Contact: Mike Horyczun
Director of Public Relations
(203) 413-6735
For Immediate Release
January 11, 2010
Exotic Encounters: Art, Travel, and Modernity
in the Collection of the Bruce Museum
January 23, 2010 – April 25, 2010
Bruce Museum, 1 Museum Drive, Greenwich, CT
Romare Bearden (1914-1988)
Three Women, 1979
Lithograph, 81/100, 28 ¼ x 21 in.
Bruce Museum collection, Gift of Raymond Dubrowski, 1982
The Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, demonstrates the powerful relationship between
traveling and art, both in its making and collecting in Exotic Encounters: Art, Travel, and Modernity in
the Collection of the Bruce Museum, a major, new exhibition drawn from highlights of its own collection
on view in the Museum’s main galleries from Saturday, January 23, 2010, through Sunday, April 25,
2010. The show is supported by the Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund.
Exotic Encounters reveals a little-recognized but key aspect of modern aesthetics, featuring
approximately 70 rare, rich and wondrous objects brought back from journeys all over the word that now
reside in the collection of the Bruce Museum. For the artist and collector, the physical displacement of a
journey is a thrilling yet frustratingly evanescent experience. Depicting what one has seen or felt abroad
and collecting objects that evoke far-away places and people are ways to recollect the excitement of
travel, preserving the sensations of exotic encounters that might otherwise vanish into thin air.
- more -
-2Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator Kenneth Silver culls the permanent collection of the Bruce
Museum to present an exhibition that reshuffles the deck of cherished art and artifacts, uncovering the
complex and surprising connections between the extraordinary places we visit and the remarkable things
we bring back. Exotic Encounters: Art, Travel, and Modernity in the Collection of the Bruce
Museum includes a vast array of painting, sculpture, and photography, as well as decorative and
utilitarian objects, including works by Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Wharton Edwards, Jean-Baptiste
Carpeaux, and Romare Bearden, as well as a myriad of anonymous craftsmen-and-women.
The lure of European culture for American artists and travelers in the late-19th and early 20th
centuries are amply demonstrated in works depicting the canals of Venice, the British countryside, and
French Gothic architecture. The “orientalist” fascination with Islamic and Middle-Eastern culture is seen
not only in exquisite depictions of Arab costume but also in rare vintage photographs from the 1860s of
Egyptian temples and funerary sculpture (some still half-buried in sand). Also on display in the exhibition
are examples of the decorative arts of China and Japan with which well-to-do American tourists at the
turn of the century embellished their homes, paintings of the Pacific islands and the Caribbean made by
artists in search of well-earned escape, and carved objects from Africa that testified to the western search
for extreme foreign experience, often in the context of colonial exploitation. Finally, works of art and
objects related to travels throughout the Americas conclude the exhibition - from Mexican crafts and preColumbian sculpture to the arts of Native North Americans, including basketry, beadwork, painting and
sculpture.
Works of art, ethnographic documents, trophies and souvenirs, however we describe them, many
of the things that have filled our homes and public collections for centuries have a shared origin in
chronicling the experiences of travel and serving as examples of artistic tourism.
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The Bruce Museum is located at 1 Museum Drive in Greenwich, Connecticut, near Interstate-95, Exit 3,
and a short walk from the Greenwich, CT train station. Museum hours are: Tuesday through Saturday 10
a.m. to 5 p.m., Sunday 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission: $7 for
adults, $6 for seniors and students, and free for children under five and members. Free admission to all
on Tuesdays. Groups of eight or more require advance reservations. Museum exhibition tours are held
Fridays at 12:30 p.m. Free, on-site parking is available. The Bruce Museum is accessible to individuals
with disabilities. For information, call the Bruce Museum at (203) 869-0376, or visit the Bruce Museum
website at www.brucemuseum.org.
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