This season, the Studio Museum continues to explore and engage its permanent collection with the exhibition A Delicate Touch: Watercolors from the Permanent Collection. Presenting eighteen works on paper, A Delicate Touch brings together works dating from the late 1940s to 2007 that share the sam... Read more
This season, the Studio Museum continues to explore and engage its permanent collection with the exhibition A Delicate Touch: Watercolors from the Permanent Collection. Presenting eighteen works on paper, A Delicate Touch brings together works dating from the late 1940s to 2007 that share the same medium.
Watercolor is quick, lightweight and portable. Successfully painting with watercolors requires dexterity, a soft touch and a delicate hand. The medium has an extensive history that dates back to European Paleolithic cave paintings. Scribes used watercolor to decorate illuminated manuscripts in the Middle Ages and European Renaissance. Eventually, watercolor became the technique of choice for artists to make sketches, copies and small-scale versions of larger works. Watercolor’s portability may account for why it was, and still is in many instances, the preferred painting style for depicting nature, wildlife and nautical themes.
The artists in this exhibition use the medium in a variety of ways. John Dowell, whose work Delicate Touch (1977) provides the inspiration for the title of the exhibition, uses watercolor to create meditations on jazz. Other mid-twentieth-century artists, including Romare Bearden, Beauford Delaney and Norman Lewis, chose watercolor for landscapes and nature scenes. Meanwhile, contemporary artists, including John Bankston, Wangechi Mutu and Otobong Nkanga, use the medium to capture forms and figures.
Organized by Curatorial Assistant Lauren Haynes, A Delicate Touch examines the Studio Museum’s collection through a well-known artistic medium and is an exciting opportunity to see works that have never been presented at the Museum before, as well as pieces that are fragile and not often shown. This exhibition gives us the chance to reflect on the treasures in our care while creating and facilitating conversations about them.
