The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art at St Petersburg College will host an exhibition of 70 color woodblock prints from the collection of Two Red Roses Foundation. This exhibition, which is the second collaboration between the Two Red Roses Foundation and the Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art, will open November 2 and run through January 9. Guest curator is independent scholar Susan J. Montgomery.
A dozen artists, including Americans Gustave Baumann, Arthur Wesley Dow, Frances Gearhart, Edna Boies Hopkins and Margaret Jordan Patterson, as well as F. Morley Fletcher of England and Austrian Secessionist Max Kurzweil, will be represented by 70 prints and two books.
The exhibition will show the remarkable reawakening of a medium inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e prints due largely to the efforts of Dow beginning in the 1890s and the subsequent achievements into the 1930s on both the East and West Coasts of the United States, as individual artists interpreted the medium with their own personal visions.
Highlights will include a complete portfolio of Baumann’s “In the Hills O’ Brown,” Dow’s personal copy of “By Salt Marshes,” a 1908 collaborative book of woodblock prints and poetry by Everett Stanley Hubbard, and a rare example of “The Bookworm” by the pioneer of British woodblock prints, F. Morley Fletcher.
The Two Red Roses Foundation is a nonprofit educational institution dedicated to promoting the American Arts and Crafts movement, an effort to reform the design and production of furniture, ceramics, metalwork and other decorative arts in the early 1900s.
The Leepa-Rattner Museum of Art is at 600 Klosterman Road. For information, www.spcollege.edu/central/museum or 727-712-5762.
