2nd Museum Visit

For this week's visit, I went to the New Britain Museum of American Art on Saturday, April 6th, 2024. I planned on walking around Walnut Hill Park before going into the museum but it was just too cold, so I decided to sit in my car for a bit and read a book before actually going in. This week was also a solo visit but I’m trying to convince one of my friends to come along since she also enjoys art, so let's hope she comes with me next time! I arrived quite early and got there at 10:30 am ready to start my visit.

Known for its outstanding collection covering three centuries of American history, the NBMAA is the first museum in the world devoted exclusively to collecting American art. The highly regarded Chase Family Building (the building the museum is located in) debuted to widespread praise in 2006 and has since won numerous awards. Its fifteen roomy galleries display the permanent collection, while up to twenty-five special exhibitions a year highlight American masterpieces, up-and-coming artists, and private collections. There is a vast array of year-round educational and community service initiatives available that are beautiful and everyone is bound to find something they'll enjoy. I plan on attending one of these events they hold soon since they hold many community events I wasn't even aware of but seem very cool and inclusive.

Building on its achievements, the New Britain Museum of American Art keeps growing. Through acquisitions and contributions, the collection, which spans the years 1739 to the present, has amassed more than 8,300 pieces of artwork. It consists of drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, illustrations, and oil paintings. Exhibitions keep highlighting the significance of art's past and its relevance to the present while maintaining a balance between the historic and the contemporary. The New Britain Museum of American Art, one of the first organizations devoted exclusively to American art, continues to have a significant influence on how we see the rich legacy of the country's artists and their dynamic engagement with the community.

There was much to see but something that caught my attention was the exhibition, Anila Quayyum Agha: Illuminations. Anila Quayyum Agha is a well-known international artist, who was born in 1965. She uses large-scale installations and personal paintings and drawings to examine the ambiguities and inconsistencies of her experience as a Pakistani immigrant to the United States. Her well-known light sculpture Intersections is on display in this exhibition, along with paintings and drawn pieces. Her art has been included in thirteen solo gallery exhibitions throughout the globe since 2019. Agha graduated with a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore. She is a professor at Augusta University and the Eminent Morris Scholar of Fine Art. She lives in Indianapolis, Indiana, and Augusta, Georgia.

In the first room of her exhibition, Agha makes two-dimensional, light, and shadow-playing wall-mounted pieces in addition to her hanging installations. Agha has been experimenting with resin paintings lately, where she uses color to a much greater extent and plays with patterns in novel ways. Even though if one were to look closely at her resin paintings, they look like one single layer but in reality are composed of numerous layers of colored resin paint, a very labor-intensive process, by which she carves out beautiful geometric and floral designs and then carefully fills them in with colored resin paint. She abandons her signature minimalist color schemes in favor of vibrant hues influenced by the high-contrast color schemes found in African and South Asian fabrics. They are so beautiful and are so soothing to the eye, it comes to show how delicate and detailed she was when making these pieces. They are so mesmerizing to look at!

Following the room over, Agha explored light and shadow as themes throughout her career, drawing inspiration from Islamic art and architecture while also challenging conventional gender roles, notions of home and belonging, and the nexus between identity and culture. The large-scale cube artwork by Agha Illumination is on display, which engages spectators in inclusive and shared experiences by casting light and shadow across architectural spaces. It was inspired by cultural intersections and people coming together. Agha reinterprets floral and geometric forms seen in Islamic art and architecture in Asia and Africa through laser cutting into lacquered steel cubes. Elevated and internally illuminated, the cubes create intricate, floor-to-ceiling shadows that alter the scenery around it, referencing the elaborately decorated public areas like mosques that were off-limits to Agha when she was a girl growing up in Lahore, Pakistan. She was inspired to make this work based on her youth, feeling that often women were discouraged from participating in public life and that their life was to be inside their homes. She wanted to make a difference by making a piece that was diverse and made people feel included, regardless of gender, cultural and ethnic background, and having a place that emits calmness and a sense of belonging. 

I was in awe of this exhibition! It was so gorgeous and throughout it, I stayed in a zen/calm mood due to Agha's work just being so soothing and refreshing to look at. I loved how her piece Illumination was so inclusive, taking up the entire room and filling the room with beauty from corner to corner. Her work is so inspiring and I salute her patience when it comes to all the small detailing in her resin paintings. Her work is very time-consuming so I praise her for her patience and love of creation. I'm glad I was introduced to a new artist, I will definitely be keeping up with her future projects and am excited to see what else she creates. I'm looking forward to next week and am so excited to continue being able to be exposed to such beautiful creations of the world! Until next week!