delicate watercolors are both minimalistic and evocative.
The Museum’s exhibitions are generously supported by the Maryland State Arts Council, the Talbot County Arts Council and the Star-Democrat. For additional information, visit academyartmuseum.org or call the Museum at 410-822-2787.
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