GLENS FALLS, NY — The Hyde Collection is proud to announce that it has received a $100,000 grant from the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation for the care and conservation of the 160 works in the Museum’s newly established Feibes & Schmitt Collection.
Ellsworth Kelly was one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century and a friend of Schenectady-based architects Werner Feibes and the late James Schmitt. In 2016, Mr. Feibes donated to The Hyde Collection the couple’s collection of Modern and Contemporary art, and a $1 million leadership gift toward construction of the Feibes & Schmitt Gallery, which opened to the public on June 10. The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation grant will help conserve the collection, so it can be shared with the public for generations to come.
“We are extremely grateful to the Ellsworth Kelly Foundation and its Director, Jack Shear, for this generous grant that allows us to steward the Feibes & Schmitt Collection,” said Museum Director Erin Coe. “The grant provides critical support for the conservation of this collection of postwar non-objective art, one of the most significant in our region.”
The collection consists of paintings, drawings, prints, mixed media, and sculpture, and includes works by Josef Albers, Jean (Hans) Arp, Keith Haring, Grace Hartigan, Ellsworth Kelly, Julio Le Parc, Sol LeWitt, Robert Motherwell, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, Man Ray, Robert Rauschenberg, George Rickey, Bridget Riley, David Smith, and Andy Warhol, among many others. The Museum is committed to conserving, exhibiting, and sharing this significant collection with the public in the new Feibes & Schmitt Gallery devoted to Modern and Contemporary art.
“The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation would like to recognize The Hyde Collection’s commitment to exhibiting Modern and Contemporary art and we are pleased to make this gift in honor of Werner Feibes and James Schmitt,” said Jack Shear, President of the Foundation. “The gift brings together two important elements of the Foundation’s mission: a commitment to preserve important works of art for future generations, and support for the cultural life of our local community.”
Based in rural Spencertown, New York, where the artist lived and worked for many years, The Ellsworth Kelly Foundation supports the essential but often under-recognized field of art conservation, having made grants to more than fifty museums and historic preservation projects throughout the United States and internationally. The Foundation distributes half its grants locally, supporting many community-based cultural and civic organizations, including a major arts-in-education initiative in Columbia County public schools.
On Saturday, June 24, The Hyde opens Ellsworth Kelly: Slow Curve, an exhibition of seventy prints that examines the influential artist’s exploration of the curve, perhaps his most iconic shape, and Fruits & Flowers, an exhibition of twenty-six lithographs based on Kelly’s renderings of plant life from which many of his non-rectilinear shapes were derived. The exhibitions are from the extensive collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation in Portland, Oregon.
Also at The Hyde
To Distribute and Multiply: The Feibes & Schmitt Gift features more than forty works of art from some of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. To Distribute and Multiply is a selection chosen from the collection of Werner Feibes and the late James Schmitt, who donated their 160-piece collection to the Museum. The exhibition demonstrates who Messrs. Feibes and Schmitt were as art lovers and collectors, and features the works of Jean Arp, Josef Albers, Grace Hartigan, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, Man Ray, Louise Nevelson, George Rickey, and Bridget Riley, among others. The exhibition is open through the end of the year.
What is The Hyde?
The Hyde Collection is one of the Northeast’s exceptional small art museums with distinguished collections of European, American, Modern, and Contemporary art. Its permanent collection of nearly 4,000 works spans centuries and consists of paintings, drawings, graphics, sculpture, furniture, and decorative arts. The core collection, acquired by Museum founders Louis and Charlotte Hyde, includes works by such artists as Sandro Botticelli, El Greco, Rembrandt, Peter Paul Rubens, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and American artists Thomas Eakins, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, and James McNeill Whistler. The Museum’s collection of Modern and Contemporary art features works by artists including Josef Albers, Dorothy Dehner, Sam Gilliam, Adolph Gottlieb, Grace Hartigan, Ellsworth Kelly, Sol LeWitt, George McNeil, Robert Motherwell, Ben Nicholson, Robert Rauschenberg, and Bridget Riley. The Hyde Collection presents changing exhibitions in its three galleries, as well as lectures, cultural events, family activities, and school programming in its modern museum complex and historic house at 161 Warren St., Glens Falls.
For more information, please visit www.hydecollection.org or call 518-792-1761.
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For More Information:
Rhonda Triller
Communications Associate
The Hyde Collection
518.792.1761 ext. 320
[email protected]
