Oklahoma City Museum of Art celebrates opening of "American Moderns," special fall events

George Wesley Bellow's 1917 painting "The Sand Cart" is part of the "American Moderns" exhibit now on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

From Friday’s Weekend Look section of The Oklahoman. To take a NewsOK video tour of the exhibit, click here.

Oklahoma City Museum of Art celebrates opening of “American Moderns,” special fall events

With its yearlong 10-year anniversary celebration drawing to a close, staffers at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art are expecting an array of famous artists, special events and even draft beers to make for a busy autumn.

The museum is celebrating the opening this week of its new special exhibition “American Moderns, 1910–1960: From O’Keeffe to Rockwell” while preparing to close another visiting exhibit, “The Art of Golf,” on Oct. 7.

Both exhibits feature well-known artists, with “The Art of Golf” spotlighting canvases by Rembrandt, Andy Warhol and Norman Rockwell. “American Moderns” includes work from Rockwell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Anna Mary Robertson “Grandma” Moses and other U.S. artists who have become household names.

“In keeping with the title, there’s four works by O’Keeffe in the exhibition, so you can really get a sense of her work in a way that you can’t with just one painting. They’re all very different, from the aerial view that’s very abstracted … to this painting (of a fishhook) that she did in Hawaii, which is really fascinating,” said Alison Amick, the museum’s curator of collections, about “American Moderns.” “And it’s a typical Rockwell in terms of using humor as a way to make a really serious comment about society.”

Georgia O'Keeffe's 1928 painting "2 Yellow Leaves (Yellow Leaves)" is part of the "American Moderns" exhibit now on view at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art.

Acclaimed artists

Like “The Art of Golf,” “American Moderns” showcases works representing a wide range of artistic styles, media and influences. The traveling exhibit features 53 paintings and four sculptures from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection.

“While all the works are from Brooklyn’s collection, it’s not really a linear survey of everything that was happening in American art from 1910 to 1960. It’s really a nice thematic exploration, taking different themes the artists would have been looking at — the influence of cubism, still life, nature, different personalities or characters as they call them, urban life — and really looking just broadly at how during this period artists were addressing these themes artistically,” Amick said of “American Moderns.” “That explains why each section that you have in this exhibition is so broad and so diverse.”