Three more chances to view Newcomb Pottery
After more than two years on the road and stops in five states and Canada, the major exhibition of Newcomb Pottery and artwork that originated at the Newcomb Art Museum has two more shows this year in Princeton, New Jersey, and Nashville.
The tour, “Women, Art, and Social Change: The Newcomb Pottery Enterprise,” is sponsored by the prestigious Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service and the Newcomb Art Museum. It is showing now through July 10 at the Princeton University Art Museum, with a final show at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville from July 29–Nov. 6.
“It’s exciting because the Newcomb Enterprise is finally getting proper national and international attention.”
Mónica Ramírez-Montagut
Approximately 180 Newcomb objects, including pottery, metalwork, jewelry, textiles and bookbinding, are part of the exhibition.
“It’s exciting because the Newcomb Enterprise is finally getting proper national and international attention — very much deserved recognition,” said Mónica Ramírez-Montagut, director of the Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University.
In press coverage, museum directors whose institutions are hosting the exhibit “talk about the great contributions of arts and crafts from the South and how progressive the Newcomb enterprise was, aimed at providing women with financial self-sustainability by deploying their artistic skills,” Ramírez-Montagut said.
Newcomb College established the Newcomb Enterprise in 1895 as an educational experiment to train women in producing handcrafted artifacts. Having the Smithsonian recognize the Pottery and the enterprise with a touring exhibit legitimizes Newcomb artwork as a “national treasure,” she said.
Art enthusiasts in the New York-New Jersey area have an additional opportunity to view a collection of early Newcomb Pottery at the Stickley Museum at Craftsman Farms in Morris Plains, New Jersey. Now through Nov. 6 the museum is displaying 28 examples from the Barbara and Henry Fuldner Collection.
Barbara Fuldner, a great-granddaughter of acclaimed Craftsman furniture designer Gustav Stickley, and her late husband, Henry Fuldner, assembled the Newcomb Pottery items over the past three decades.
