remodeled Currier shows NH artists

Out of an almost two-year remodeling project emerges a little gem of a museum—the new Currier Museum of Art. The improved museum in Manchester has some bright facets to show off. It has expanded its footprint by more than a third, adding 33,000 feet of gallery space and ancillaries. The renovations now enable the museum to host larger, nationally prominent shows, such as “Andy Warhol: Pop Politics,” which is coming in late September. 

The introduction of five new galleries also means Currier will be able to exhibit 50 percent more of its collection. The current exhibit, “Celebrating New Hampshire Artists,” contains just about every medium: painting, glass, sculpture, tableware, crafts, ceramics, fine art furniture, wood engraving, prints, silver gelatin and giclée photography. The work of New Hampshire artists will rotate through a gallery dedicated to this concept for the next six months.

A large part of the Currier mission has been to collect and display the work of New Hampshire artists, so this is a wonderful opportunity to view comprehensive collections that have long been mothballed. Currier is being generous with admission deals, allowing kids under 18 to enter for free and offering free entry for everyone on Saturday mornings.

Included in the “New Hampshire” exhibit is an enthralling display of “eating” utensils from Joy Raskin and Dan Dustin. Silversmith Raskin’s ultra-modern “Lenticular Bridge Set” is a severe-looking silverware set that combines lovely curves and sharp edges. In a neighboring display case, on the other end of the textural spectrum, are Dustin’s wooden spoons. They’re carved of lilac and laurel and follow the internal grainy logic of their respective woods. Lilac’s aubergine heartwood has never been revealed so gorgeously or sanded so lovingly. Dustin, a quirky bearded fellow from Contoocook, is an amazing artisan and sculptor who served as inspiration for Ernie Hebert’s novel, “Spoonwood.”

Pivoting 180 degrees, James Aponovich’s “Castello Nuovo: Still Life with Day Lilies and Watermelon” is a splash of flowery, fruity glory. The oil on canvas painting is part landscape, part still life, part celebration and a miniature self-portrait, all in one. Aponovich’s longstanding relationship with the Currier was crowned in 2005 with a retrospective of his work. He lives, paints and grows lilies in Hancock with artist wife, Elizabeth Johannson.

Concord journalist and documentarian Dan Habib serves a slice of apple-picking life in “Jamaican Migrant Worker,” a silver gelatin print showing contorted arms, work-gnarled hands and fresh fruit. Its unique angle gives the hard manual labor an almost abstract beauty.

Lotte Jacobi’s 1955 “Portrait of Robert Frost,” a palladium print, catches the poet in his 80s. Jacobi and a friend drove up to see him one day on a whim. The shot she captured shows Frost looking simultaneously regal and a bit uncomfortable. He was no swinger of birches at that point; he had a sparkle of silver stubble on his chin and the fuzzy white hair of an elder statesman. Jacobi was a friend to Albert Einstein and took some of the most recognizable public images of him (which I hope will appear from the archives during this show). She was a fascinating photographer, documenting the ancient Silk Road in the 1930s before fleeing Nazi Germany and New York City for the wilds of Deering.

Portsmouth’s own Richard Haynes offers impressionistic jazz pastoral in “Session 1,” using luscious color fields engineered with Caran d’Ache oil crayons. The Currier has recently collected part of his “Jazz Series.”

Peter Winslow Milton’s “Rehearsal” is an epic theatrical set picture (almost 4- by 8-inches) in which he creates a lofty space—very similar, actually, to the space in the newly renovated Currier. The oil painting’s images conjure a rich milieu of emotions and relationships. His more than 40 human subjects inhabit the large canvas like little orbiting planets that are part theater, part audience, part dance studio and part fantasia. The sun-dappled lobby imbues a sense of inner and outer space, aloneness and togetherness. Its disparate set pieces and scenes create separate moments and dramas that have lives of their own but point toward the whole—a remarkable feat.

The new Currier, I think, has accomplished the same thing.

“Celebrating New Hampshire Artists” will run through mid-September at the Currier Museum of Art, 150 Ash St., Manchester, 603-669-6144,      www.currier.org