American Places: Featuring Selections from the Corcoran Collection

Being alone and being in a crowd: many American artists in the early 20th century probed these opposed yet essential aspects of modern life. See how artists captured landscapes from isolated mountaintops to crowded cities. Paintings by Grant Wood, Hale Woodruff, and Georgia O’Keeffe evoke the solitude of rural places. Others by George Bellows, Stuart Davis, and David Park conjure the chaos and vibrancy of city life. Numerous works on view come from the Corcoran Collection.

An adjoining installation of works on paper focuses on one place that had a formative influence on American art: the Corcoran Gallery of Art and its related art school, the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, which is now part of George Washington University. The Corcoran Gallery was an active force in Washington, DC, from its founding in 1869 until it closed in 2014. These works represent educators, students, and artists who were linked to the Corcoran, including painters Alma Thomas and Sam Gilliam, sculptor Anne Truitt, and photographers Roy DeCarava and John Gossage.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Image credit:  Charles Sheeler, Classic Landscape, 1931, oil on canvas, Collection of Barney A. Ebsworth​​​