New Exhibition to Open at Fenimore Art Museum Featuring the Work of Adrianne Lobel

Cooperstown, New York — Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York presents the work of artist Adrianne Lobel in the exhibition Nature Composed: Paintings and Tapestries by Adrianne Lobel, on view September 23 – December 31, 2023. 

Adrianne Lobel has been painting for over twenty years, commencing after her illustrious career as a stage designer for theater, film, dance, and opera in America, Europe, and Japan.

In this current series of work, Lobel organized and composed the chaos of nature—with an interest in the relationship of simple forms, line, and color in space. 

“This particular body of work is from the last two years,” said Lobel. “I now spend May through October upstate working outside. Then I bring those paintings to my studio in Hoboken where I work from the work, changing scale and adjusting. Most of these paintings are of my pond and the reflections of the vegetation and the sky in the water. I am interested in simplifying the forms and colors of nature and the relationships between the forms and colors. I want to organize the chaos of it into something almost architectural.”

Her work continues to develop with a trajectory closely resembling that of Mondrian. Early landscapes were impressionistic, gradually becoming more cubist, and then more simplified and geometric.

Lobel also creates needlepoint tapestries from these paintings, which translate the images into something even more graphic and hard edged.

Adrianne Lobel is the daughter of well-known artist and children’s book author Arnold Lobel, creator of the Frog and Toad series. She assisted with the development of the exhibition Frog and Toad & Other Friends: The World of Arnold Lobel, on view at Fenimore Art Museum September 23 – December 31, 2023.

Fenimore Art Museum is located at 5798 State Route 80, less than one mile from the center of Cooperstown. For more information visit FenimoreArt.org.

About Adrianne Lobel

As a painter, Adrianne Lobel has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in New York City and Upstate New York. Before turning to painting fulltime, she enjoyed a decades-long career as an award-winning scenic designer for theater, opera, film, and dance. Her numerous Broadway credits include the Broadway productions of Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award winning musical Passion, The Diary of Anne Frank (both directed by James Lapine), On The Town directed by George C. Wolfe and A Year with Frog and Toad directed by David Petrarca. She also served as producer for A Year with Frog and Toad, which is performed widely around the country.

Collaborating often with Peter Sellars she designed scenery for his productions of Nixon in China (The Metropolitan Opera), Dr. Atomic (San Franciso Opera), The Rake’s Progress (Le Chatelet Paris), The Marriage of Figaro (Pepsico Summerfare NY), Cosi Fan Tutte (Pepsico Summerfare NY), The Magic Flute (Glyndebourne Festival Opera) and The Mikado (Chicago Lyric Opera.)

For director Francesca Zambello she designed the sets for An American Tragedy (Metropolitan Opera), Street Scene (Houston Grand Opera), Lady in the Dark (The National Theater, London) and the new musical Little House on the Prairie at The Guthrie Theatre – which she also helped develop.

Her scenic design work for choreographer Mark Morris includes L’Allegro, Il Penseroso ed il Moderato (La Monnaie-Brussels, BAM), The Hard Nut (La Monnaie Brussels, BAM), Orfeo ed Euridice (BAM, Edinburgh) Platee (The Royal Opera, London, NYCO), King Arthur (English National Opera and NYCO) and most recently Acis and Galatea at Zellarbach Hall San Francisco. She has also worked with choreographers Christopher Wheeldon, Eliot Feld, and Donald Byrd.

Lobel has worked in most major American regional theaters and extensively Off-Broadway. She has won the Lucille Lortel Award, the Obie Award, Long Wharf’s Murphy Award, The Joseph Jefferson Award, as well as Drama Desk, Maharam, Helen Hayes, FANY and Tony nominations.

As a painter, Lobel has had solo exhibitions in New York City at The Carter Burden Gallery, The Bowery Gallery, The Warren St. Gallery, Walter Wickiser Gallery, the New York Studio School and upstate at the Atwater Gallery, Sharada Gallery, Marianne Corville Gallery and The Mabbitsville Gallery. Group Exhibitions include: The 2017 New York Studio School Alumni Show, the Julia Saul Gallery (curated by Isaac Mizrahi), and the Julie Keyes Gallery (curated by George Negroponte).

She holds an MFA from the Yale School of Drama and is a graduate of the New York Studio School Certificate Program where she recently won a Mercedes Matter award.

RELATED PROGRAMS

A Conversation with Adrianne Lobel
Saturday, Sept 23 • 5:00-6:00 p.m.

Reservations required. Visit FenimoreArt.org to purchase tickets
$15 Museum Members / $17.50 Non-Members

In this special presentation, artist Adrianne Lobel will discuss the work in her exhibit, Nature Composed: Painting and Tapestries by Adrianne LobeI, as well as the work of her father Arnold in the exhibition, Frog and Toad & Other Friends: The World of Arnold Lobel.

Gallery Talk with artist Adrianne Lobel

Sunday, September 24 • 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Reservations required. Visit FenimoreArt.org to purchase tickets
$20 members; $25 non-members

Join artist Adrianne Lobel for a special after-hours guided tour of her exhibit, Nature Composed: Paintings and Tapestries by Adrianne Lobel.

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.