Come see the exhibition The Wyeths: Three Generations | Works from the Bank of America Collection through the eyes of Victoria Wyeth with an after-hours gallery tour. Two tour times available (5:00 PM & 6:30PM). Guests will receive a treat to bring home to enjoy.
Cost: $50 per person
To ensure the safety of all our guests, the museum will require proof of vaccination at check to attend. Masks are required. Space is limited; registration is required. Please register online or contact Sarah Kirby at (518) 463-4478 ext. 414 or kirbys@albanyinstitute.org.
About Victoria Wyeth:
Victoria Browning Wyeth, the only grandchild of iconic artist Andrew Wyeth, is the daughter of Nicholas and Jane Wyeth, great-granddaughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, and the niece of contemporary realist Jamie Wyeth. The summer after Ms. Wyeth’s sophomore year in high school, she began working at the Farnsworth Art Museum, near her family’s summer home in Maine. She was the Museum’s first-ever docent for their Andrew Wyeth Collection. Since her first gallery talk, Ms. Wyeth has interspersed discussions of subject matter and technique with direct quotes to her from her grandfather and her uncle. She adds many personal memories and family stories.
A 1997 graduate of the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York, Ms. Wyeth earned a B.A. in American Cultural Studies in 2001 from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She then spent a year as a Visiting Graduate Student at Harvard University, where she studied the History of Science and the History of Medicine. She further pursued her academic studies by attending Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT., earning a Master of Arts degree in the History of Clinical Psychiatry. Her M.A. thesis was titled: Delusions of Body and Soul: Chronicling Delusions at the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane, 1867-1886.
During Ms. Wyeth’s senior year of college, she organized and curated her first museum exhibition, which was held at the Bates College Museum of Art. Andrew Wyeth: Her Room was an in-depth study of her grandfather’s process in creating a tempera painting. Her Room, painted in 1963, was lent by the Farnsworth Art Museum. From their personal collection, her grandparents lent all the preparatory studies. From the artist’s initial drawings for Her Room to his final detailed watercolors, no exhibition of this kind had ever before been held.
Two museum shows including Ms. Wyeth's photographs were held in 2017. The first solo museum exhibition of her photographs, Victoria Wyeth: My Andy, was at the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, which has the world’s largest public collection of watercolors by her grandfather.
Her other show in 2017 was at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where she was guest curator of Andrew Wyeth at 100: A Family Remembrance, organized to celebrate Wyeth’s 100th birthday that July. The exhibition consisted primarily of loans from Ms. Wyeth’s personal collection and included sketches, paintings, her grandfather’s paint brushes, two of his painting smocks, illustrated letters the artist had written to his granddaughter, and his denim jacket with the American flag on the back which she is wearing in his 1999 portrait of her. Also included in the show were 19 photographs of Andrew Wyeth that his granddaughter had taken of him since she was in 7th grade.
The first gallery exhibition of Ms. Wyeth’s photographs was held in the fall of 2018 in Philadelphia’s Stanek Gallery. Although she is the first Wyeth to use a camera, her grandfather never disparaged her photos but rather gave her hints about how to improve the composition. His “eye” is evident in many of her photographs. N.C. Wyeth’s legacy now continues with the 4th generation.
IMAGE: Eight Bells (Clyde, Stanley and Andrew aboard Eight Bells), 1937, N.C. Wyeth (American, 1882-1945), oil on hardboard, Bank of America Collection