Ben Schonzeit, Englishtown Jewels, 1971, Acrylic on canvas, 60 x72”, Gift of Jean Crutchfield and Robert Hobbs

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C.- Reynolda House Museum of American Art will open a new exhibition, New World Views: Gifts from Jean Crutchfield and Robert Hobbs, on Tuesday, May 20, 2008 in the Museum’s Babcock Gallery. The exhibition, which includes 10 works dating from 1971 to 1996, highlights the expanding global view of American art during the last 30 years.
The works in New World Views range from paintings and prints to sculpture by artists as diverse as Puerto Rican painter Arnaldo Roche-Rabell, Pop artists Richard Artschwager and Nicholas Krushenick, self-taught painter Thornton Dial, and expatriate modernist Beverly Pepper. This exhibition of recent acquisitions to the Reynolda House collection will be on view from through August 31, 2008.
All pieces in the exhibition are gifts to Reynolda House from collectors Jean Crutchfield and Robert Hobbs, longtime friends and supporters of Reynolda House. Crutchfield is a collector and a former gallerist. As an independent curator, she has curated Presumed Innocence for the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center , and, with Hobbs , The Art of Aggression for the Moore Space in Miami .
Hobbs holds the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair at Virginia Commonwealth University and has curated Kara Walker: Slavery! Slavery! for the Sao Paolo Bienal and Thornton Dial: Remembering the Road for the Atlanta Cultural Olympiad.
Reynolda House Museum of American Art displays a premier collection of American art ranging from the colonial period to the present. Built in 1917 by Katharine Smith Reynolds and her husband Richard Joshua Reynolds, founder of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, the house opened to the public as an institution dedicated to the arts and education in 1965, and as an art museum in 1967. Today, Reynolda House is renowned for its collection of American art, which is comprised of masterpieces from three centuries of painting and sculpture, including works by such distinguished artists as Albert Bierstadt, Mary Cassatt, Frederic Church, John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Jacob Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Grant Wood. The collection is extraordinary for its quality and provides audiences with a thorough survey of major developments in American art in a warm and welcoming setting.