Past Exhibition Listing
Bertha Jaques: Botanical Prints and Photographs
January 19 - May 12, 2013
Accomplished printmaker and photographer Bertha Jaques is perhaps best known for her prints of wildflowers and ferns. Her interest in this subject matter grew out of her desire to present something that was not only beautiful to behold, but also promoted wildflower preservation. Jaques’ interest in environmental issues was only one way in which she was a pioneering woman artist. Not only did Jaques succeed in a field dominated by male artists, she helped popularize etching in America. Jaques’ full impact on printmaking and photography at the dawn of the twentieth century is still under-recognized and ripe for reappraisal.
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Marvin Cone: An American Master
September 29, 2012 - January 20, 2013
Like his good friend Grant Wood, Cedar Rapids native Marvin Cone was one of Iowa's most important artists. Cone's influence in Cedar Rapids is attested to by the multitude of students he taught in his 42 years at Coe College. More than that, Cone's work is reflective of several aspects of American art and his place in the greater discussion of American art remains under-recognized. This large, 7-gallery exhibition attempts to rectify that oversight, not only reassessing Cone's work in general but also contextualizing it in the larger picture of American art. This is the first major solo exhibition of Cone's work since 1980.
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Charles Barth: A Kaleidoscope of Culture
September 8, 2012 - January 6, 2013
Both a painter and a printmaker, Barth's work is strongly influenced by the Mexican culture he sees all around him during his time there every year. Inspired by the rich and diverse culture of Mexico, Barth creates new tableaus, rich in color and full of vitality. This solo exhibition, his first at the CRMA since 1991, coincides with the recent release of a major monograph on his work, Charles Barth: A Kaleidoscope of Culture, which gives the exhibition its name.
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Clary Illian: A Potter's Potter
August 25, 2012 - February 17, 2013
Ely, Iowa, resident Clary Illian first started making ceramics in the early 1960s, shortly after graduating from the University of Iowa's highly-respected ceramics department and a two year residency with world renowned British ceramicist Bernard Leach. Since then, Illian has created a body of work which not only celebrates the utilitarian qualities she pursues, but also demonstrates her ability to infuse each of her pieces with their own unique character and personality.
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Looking Forward: New Architecture in Downtown Cedar Rapids
June 2 - September 9, 2012
Focusing on eight civic projects from a variety of downtown locations and serving various functions, the exhibition will allow a snapshot into some of the exciting changes happening in the downtown area. The projects included: The U.S. Federal Courthouse, the Juvenile Justice Center, the Cedar Rapids Public Library, the Central Fire Station, the NewBo City Market, the Amphitheater, as well as the major renovations to the Jean Oxley Linn County Public Service Center and the Cedar Rapids Convention Complex.
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Looking Back: Vintage Post Cards of Downtown Cedar Rapids
May 12 - August 26, 2012
As a companion to an exhibition featuring eight new building projects in downtown Cedar Rapids, this exhibition presents more than 115 vintage post cards of the way Cedar Rapids looked 100 years ago. Lent from a single local private collection, these small, inexpensive forms of communication illuminated the Cedar Rapids that was, highlight its architectural accomplishments, some of which survive to this day. As a set, these post cards bring the past glory of Cedar Rapids to life.
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Lure of the Local: Collecting the Corridor, 2006-2011
February 4 - May 13, 2012
Beginning with its first acquisition in 1906, the Cedar Rapids Art Association (now the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art) has valued art of its own time, often from local origins. Over the last century, the collection has grown to more than 7,000 works of art, including several works by local artists Grant Wood and Marvin Cone. Over the past five years, a concerted effort has been made to ensure that the Museum collection continues to reflect the artistic outputs of artists living in and near the Corridor.
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Raising Expectations
October 15, 2011 - July 29, 2012
University of Iowa jewelry professor, Kee-Ho Yuen selected an eclectic mix of functional and sculptural metal pieces made by members of the Iowa Metals Guild. The work in this show explores contemporary and traditional technologies and materials, ranging from advanced 3-D computer modeling to traditional fabrications and enameling.
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Seeing and Remembering: Portraits and Their Stories
September 24, 2011 - January 15, 2012
Portraiture is one of the oldest forms of art in history, with likenesses of individuals having been made for more than 5,000 years. Portraits, in their many guises, still fascinate us. The exhibition looks at the different genres within portraiture as seen from the vantage point of the artist.
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An American Masterpiece: Charles Willson Peale's George Washington
September 3, 2011 - February 5, 2012
For five extraordinary months, the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art will be displaying an American treasure: Charles Willson Peale’s portrait of George Washington, on loan from the Brooklyn Museum. Commissioned in 1776 by John Hancock, President of the Continental Congress, this was Peale’s second full-scale life portrait of Washington, and the first to portray him as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army.
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Shout Freedom! Photo League Selections from the Columbus Museum of Art
May 21 - September 4, 2011
The Photo League (1936-1951) was a non-profit organization of photographers based in New York City and committed to the transformative power of photography to effect social change. Its members included Berenice Abbott, Lewis Hine, Lisette Model, Aaron Siskind, W. Eugene Smith, Paul Strand, and Weegee, some of the most important American artists of the 20th century. In 2001, the Columbus Museum of Art (Ohio) acquired a major collection of work by 70 members of the Photo League, which served as the basis for the 55 black-and-white vintage photographs in this exhibition.
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Wizards of Pop! Sabuda & Reinhart
January 22 - May 1, 2011
Wizards of Pop! Sabuda & Reinhart includes more than 80 images from 16 picture and pop-up books. The book art reveals a variety of media and techniques — with picture book illustrations in batik, marbleized paper mosaic, and delicate cut-paper, and pop-up books rendered in pencil, marker, watercolor, acrylic, and linoleum block print. The exhibition features imaginative two-dimensional artworks, as well as innovatively engineered three-dimensional pages.
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A Show of Hands: Ceramics from the Collection
December 4, 2010 - July 29, 2012
A Show of Hands celebrates the growing section of decorative arts in the CRMA's collection, and shares with the public for the first time the extraordinary art produced by these artists. While individual pieces have been included in group exhibitions in the past, a separate, dedicated exhibition of ceramics from the collection has never happened at the CRMA.
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China: Insights. New Photography from the People's Republic
October 9, 2010 - January 2, 2011
This exhibition brings together the work of seven photographers from mainland China, each of whom have undertaken the creation of a long-term documentation of one or more aspects of Chinese culture that he or she feels reflects something new about China now—whether that is something emerging or something vanishing.
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Goya's Disasters of War
September 4 - December 12, 2010
Goya’s Disasters of War series has often been hailed as the earliest form of war reporting, preceding the Civil War photography of Matthew Brady and the photojournalism seen in the long succession of wars throughout the 20th and into the 21st centuries. This series of prints captures all the gruesome horror that war brings with it, from battle scenes, to rape, to mass executions.
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River of Words: IOWA Environmental Poetry and Art Exhibition 2010
August 8 - August 31, 2010
The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is pleased to host the third annual River of Words® exhibition opening August 8, 2010 in the North Carnegie Library at the Museum. This year saw a swelling of interest among Iowa students in the international competition that is designed to help youth explore the natural and cultural history of the place they live, and to express what they discover through poetry and art.
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From Monet to Picasso: The Riley Collection
May 22 - September 19, 2010
Local collectors Tom and Nan Riley have been quietly creating an extraordinary collection of European art of the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. With significant but little-known works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Pissaro, Chagall, Cassatt, Dufy, Matisse, Léger, Mondrian, Miró, Dali, Braque, and Picasso, the Riley Collection has become one of the most significant private collections in the state of Iowa.
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The Sky’s The Limit: Marvin Cone’s Clouds
May 1 - August 22, 2010
This exhibition of thirty works from the 1910s to the 1940s traces the many ways and styles Cone used to capture the ethereal and transitory qualities of clouds, as well as their majesty and power.
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Drawn to Drawing
January 2 - April 18, 2010
Beginning with the purchase of a Jasper Johns drawing in 1958 for the then high sum of $175, the Kramarsky’s went on to amass a collection of more than 4,000 works of art. Every so often, the collector and his wife donate some drawings to a lucky museum in the country. The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is truly fortunate to have been the recipient of these tantalizing drawings in 2009, on view here for the first time in Cedar Rapids.
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Norman Rockwell: Fact & Fiction
September 12, 2009 - January 3, 2010
In the 65 years since his visit, numerous anecdotes and stories have arisen about the artist's time in Cedar Rapids and the creation of this work. This exhibition uses these five, newly conserved and restored watercolors, along with numerous photographs taken by local photographer Wes Panek for Rockwell, to investigate the many facts and fictions associated with Rockwell's visit and this set of watercolors.
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The American Century
September 12, 2009 - September 9, 2012
In this new installation of the permanent collection, the many movements of twentieth-century American art will be highlighted.
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River of Words: IOWA Environmental Poetry and Art Exhibition 2009
August 1 - August 23, 2009
The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art is pleased to host the second annual River of Words® exhibition opening August 1, 2009 in the North Carnegie Library at the Museum. This year saw a swelling of interest among Iowa students in the international competition that is designed to help youth explore the natural and cultural history of the place they live, and to express what they discover through poetry and art.
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Under the Big Top: The Circus in Art
June 20 - August 16, 2009
In celebration of Iowa’s importance in the development of the circus (the Ringling brothers were from McGregor, Iowa), the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art will install two galleries of circus imagery from its own collection.
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Treasures from the National Collection
June 20, 2009 - March 11, 2012
With the closure of their entire facility due to the devastating floods of 2008, the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library has installed a gallery of their artistic treasures at the CRMA. From textiles to paintings to cut crystal, many extraordinary works of fine, folk, and decorative art will be on view.
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Malvina Hoffman: Rodin's Last Student
May 30, 2009 - November 14, 2010
In 1985 and 1986, the CRMA received a large number of plaster and bronze works by Malvina Hoffman. In 2003, Hoffman's magnificent Bacchanale Frieze was permanently installed in the Museum's Carnegie Wing. A substantial exhibition of her work, however, hasn't happened for some time.
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John Buck: Iconography
May 30 - August 16, 2009
An overview of the Iowa-born, Montana-based, John Buck’s 40-year career in printmaking and sculpture, the exhibit includes over 60 works including prints, large-scale sculpture, wooden constructions (shadow boxes) and glass and wood works created at Pilchuck.
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Christian Marclay's Telephones
March 14 - May 31, 2009
Cleverly conceived and artfully edited, Christian Marclay's 7 1/2-minute video, Telephones, comprises a succession of brief film clips that creates a humorous narrative of its own in which the characters, in progression, dial, hear the phone ring, pick it up, converse, react, say goodbye and hang up.
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American Narratives: Photographs by Thomas C. Jackson
March 14 - May 31, 2009
American Narratives: Photographs by Thomas C. Jackson will focus on a different medium altogether, photography, which Jackson came to only recently. The splicing together of his separate, seemingly-unrelated photographs creates fascinating and intriguing new narratives.
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Mary GrandPré: Harry Potter and Beyond
November 1, 2008 - February 1, 2009
Illustrator of several children's titles, GrandPré is perhaps best known for her illustrations of the American version of J. K. Rowling's series of Harry Potter books. The Cedar Rapids exhibition will be her first in many years and will feature works from all aspects of her career: children's books, Harry Potter books, magazine covers, and poster design.
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The Year of the River: Flood Photography from The Gazette
August 30, 2008 - February 22, 2009
From Marengo to Vinton, from Palo to Cedar Rapids, and from Coralville to Iowa City, The Gazette photographers logged countless hours capturing images of the people and places impacted by the extraordinary flooding that occurred. While some images they shot documented the magnitude of the rising waters, many other photographs sought out the human side of the catastrophe.
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River of Words® IOWA Environmental Poetry and Art Exhibition 2008
August 30 - September 21, 2008
Every year, River of Words® conducts an international poetry and art contest for children aged 5 to 19 in grades K-12, in affiliation with The Library of Congress Center for the Book. This free contest is designed to help youth explore the natural and cultural history of the place they live, and to express what they discover through poetry and art. Entries not chosen as finalists or grand prize winners in the international contest are returned to IOWATER, where they are judged in a statewide IOWA River of Words competition.
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The ESPY Collection
May 31 - October 12, 2008
The ESPY Collection was created in 2001 when photographer Rick Chapman was asked by ESPN to create a series of portraits of the recipients of the ESPY Awards.
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Mothers in Art: Mother's Day at 100
March 29 - June 11, 2008
Mothers in Art: Mother's Day at 100 celebrates the 100th anniversary of the modest origins of the holiday in 1908 by presenting a number of works from the Museum's own collection that represent the ways mothers have been depicted in the history of art.
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American Artists Abroad, 1900-1950
February 2 - May 11, 2008
American Artists Abroad will be an exhibition drawn from the CRMA's permanent collection and will present and contextualize the achievements of a number of American artists traveling and studying abroad in a post-1900 world.
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Ulfert Wilke: A Centennial Celebration
September 1, 2007 - February 3, 2008
To commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1907 and the 20th anniversary of his death in 1987, the CRMA organized this small but enlightening exhibition of works by painter, printmaker, and calligrapher Ulfert Wilke.
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Stan Wiederspan: Box Chapel
April 28 - August 5, 2007
Cedar Rapids artist and former Cedar Rapids Art Association director Stan Wiederspan has embarked upon a radically new series of paintings: hyper realistic acrylic paintings representing ordinary cardboard boxes.
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The Young and the Restless: Children in Art
January 13 - April 15, 2007
As a companion exhibition to Hidden Treasure: Original Children's book Illustration from the Cedar Rapids Public Library, the CRMA searched its collection for images of children. Not surprisingly, image of the child and children have figured frequently in art, from individual portraits to candid images of children at play and characters in narratives.
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About Face: Portraiture from the Collection
November 25, 2006 - August 1, 2007
Focusing on images of individuals and groups, About Face: Portraiture from the Collection will operate in tandem with the portraiture section of Midwestern Visions--an exhibition of Midwestern art currently on display at the CRMA. Spanning a greater geography and a greater time frame than Midwestern Visions, About Face will address ways in which portraiture evolved through time, analyzing consistencies of portrayals and noting divergences.
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Midwestern Visions: Grant Wood, Marvin Cone and Beyond
September 23, 2006 - June 11, 2008
In this new installation, Grant Wood and Marvin Cone, while still possessing major roles, will be joined by a wide variety of other Midwestern artists from the collection, to provide a fuller and more complete picture of the Midwest's contribution to the history of American art.
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Cedar Rapids Day into Night
September 22, 2006 - January 7, 2007
Cedar Rapids: Day Into Night, was conceived as a companion exhibition to Midwestern Visions. Earlier in the spring of 2006, the CRMA announced a call for entries of artworks that address some aspect of life in Cedar Rapids or Linn Country.
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Rembrandt Magnified: Print Images from a Master
August 25 - December 31, 2006
While known as a master painter-- having created such works as The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes (1632); The Night Watch (1642); Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer (1653); The Return of the Prodigal Son (after 1660); and many self-portraits---Rembrandt is also considered to be one of the greatest printmakers of all time. He created more than 300 prints and was one of the first artists to experiment with etching and drypoint techniques.
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Cat Chow: Material Girl
June 9 - September 3, 2006
Chicago- and New York-based contemporary artist Cat Chow puts a new spin on the intersection of art and fashion. Wearable yet sculptural, her creations often use elements of fashion—such as zippers, measuring tapes, and bobbins—to explore a variety of social and political issues.
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The Quiet Landscapes of William B. Post
February 17 - May 21, 2006
William B. Post, a pioneer photographer from 1890 to 1910, was a leading figure of the American pictoralist group. Turning his camera to the landscape of rural Maine, Post's rich and subtle platinum print photographs encourage a contemplative response and a spiritual communion with nature.
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Bertha Jaques: Botanicals
February 17 - May 21, 2006
Bertha Jaques was a cofounder of the highly influential Chicago Society of Etchers, established in 1910. A one time resident of Cedar Rapids (1885-1889), she created more than 450 different prints during her lifetime.
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The Abstract Impulse
December 2, 2005 - April 2, 2006
Culled from the CRMA's growing collection of prints created after 1950. The Abstract Impulse explores the potential of abstraction in the hands of post-WWII artists.
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The Human Touch: Dain Rauscher Collection
June 11 - July 25, 2005
The exhibition features 38 works of art from the RBC Dain Rauscher corporate art collection in Minneapolis. For the first time, pieces from the collection are touring to cities across the country where the firm has branch offices. Cedar Rapids is the first stop on the tour.
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Joan Liffring- Zug Bourret: From A Life of Photography
February 3 - May 22, 2005
Many images are being shown for the first time in a museum as part of this exhibition, including a new, one-of-a-kind photogram, Twig, Bone and Moth Wings, 2003 created in memory of Liffring-Zug Bourret's late grandson Jordan Heusinkveld of Amana.
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