New Exhibition Featuring Barn Drawings by Utica-based Artist David “RC” Oster at Fenimore Art Museum

Start date: October 17, 2022
End date: November 6, 2022
Time: 10:00 am
Location: Fenimore Art Museum, 5798 State Highway 80 (P.O.BOX 800) Cooperstown, NY 13326
Organizer: Fenimore Art Museum
Email address: INFO@FENIMOREART.ORG
Phone: 607-547-1400
Exhibits | Fenimore Art Museum Exhibits

NEW COMMUNITY EXHIBITION
Barns of New York: Drawings by David Oster
On view through November 6, 2022 at the Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY
Free museum admission for ages 19 and under – find more free options at FenimoreArtMuseum.org/free.

Cooperstown, New York – Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York presents a new community exhibition, Barns of New York: Drawings by David Oster, on view through November 6, 2022. David “RC” Oster is a self-taught artist living in Utica, specializing in ink drawings of nature scenes and architectural landmarks.  He is known for his highly detailed illustrations of farms and barns from the region, many of which have disappeared since his drawings were made.  An ardent preservationist, he has illustrated hundreds of old homes, mills, and barns from the Tug Hill to the Southern Tier, as well as numerous scenes from the western Adirondacks.  All of his drawings are created free-hand in ink, sometimes on site.

The goal of the Community Exhibitions program is to celebrate the people in our region of Central New York through art. The exhibits change frequently, offering numerous and ongoing opportunities for local artists and organizations to be featured in a nationally recognized museum.


Museum Admission: Adults (20-64) $15.00; Seniors (65+) $12.50. FREE for ages 19 and under, museum members, and active military and retired career military personnel. FREE museum admission is also available for those receiving SNAP benefits (up to 4 people) with the presentation of a SNAP Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT) card.  Discounted two-way tickets are available if you’d also like to visit The Farmers’ Museum across the street. For more information on our “Free Admission” offerings, visit FenimoreArtMuseum.org/free.

Also on view at Fenimore Art Museum this fall: 

The Art of Observation: The Best of Photographer Elliott Erwitt (on view through December 31, 2022)

This exhibition offers an enticing window into Elliott Erwitt’s collection of work. It showcases the impressive results of a remarkable career that coincides with two of the most significant developments in photography in the second half of the twentieth century: the rise of mass-circulation picture magazines; and the occasionally contentious relationship between personal work and commercial photography. This exhibition shows both the miracle of Erwitt’s balance between commercial and personal photography, and the memorable flavor that he brings to his work.

Jonathan Kirk – Abstract Sculpture: Fables, Foibles, and other Machinations (on view through December 31, 2022)
Jonathan Kirk’s sculptures, while abstract, are evocative of a wide range of sources, from the natural and organic world, to forms of industrial and naval architecture. The work illuminates the ways in which the forms of the artist as well as the engineer still embody the mysterious intelligence of their natural models and points to the idea that making is, in a sense, the invention of what might be called ‘cultural machinery.’

Tales from the Rockabout Hills: Paintings by D. Michael Price (on view through December 31, 2022)

D. Michael Price is a fantasy artist whose work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally. Well-respected as a successful fine artist as well as a published children’s book author/illustrator, Price’s works of fantasy art are created in acrylic and oil mediums on canvas. His love of the magical beauty to be found in the hills, valleys, forests, and streams of his Upstate New York home in the “Rockabout Hills” provides him with constant inspiration. The exhibition includes artwork from four of his books, which transport the viewer through magical settings with humor and originality.

Mary Michael Shelley – Art of the Everyday (on view through December 31, 2022)

Mary Michael Shelley’s artwork has been described as primitive, traditional, untrained, Americana, whimsical, naïve, eccentric, outsider, visionary, or carved craft. The carved wooden reliefs featured in this exhibition by this Ithaca based artist are a sort of “picture diary” or “picture story” in which Shelley documents life events, emotions, and places important to her life.

North by Nuuk: Greenland After Rockwell Kent—Photographs by Denis Defibaugh (on view through December 31, 2022)

Photographer Denis Defibaugh presents his journey from Nuuk to the settlement of Illorsuit, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle, following Rockwell Kent’s earlier footsteps and offers a fresh look at timeless Greenland. Defibaugh’s revealing documentary photographs, made during 2016–17, introduce a changing country and its cultural continuity in response to Kent’s 1930s historic writings and images made during his residence in Greenland. Gallery text and video include native language speakers as well as Kent’s lantern slides. The exhibition is supplemented with etchings and prints from Rockwell Kent’s Greenland sojourn, on loan from the University of Plattsburgh, and artwork from the Thaw Collection of American Indian Art. Sponsored in part by Nellie and Robert Gipson.

Fenimore Art Museum presents its new fall exhibitions alongside its world-renowned collections of fine art, folk art, and Native American art, which includes The Thaw Collection of American Indian Art. Visit FenimoreArt.org for a complete list of current exhibitions.

About Fenimore Art Museum
Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org

About Fenimore Art Museum
Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, features a wide-ranging collection of American art including folk art; important American 18th- and 19th-century landscape, genre, and portrait paintings; more than 125,000 historic photographs representing the technical developments made in photography and providing extensive visual documentation of the region’s unique history; and the renowned Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection of American Indian Art comprised of nearly 900 art objects representative of a broad geographic range of North American Indian cultures, from the Northwest Coast, Eastern Woodlands, Plains, Southwest, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions. Visit FenimoreArt.org