Artworks by Music Legend Bob Dylan Featured This Summer at Fenimore Art Museum

New exhibition:
Bob Dylan Remastered: Drawings from the Road
May 25–September 15, 2024
Fenimore Art Museum, Cooperstown, NY

COOPERSTOWN, NY — A new exhibition at Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York celebrates another impressive aspect of music legend Bob Dylan’s creativity: his talents in visual art. Bob Dylan Remastered: Drawings from the Road features ninety-two unique, original signed works. The exhibition is on view May 25–September 15, 2024.

A dedicated performer, Dylan started what is known as his “Never Ending Tour” in 1988; between 1989 and 1992, as he traveled through North America, Europe, and Asia, he began sketching glimpses of his life on the road. The resultant pencil and charcoal drawings were a way to “refocus a restless mind,” as Dylan claimed, providing him a new outlet to celebrate the comings and goings of everyday life.

“This exhibition allows everyone, including Dylan’s fans, to experience another aspect of the range of talents possessed by this music legend,” said Chris Rossi, Director of Exhibitions at Fenimore Art Museum. “We all recognize him as an accomplished singer/songwriter and visitors will be equally amazed when discovering his work as a visual artist.”

Dylan made three different collections out of the original drawings by “remastering” these works, adding vivid watercolor and gouache to digital enlargements of the drawings to create a new, special edition set entitled The Drawn Blank Series, which is the focus of Fenimore’s exhibition.

All three series were first seen in public during an exhibition at the prestigious Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz Museum in Germany in 2007. After one additional show in Helsinki, the works returned to Dylan. Today, The Drawn Blank Series is owned by a private collector while the other two sets were sold to a private gallery. Dylan’s work has been compared to modern masters such as Henri Matisse and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His skills as a draughtsman, in keeping with his talents as a songwriter, lie with his ability to tell an engrossing tale through the simplest and most evocative means.

The exhibition is sponsored in part by The Clark Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas O. Putnam.

This exhibition was provided by PAN Art Connections. Visit FenimoreArt.org for more information.

RELATED PROGRAMS

For information on upcoming programs, visit FenimoreArt.org.

ABOUT BOB DYLAN

One of the most iconic and prolific musicians of our time, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan has been chronicling modern life, note by note, for nearly sixty years. Equally influential and indomitable, Dylan’s songs helped redefine folk, pop, blues, country, and rock music, all while providing a soundtrack to America’s civil rights and anti-war movements. The power and breadth of his artistry, however, has only been fully recognized recently: in 2016 his work creating “new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition” was honored with a Nobel Prize for Literature.

ABOUT FENIMORE ART MUSEUM

Fenimore Art Museum, located on the shores of Otsego Lake—James Fenimore Cooper’s “Glimmerglass”—in historic Cooperstown, New York, offers visitors the opportunity to experience a wide variety of world-class art in an idyllic, small-town setting. The museum 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.