The Taft Museum of Art’s historic house may be celebrating its 200–year anniversary this year but its two newest exhibits, In a New Light | Treasures from the Taft and Borrowed Gems from the Taft Museum of Art, are all about having a 21st-century perspective.
Premiering in July, the temporary exhibits will display select pieces from the museum’s permanent collection with a twist: an entirely new location.
In a New Light, which will be available July 3-May 1, will feature more than 80 works pulled from the museum in its Fifth Third Gallery. The curated exhibit puts a modern twist on an old collection by allowing modern audiences to examine Anna and Charles Taft’s legacy as some of Cincinnati’s most prolific art collectors. Key pieces of the couple’s collection will be displayed with special themes such as wealth, gender and racial inequality and the destruction of the environment, a press release says.
Visitors interested in the Borrowed Gems exhibit will have to travel just a little further than the Taft Museum. Around 40 works from the Taft Museum’s collection will be available in a free public exhibit at the Cincinnati Museum Center July 23-February 21. Paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Charles François Daubigny as well as the museum’s distinctive collection of Qing dynasty ceramics will be loaned from one museum to the other in order to give visitors the opportunity to appreciate them in an entirely new setting, says the release.
The creation of these two new temporary exhibits marks only the second time that the Taft’s art collection has been removed from the historic home since the museum originally opened nearly 90 years ago in 1932, the museum’s release says. This reevaluation of long-standing tradition seems to be what associate curator Tamera Lenz Muente is looking for.
“Some may ask, ‘does an art collection assembled nearly 100 years ago still hold relevance today?’” Lenz Muente says in the press release. “We invite audiences to embrace this conversation and dialogue with us as we continue to learn more about our historic house and the legacy of the artwork it contains.”
Both exhibits are a part of the museum’s larger effort to improve the stability of the historic house itself, also known as the Bicentennial Infrastructure Project. The project, which is set to begin in August and continue into next spring, will mean a bit of an unconventional summer for the museum’s visitors.
The deinstallation of the museum’s art collection and the infrastructure rehabilitation means that certain galleries will become unavailable on a rolling basis, but the museum will remain open. Complimentary admission will be offered, and all other museum amenities such as the Museum Shop and the Linder Family Cafe will still be available.
For more information, visit taftmuseum.org/bicentennial.
This article appears in May 1-31, 2021.
