Life > April 21, 2005

By Jessica Pritchard

Editor in Chief

In celebration of a two-year long renovation and expansion project, the Reynolda House Museum of American Art will hold Community Day April 23.

“Community Day is always a way to build ties between town and museum,” said Tom Denenberg, the Betsy Babcock curator of American art at the museum. “We hope to get perhaps 2,000 visitors, though with the new wing anything is possible.”

The event will feature live music, art activities for children, refreshments and tours of the new wing. During the festival, artists and artisans can be seen working and painting while greeters will direct visitors to the tours and activities.

Musical groups including One String Over, Crescendo and several children’s choirs will perform throughout the event, which is held from 2:00 to 5:00 p.m.

John Anderson, the vice president of finance and administration at the university and interim director of the Reynolda House, said that he hopes Community Day will, “show the ‘new’ and restored Reynolda House to our community.”

Construction on the Mary and Charlie Babcock wing began April 9, 2003, just a year after the museum became affiliated with the university. The new 30,000 square foot wing was added to the back of the house so as to preserve the appearance of the front for which the museum is known. The addition nearly doubled the square footage of the museum.

Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planner LLP designed the $12 million wing, whose previous projects include Grand Central Terminal and renovations to the Rockefeller Center.

The new wing opened April 1 featuring a 1936 guesthouse which had been transformed to accommodate a new museum lobby with an orientation gallery and video and oral history stations. The wing also boasts a museum store, a temporary exhibition gallery, an auditorium, an art library, education studios, offices and art and archival storage.

Denenberg said the reception to the new wing has been extremely positive, with visitors traveling large distances to view the renovations and exhibits.

“Visitation has been very strong, even before the main public opening which is Community Day” he said. “It is great to see the new gallery space in the Mary and Charlie Babcock wing crowded with people.”

The wing will house a group of art called “Vanguard Collecting” for its inaugural exhibit. The collection draws from pieces shown during the decade in which the Reynolda House Museum opened, when American Art was still considered a second class citizen compared to classical and European art.

The exhibit is comprised of 25 pieces total. Pieces by Frederic Edwin Church, Mary Cassatt, William M. Harnett and a host of other American artists are featured. The exhibit focuses primarily on pieces by artists who experienced alternating periods of popularity and obscurity. The inspiration for the exhibit was a painting titled “Job Lot Cheap” by Harnett. 

“I think it is fascinating that artists like Church and Bierstadt, the most famous American artists in the 1860s and 1870s, could die in obscurity around 1900,” Denenberg said. “Paintings like this were simply too sentimental for increasingly modern sensibilities at the turn of the century. For example, when Reynolda House acquired ‘Job Lot Cheap’ in 1966, some scholars questioned if it was indeed Harnett or John Peto. By 1992 it was considered to be one of William Harnett’s most important paintings.”

In concert with the addition of the new wing, the remainder of the house was restored to its 1917 conditions. The project, which cost around $600,000, was funded primarily from private donations.

Barbara Babcock Millhouse, the President of Reynolda House, led the restoration and interpretation project. Staples & Charles Ltd. lent their expertise as well.

To recreate a house of the 1910s, drapery and upholstery fabrics were recreated to match the originals and several rooms previously closed to the public were reopened. In addition, two more rooms will be opened in the fall of 2005 to include a works on paper gallery and a decorative arts exhibition.