Current Exhibitions
Exhibition In the George A. and Herbert T. Wolf Gallery
The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona is pleased to announce its latest exhibition, William H. Rau: Connecting to Community. This exhibition will open December 13, 2019 and will be on display until October 3, 2020 in the Museum's George A. and Herbert T. Wolf Gallery.
William Herman Rau was a master of albumen landscape photography. Although he traveled widely in his early career, he is today best known for his Pennsylvania Railroad photographs, made to encourage rail travel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rau’s interest in photography began early. At age nineteen, he secured a position on an expedition to the South Pacific through the U.S. government. The experience from his expedition paved the way for his participation in other photographic surveys. Among these surveys are a summer spent with William Henry Jackson in Colorado and a voyage to Egypt with noted photographer, Edward L. Wilson.
Hired by the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1890, he spent the next five years documenting the rail line from New York to Pittsburgh. Rau also served as official photographer for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis and the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland.
Read about SAMA's William H. Rau exhibition volunteer-curator,
Exhibition In the Shirley and Fred A. Pechter Gallery and
Paul I. Detwiler Education Center
SAMA Altoona is excited to announce its newest exhibition 50 Years of Woodstock: Posters from the Mark Del Costello Collection on display from Wednesday, December 20, 2019 until Saturday, August 29, 2020.
50 Years of Woodstock: Posters from the Mark Del Costello Collection features selections from SAMA’s Mark Del Costello Collection. Woodstock began as “An Aquarian Experience: 3 Days of Peace and Music” in 1969 at a dairy farm in New York. Since then, Woodstock has become associated with counterculture and is a staple in pop culture history.
The Mark Del Costello Collection focuses on American graphic design of the modern era. This collection includes posters and ephemera related to a wide variety of topics such as music, theater, film, visual arts, product advertising, and political issues.
Exhibition In the Titelman Galleries
Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art located in downtown Bedford at 137 E Pitt St, has added their new summer art exhibit. The Mark Del Costello Collection focuses on the American graphic design of the modern era. The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art is very grateful to have acquired and to be able to share part of such an incredible collection.
These silver screen selections, in the downstairs Titelman Galleries, are an eclectic selection of American and Foreign Film posters.
From Drama to Comedy, you do not want to miss out on this amazing movie poster collection as the perfect way to spend a Summer Day! The experience from this exhibition is vaguely reminiscent of a movie rental process from a bygone era and will bring you back to a decade before digital reigned king. Walking these galleries is like harkening to the glory days of Blockbuster Video when one could peruse the aisles of VHS tapes searching for that special video or two that sparked a deep enough curiosity to rent. The art of the movie poster on SAMA Bedford’s walls shouts out, from all genres competitively, for your viewing attention. SAMA Bedford invites you to come and thoroughly enjoy the wide variety of cinematic advertisements. What better way to celebrate the reopening of the Museum to the public than with the Art of the Movie Poster! This exhibition opens Friday, June 19, 2020, and will run through Sunday, October 18, 2020.
Exhibition in the Paula and Dean Lemley Gallery
The museum continues the Mark Del Costello Collection theme with a more specific subject matter in the Paula and Dean Lemley Gallery were film posters by world-renown director and artist, Tim Burton is the focus. These selections span decades of the legendary directors’ work.
Exhibition In the Donald Robinson Gallery
TBA
Exhibition In the Ashe and Regional Galleries
All Color/No Color
February 14, 2020 - July 9, 2020
View the delicate art of paper cutting by Linda Harrill Peck and Harriet M. Rosenberg. It is also where you can take in the reflective properties of cast aluminum formed into shapely sculptures or a 2-dimensional work. Both aluminum expressions are from the same artist, Maggie Milono.
Color explodes through the variety of art pieces representing the All Color of SAMA's Education Collection. There is a wide variety of mediums in this colorful section such as pastels, watercolor and even leather. View works in oil by local and nationally-known artist, Kevin Kutz, that are rich with color.
Exhibition In the Elizabeth Gamble Shaw Gallery
"In Search of Beauty with a Brush: Robert Bowden" and "50 Years of Woodstock: The Collection of Mark DelCostello"
May 18 - August 2, 2020
Robert Bowden’s exhibition displays a compendium of paintings that reveals his amazing talent. Long a fixture in the Pittsburgh arts scene, Bowden is noted for his beautiful works. As a painter of urban subjects, his style is to capture the cityscape with intimacy an immediacy. Bowden is attracted to a subject’s color, shape, light effect and compositional potential.
Bowden’s illustrious career as a graphic designer interwoven with his early interest in abstraction has evolved into a successful evolution of realism using the challenging and unforgiving media of watercolor. Urban landscapes painted en plein air is the major theme in his paintings. He has also written four books and three exhibition catalogs of his work. Bowden has paintings in four museum permanent collections as well as in numerous corporate and private collections.
The Mark Del Costello Collection on display focuses on American graphic design of the original 1969 Woodstock era. Approximately 15 posters share images of the bands that played on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethal New York, 40 miles Southwest of Woodstock.
Costello’s entire collection includes posters and ephemera related to a wide variety of topics such as music, theater, film, visual arts, product advertising, and political issues. Apart from its artistic significance, the Mark Del Costello Collection is also an important source for social history, touching many of the noteworthy events and movements that have occurred in the United States over the last fifty years. This collection would not be possible without the generous donations of Mark Del Costello. Del Costello’s donations were accessioned to the Museum’s collection in 1985 and 2019 and totals well over 1,500 pieces.
Exhibition In the Sullivan Gallery
Southwest Splendor
June 16, 2020 - October 30, 2020
The art collection called “Southwest Splendor” features approximately 70 works spanning from 1930 to 1990 from a private collection of a former area resident who requested anonymity. On view June 16 through October 3, 2020, this collection offers a mix of Anglo, Indian and Mexican cultures.
The anonymous collector provided the loan in memory of Father Sean M. Sullivan, T.O.R., who co-founded SAMA in 1976 and served as president of Saint Francis (College) University. Sullivan, 85, died in 2014 and is credited with providing the “vision, creativity and drive” to make SAMA at Loretto, a reality on the Saint Francis University Campus.
Exhibition in the
Margery Wolf-Kuhn Balcony
Gallery
Deep Cuts from the Permanent Collection
January 31 - October 30, 2020
"A song by an artist that only true fans of said artist will enjoy/know. ... Typically refers to a more obscure or less accessible song in an artist's portfolio, one that only dedicated fans are aware of. Also increasingly used to refer to any obscure or less accessible artwork, opinion, trivia, etc."