Asheville – The Asheville Art Museum will host two programs available to the public with Victoria Browning Wyeth on March 26, 2022. Victoria Browning Wyeth, the only grandchild of iconic artist Andrew Wyeth, will provide a comprehensive 45-minute walking tour of the Museum’s special exhibition, The Wyeths: Three Generations | Works from the Bank of America Collection. Victoria will also give a one-hour presentation on the life and work of her grandfather, Andrew Wyeth. On view through May 30, The Wyeths: Three Generations is a brilliant collection of more than 60 paintings, drawings, and illustrations by three generations of Wyeth family artists including N. C., Andrew, Henriette, and Jamie. Registration is required for both programs at ashevilleart.org.
Asheville Art Museums presents Private Exhibition Tour with Victoria Wyeth
Saturday, March 26, 2022; 10–11am
$65 (Members receive a $20 discount)
Join Victoria Browning Wyeth for a 45-minute walking tour of the special exhibition The Wyeths: Three Generations | Works from the Bank of America Collection. Ms. Wyeth will take visitors through the exhibition and focus on the work of N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, and Jamie Wyeth, contextualizing each painting and discussing the techniques involved in their creation. Register at ashevilleart.org/event/private-tour-victoria-wyeth.
Asheville Art Museums presents In Conversation | I Paint My Life: A Close Look at the Work of Andrew Wyeth
Saturday, March 26, 2022; 6–7pm
$95 (Members receive a $20 discount)
In conjunction with the special exhibition The Wyeths: Three Generations | Works from the Bank of America Collection, join Victoria Browning Wyeth for a one-hour presentation on the life and work of her grandfather, Andrew Wyeth. Ms. Wyeth will examine Andrew Wyeth’s major works from both Maine and Pennsylvania and how they connect to the paintings from the Bank of America Collection. She will discuss the technique involved with his various media and share family stories surrounding the images. Register at ashevilleart.org/event/in-conversation-wyeth.
This collection provides a comprehensive survey of works by N. C. Wyeth, one of America’s finest illustrators; his son, Andrew, and daughter, Henriette, accomplished realist painters; and Andrew’s son, Jamie, a popular portraitist. Through the works of these artists from three generations of the Wyeth family, themes of American history, artistic techniques, and creative achievements can be explored. This exhibition featuring more than 60 paintings, drawings, and illustrations will be on view in the Asheville Art Museum’s Explore Asheville Exhibition Hall February 12 through May 30, 2022. This is a ticketed exhibition and tickets are on sale now at ashevilleart.org.
About Victoria and Andrew
Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is one of the United States’ most popular artists, and his paintings follow the American Realist tradition. He was influenced by the works of Winslow Homer, whose watercolor technique he admired, as well as by the art of Howard Pyle and his father, N. C. While Andrew painted recognizable images, his use of line and space often imbue his works with an underlying abstract quality. The exhibition includes important works from the 1970s and 1980s as well as recent paintings.
Victoria Browning Wyeth, the only grandchild of iconic artist Andrew Wyeth, is the daughter of Nicholas and Jane Wyeth. Her father is a private art dealer, and her mother is an art advisor who was trained as an art historian. Ms. Wyeth is the great-granddaughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the niece of contemporary realist Jamie Wyeth. The summer after Ms. Wyeth’s sophomore year in high school, she began working at the Farnsworth Art Museum, near her family’s summer home in Maine. She was the Museum’s first-ever docent for their Andrew Wyeth Collection, the primary attraction for the majority of the Museum’s summer visitors. From 2004 until 2011, Ms. Wyeth conducted gallery talks five days a week at the Brandywine River Museum, in Chadds Ford, PA, near her grandparents’ home. Ms. Wyeth has lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. Ms. Wyeth is a gifted photographer; the Philadelphia Museum of Art used her photographs of her grandfather for publicity purposes for their 2006 retrospective Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Moreover, her black and white photographs of the artist were exhibited in conjunction with his exhibitions at the Bates College Museum of Art (2000–2001), the Mississippi Museum of Art (2001), and the High Museum of Art (2005–2006). The first gallery exhibition of Ms. Wyeth’s photographs was held in the fall of 2018 in Philadelphia’s Stanek Gallery. Although she is the first Wyeth to use a camera, her grandfather never disparaged her photos but rather gave her hints about how to improve the composition. His “eye” is evident in many of her photographs. N.C. Wyeth’s legacy now continues with the fourth generation.
N. C. Wyeth (1882–1945) has long been considered one of the nation’s leading illustrators. In the early 1900s, he studied with illustrator Howard Pyle in Delaware. In 1911, he built a house and studio in nearby Chadds Ford, PA. Later, he bought a sea captain’s house in Maine and in 1931 built a small studio, which he shared with his son, Andrew, and his daughters, Henriette and Carolyn. The exhibition includes illustrations for books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Washington Irving as well as historical scenes, seascapes, and landscapes.
Henriette Wyeth (1907–1997) was the eldest daughter of N.C. Wyeth and an older sister to Andrew Wyeth. Like other members of her family, her painting style was realist in a time when Impressionism and Abstraction were popular in the early 20th century. She studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and was an acclaimed portraitist, though perhaps not as widely known as her father and brother. Most notably she painted the portrait of First Lady, Pat Nixon, which is in the collection of The White House.
Jamie Wyeth (born 1946), like his father and grandfather, paints subjects of everyday life, in particular the landscapes, animals, and people of Pennsylvania and Maine. In contrast to his father—who painted with watercolor, drybrush, and tempera—Jamie works in oil and mixed media, creating lush painterly surfaces. The 18 paintings in the exhibition represent all periods of his career.
The Asheville Art Museum galleries, the Museum Store, Art PLAYce, and Perspective Café are open with limited capacity. The Frances Mulhall Achilles Art Research Library remains temporarily closed. The Museum welcomes visitors Wednesday through Monday from 11am to 6pm, with late-night Thursdays from 11am to 9pm. The Museum is closed on Tuesdays. General admission is always free for Museum Members, UNC Asheville students, active-duty military personnel with valid ID, and children under 6; $15 per adult; $13 per senior (65+); and $10 per student (child 6–17 or degree-seeking college students with valid ID). Admission tickets are available at ashevilleart.org/visit. Visitors may become Members at the welcome desk during their visit or online at ashevilleart.org/membership.