Exalted Nature Exhibition Publication
Burchfield Penney Art Center
The exhibition Exalted Nature: The Real and Fantastic World of Charles Burchfield, premiered at the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and then traveled to the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York.
White Bicycle designed this 132-page illustrated catalogue that contains essays by both Nancy Weekly and Audrey Lewis. Weekley, the world’s leading authority on the American artist Charles Ephraim Burchfield (1893-1967), co-curated the exhibition with the Brandywine’s Associate Curator Audrey Lewis. Weekly is Head of Collections and the Charles Cary Rumsey Curator at the Burchfield Penney Art Center and Burchfield Penney Instructor of Museum Studies at SUNY Buffalo State. Lewis traces the origins of modernism in Burchfield’s work in comparison with American landscapists.
The exhibition investigated Burchfield’s development of a modernist aesthetic, pioneering painting techniques, and invention of “Conventions for Abstract Thoughts” to convey emotions and “audio-cryptograms” to symbolize sounds from the animated world.
Glowing reviews were published about the exhibition in the media by The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Art & Antiques Magazine, ARTfix Daily, and Courier-Post.
Charles E. Burchfield (1893-1967), Nighthawks at Twilight, 1917-49; watercolor on joined paper, 33 1/2 x 47 inches;
Collection of the Flint Institute of Arts, Flint, Michigan, Gift of the Viola E. Bray Charitable Trust, 1964.3
