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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
March 11, 2008

PRESS CONTACT:           
Andrea Potochniak
607 254-4563
arp37@cornell.edu

Major grant is in support of upcoming exhibition
and catalogue about London’s Bloomsbury group

Ithaca, NY—Cornell University’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities* grant of $366,292 in support of their upcoming traveling exhibition A Room of Their Own: The Artists of Bloomsbury, scheduled to open at the Johnson in 2009. The Johnson Museum was one of thirteen museums nationwide to receive this Public Programs/Museums Implementation grant during that funding cycle.

The exhibition will travel to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina; the Mary and Leigh Block Museum at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; the Smith College Museum of Art in Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Palmer Museum at Penn State University. A Room of Their Own will be accompanied by a major catalogue, a free visitors’ guide, multimedia components and extensions, a website version of the exhibition and catalogue, and a full range of programming, culminating with a scholarly symposium at Cornell.

Although of another place and time, the Bloomsbury group confronted issues that are remarkably current: international crises, war, the value of craft in an industrialized world, women’s rights, environmental protection, and the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful in their art and their lives. The exhibition, by examining the group’s responses to these issues, provides a valuable mirror on how people can address similar concerns today. A hundred years after the Bloomsbury group was established, their story still resonates and brings together a variety of interests across many artistic and intellectual pursuits. Museum audiences will come away with a better appreciation of this fertile period when fine artists collaborated closely with dancers, choreographers, musicians, and writers to create startling new works and art forms.

The name Bloomsbury conjures up an image of early twentieth century Bohemia, where a core group of literary friends that included Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey, and E. M. Forster were joined by a host of other writers, including Katherine Mansfield, Vita Sackville-West, and D. H. Lawrence; philosophers Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore; psychoanalysts Alix and James Strachey; and poets T. S. Eliot, Rupert Brooke, and Siegfried Sassoon. But Bloomsbury was much more richly patterned and complex than even this eminent list suggests. A group of fine artists, including Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, critic and painter Roger Fry, Lytton Strachey’s talented cousin Duncan Grant, and Dora Carrington, Strachey’s longtime companion, formed the nucleus of visual Bloomsbury.

Conceived to exemplify the breadth and strength of the complex artistic output of the Bloomsbury artists, the exhibition will include over 120 paintings, watercolors, drawings, books from the Hogarth Press, and decorative works from the Omega Workshop.

Nancy Green, the organizing curator and the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs at the Johnson, was also awarded two research grants for this project from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas.

* Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the exhibition, publications, and programming do not necessarily reflect those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The Johnson Museum has a permanent collection of over 30,000 works of art from Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America. The museum building was designed by I. M. Pei. Funds for the building were donated by Cornell alumnus Herbert F. Johnson, late president and chairman of S C Johnson. The building opened in 1973.

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The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, located on the campus of Cornell University, is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Admission is free. The Museum is completely accessible for mobility-impaired visitors, and a wheelchair is available in the lobby. Metered parking is available in the lot next to the Museum. For more information, please call 607 255-6464. Visit the Museum’s website at www.museum.cornell.edu. The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art is a proud member of Ithaca’s Discovery Trail: www.DiscoveryTrail.com.

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