Edward Hopper's Boyhood on the Hudson River and Emerging ArtistIC Vision

November 3, 2022 - March 26 , 2023

Curated by Carole Perry and Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, with Lynne Z. Bassett 
​OPENING RECEPTION: November 16, 2022, 6:00 – 7:30pm
The reception is open to Museum Members, guests, and the public by reservation. Free.
This exhibition investigates how the artistic vision of Edward Hopper (1882-1967) coalesced during his youth in Nyack until he moved away in 1908, at age 26, to pursue his career in New York City. 
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Edward Hopper as a child seated in a rowboat, New York. Silver gelatin print. The Sanborn Hopper Archive at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Frances Mulhall Achilles Library, Gift of The Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust, Series: Personal Papers, Edward Hopper, Photographs
Hopper emerged as a young artist while growing up at the family home of his maternal grandparents, located a block from the Hudson River. As proclaimed in the museum’s 2011 landmark exhibition, Edward Hopper, Prelude: The Nyack Years, his hometown prepared Hopper for the credo he rigorously followed: that the aim of art “is the reproduction of the world that surrounds me by means of the world that is within me, all things being grasped, related, re-created, molded and reconstructed in a personal form and an original manner.”
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Edward Hopper's Paint Box, manufactured by F.W. Devoe. Metal (handpainted), c.1892-1895, Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, The Sanborn-Hopper Family Archive
In this new exhibition, on view through March 26, 2023, audiences can view the artist's childhood drawings on loan from the Whitney Museum of American Art, private collections including the Arthayer R. Sanborn Hopper Collection Trust, alongside Hopper’s school notebooks and artmaking materials and artworks by family members from the Museum’s Sanborn-Hopper Family Archive. Together, these objects provide a glimpse into Hopper’s early years, the influence of his boyhood proximity to the busy waterfront and commercial district of his hometown, and insights into his life at home and his family’s support of his developing talent and ambitions.
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Edward Hopper, Three Commodores' Signal Flags, Manuscript ink, graphite pencil, hand-applied colorants from "TC" (Three Commodores) By-Laws notebook, 1896. Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center,The Sanborn-Hopper Family Archive
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Edward Hopper, Smith’s Dock, 1900, Ink on paper, Collection of Steve Oifer
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Edward Hopper (1882-1967), Barge, c.1894-1900, painted wood, Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center; The Sanborn Hopper Family Archive.
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Edward Hopper, Anatomical drawings of Adult Sea-Squirt, Minnow and Lancelet, c. 1896-1899, manuscript inks, graphite, from his high school Zoology notebook, Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center; The Sanborn-Hopper Family Archive
Today, from the front porch of the historic house where Hopper was born in 1882, one can imagine the artist looking straight down Nyack’s Second Avenue to a swath of the Hudson River dotted with boats at work and play. Inside, what is now the Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center, is a bedroom that served as the Hopper’s first studio. 

This exhibition gives audiences new insights into forces at play while Hopper grew up which helped shape his view and aesthetics, leading  him on the path to becoming one of the defining American artists of the 20th century.
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Edward Hopper, Artist's Studio, c. 1900. Pen and ink and graphite pencil on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest
​This exhibition is made possible, in part, by funds provided by the New York Council on the Arts and by Victoria Hertz, Elisabeth Voigt, Mary Anne Evangelist, and Robert Gundersen.

Events & Programs

​OPENING RECEPTION:

​November 16, 2022, 6:00 – 7:30pm
The reception is free to Museum Members, guests, and the public by reservation. Come to the OPENING of the exhibition, and then see the film: "Hopper An American Love Story." 

James Prosek: Drawing on Hopper

Members: $15; Non Members: $20; limited to 25
Thursday, March 2, 2023, 6:00-7:30pm
Ticket includes a glass of wine. 
“In every artist’s development the germ of the later work can be found in the earlier. . . . What he was once, he always is. . . ” -Edward Hopper

Join award-winning artist, naturalist, and writer James Prosek at the exhibition, "Edward Hopper’s Hudson River Boyhood and Emerging Artistic Vision" (on view until March 26th). The renowned Connecticut based artist explores parallels with Edward Hopper’s childhood experiences, specifically how objects and scenes he was drawn to capture in his sketchbooks–as he wandered, and trespassed, on private lands of his rural hometown–would help shape his mature artistic identity. As with Hopper, art was a natural outlet for him and as a youth he developed his artistic gift and love of nature. 

ABOUT JAMES PROSEK

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photo by Jenny Nichols
Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek published his first book at nineteen years of age, Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings of the trout of North America. Prosek's work has been shown at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY, Gerald Peters Gallery, NY and Santa Fe, The Royal Academy of Arts in London, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, The Yale Center for British Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with solo exhibitions at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT, The Addison Gallery of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The New Britain Museum of American Art, The Buffalo Bill Center of the West, The North Carolina Museum of Art and the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC among others.  
He has been an artist-in-residence at numerous institutions, including the Yale University Art Gallery, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings (Since the start of the program in 2005, the World Trout Initiative has given $2 million to over 200 fish conservation groups). His book Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, published in September 2010 was a New York Times Book Review editor's choice, and is the subject of a documentary for PBS series "Nature" that aired in 2013. He is currently working on a book about how and why we name and order the natural world and an article for National Geographic on the Sargasso Sea.
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His latest book (Ocean Fishes, Rizzoli, 2012) is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fishes, all of which were painted life size based on individual specimens he traveled to see. In autumn of 2012 Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
Prosek is a curatorial affiliate, as well as on the board (Leadership Council), of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the advisory board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies.

Drawing Lessons: Hopper's "Artist's Studio"

Members: $15; Non Members: $20; limited to 25
Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 6:00-7:15pm
Ticket includes a glass of wine. 
Picture
Edward Hopper, Artist's Studio, c. 1900. Pen and ink and graphite pencil on paper, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.
In this gallery talk and visual presentation, Edward Hopper House Director and 'Boyhood' exhibition co-curator Kathie Bennewitz explores Hopper's pen and ink drawing, "Artists Studio" (c. 1900). Learn how this studio image connects to artists before him as a glorification of the art of drawing and how it also serves as a statement on Hopper's own artistic self-consciousness and practical training at this important juncture of his emerging career.
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Kathleen Motes Bennewitz

ABOUT Kathie Bennewitz

Bennewitz earned art history degrees from Princeton University and the University of Delaware. After curatorial positions at the Amon Carter Museum and Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, and in education at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, she served as Director of Exhibitions and Programs at the Greenwich Historical Society (the historic site of the Cos Cob art colony) and Fairfield Museum and History Center. She has curated exhibits on American art and artists over her career and, in Connecticut at the Lockwood-Matthews Mansion Museum, Norwalk Historical Society, Westport Historical Society, Westport Library, and as Town of Westport Curator with the Westport Public Art Collections.

EDWARD HOPPER: EARLY TO LATE

Members: $15; Non Members: $20; limited to 25
Thursday, February 9, 2023, 6:00-7:30pm
Ticket includes a glass of wine
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Three self-portraits by Edward Hopper
Join Hopper scholar Elizabeth Thomson Colleary for a gallery lecture that examines how the very early works on display in "Edward Hopper’s Hudson River Boyhood and Emerging Artistic Vision" provide insight into the subjects and locales that fascinated the artist from an early age. She will place his early drawings in relation to later, mature masterworks that clearly display the ongoing influence and impact that Hopper’s Nyack years had in defining his lifelong artistic vision. Beth Colleary guest curated last year's milestone exhibition "Josephine Nivison Hopper: Edward's Muse" and also appears as an expert in the documentary "Hopper: An American Love Story" (2022).

ABOUT Elizabeth ThomPson Colleary

Elizabeth Thompson Colleary (Guest Curator at Edward Hopper House; Grant Speaker) is an independent curator who has taught art history on the college level for twenty eight years and has taught at Scarsdale (NY) High School for the past thirteen years. She also worked at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, where she helped develop the Hopper Research Collection at the Whitney Library. In 2004 she published "Josephine Nivison Hopper: Some Newly Discovered Works," in the Woman's Art Journal (25: 3–11). For Edward Hopper House she guest curated "Grace de Coeur: Watercolors by Josephine Nivison Hopper" (2014) and "Josephine Nivison Hopper: Edward's Muse" (2021). She also authored "Dear Mr. Hopper (Yale University Press, 2013), and an accompanying exhibition at Edward Hopper House, based on letters discovered in the attic of Edward Hopper's childhood home in Nyack that chronicle his previously unknown relationship in France (1904 to 1914) with Alta Hilsdale and updates our understanding of the artist's personal life, relationship with women, and early work. 

Pedaling with Hopper & Hays

Members: $15; Non Members: $20; limited to 25
Tuesday, January 10, 6:00-7:30pm
Ticket includes one sporty cocktail compliments of John Henry Co.  
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Edward Hopper, "French Six-Day Bicycle Rider" (1937), Private Collection
When Hopper was a teenager, cycling was trendy. The invention of the safety bike brought thousands to the sport for health and transportation. In this talk, cyclist and local historian Mike Hays will look at the cycling trend of the 1890s, look at what made Hopper’s bike special, and examine some of his early bike sketches including an amazing self-portrait as a cyclist.

He'll then jump forward nearly 40 years to examine the popular Madison Square 6-day bicycle race, where Hopper was a regular guest. This event also inspired his 1937 painting, "French Six-Day Bicycle Rider." 
Picture
Mike Hays

ABOUT MIKE HAYS

Mike Hays is an active cyclist, local historian and online columnist of Nyack People & Places for Nyack News & Views. He also serves as board president of the Historical Society of the Nyacks, and vice president of the board of trustees for Edward Hopper House Museum & Study Center. 
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Edward Hopper (Cyclist), 1895–1899. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Josephine N. Hopper Bequest.

KEN CARBONE: DRAWING ON HOPPER

$25 per Non-Member, $20 per Member, limited to 25 Attendees
Tuesday, December 20, 2022, from 6:00-7:30pm 
Picture
A selection of Ken Carbone's sketchbooks
Join us on Tuesday, December 20 for Drawing on Hopper to hear celebrated artist and designer Ken Carbone discuss with Carole Perry, Artistic Director & Curator at Edward Hopper House, the importance of drawing as a "process and product." For Edward Hopper, his contemporaries, and today's top artists, drawing remains essential for artistic expression.  In his audio-visual presentation and using his personal journals, Carbone also will reveal how ideas are born, nurtured, and transformed into art with impact. 

​This event is held in conjunction with the current exhibition, "Edward Hopper's Boyhood on the Hudson River and Emerging Artistic Vision" 

Each ticket also includes one glass of cheer, courtesy of John Henry Co., to toast the holidays.

ABOUT KEN CARBONE

Ken Carbone was born in Philadelphia and received his BFA at The Philadelphia College of Art in 1973. His work is deeply rooted in drawing, which offers him the broadest range of creative expression—from the economy of a linear sketch to the depth of a richly rendered image.

Carbone’s exploration of the body, portraits, objects, and nature is conveyed representationally and abstractly using a wide range of media. His current fascination with trees and plants defines his art. In a recent collection of paintings titled Good Nature, he pays homage to these magnificent lifeforms and expresses their natural abstract qualities in line, shape and color.

He has lectured widely at art schools and museums internationally. In 2015, he spoke at a TEDx about his career in art and design. He has written about contemporary culture for Fast Company, The Huffington Post and is a monthly columnist for Print Magazine.
SCREENING: “Hopper An American Love Story”

Filmmaker Phil Grabsky's new documentary "Hopper: An American Love Story" was recently released in October 2022 to coincide with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s exhibition, Edward Hopper’s New York. The already acclaimed film explores the enigmatic personality behind the brush, taking a deep look into Hopper’s art, his life, and his relationships, and prominently features Nyack in its opening chapter. Seventh Art Productions and M&C Media for Exhibition on Screen Executive Producers: Cynthia Weber Cascio, Michael Cascio, Phil Grabsky. ​
November 16, 2022, 8-9:30p, with discussion, 9:30-10p, at The Nyack Center, 58 Depew Avenue, Nyack, NY

​The screening is open to the public by ticket purchase:
  • $15 general public
  • $12 Members of Edward Hopper House
  • $12 Members of Rivertown Film Society
​​Presented with Rivertown Film, Nyack, and Seventh Art Productions, one of the UK's leading independent producers of award-winning documentary films on art, history, society and classical music.
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