FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Springfield, MO. (April 5, 2022) – The Springfield Art Museum is pleased to present The Open Window, opening Saturday, April 9 at 10:00 AM. This focus exhibition features 18 works from the Museum’s permanent collection that follow - or challenge - the metaphor of “Alberti’s Window.”
Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian Renaissance theorist who instructed painters to consider the frame of a painting as an open window. This treatise laid out a method for effectively creating single-point perspective in painting and, consequently, served as a defining concept for theories of painting, architecture, and moving pictures going forward. Of course, this theory has been challenged repeatedly by modern artists through painting movements like Cubism, photographic collage, avant-garde film, and multiple modes of Contemporary Art.
The works in this exhibition provide an intellectual space in which we might consider how our own views are framed, and with what perspective? For many of us, the last two years have been largely lived through a variety of “windows,” from the physical windows in our living and work-spaces, to the virtual windows on our phones, tablets, and device screens. How has this framing of perspective changed us?
This exhibit includes a FREE Take-Home Project Bag with art-making activities related to viewing and creating perspective on flat surfaces. Take-Home Project Bags can be reserved on the Museum’s website: www.sgfmuseum.org/262/The-Open-Window and picked-up in the Museum’s Lobby. Completed projects can be shared on social media using the hashtag #sgfprojectbag and tagging the Museum @sgfmuseum.
See The Open Window in our Armstrong Gallery through July 10, 2022. The Springfield Art Museum is located at 1111 East Brookside Drive. Admission is always free. Donations are gratefully accepted.
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The Springfield Art Museum is Springfield, Missouri’s oldest cultural institution, founded in 1928. A department of the City of Springfield, the Museum invites you to connect with the world, your community, and yourself through active engagement with art objects. For more information, please visit www.sgfmuseum.org or contact Joshua Best, Museum Affairs Officer at (417) 874-2859 or jbest@springfieldmo.gov.
