Palmer Museum of Art Unveils 2021 Exhibition Lineup

The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State’s upcoming 2021 exhibition lineup will feature Pennsylvania landscapes, women artists, a variety of periods and places around the word and more.

The museum reopened on Feb. 10 and features a new timed-entry ticket reservation system due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It is closed to the public on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Now through Sunday, June 6, the Palmer Museum will feature “Field Language: The Painting and Poetry of Warren and Jane Rohrer.” This exhibit displays the art of a married couple, Warren and Jane Rohrer, who share a background with Mennonite farm families.

Warren’s paintings feature cultivated fields of southcentral Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Jane’s poems feature a modern look into her experience with traditional agricultural life.

During this time frame, there will also be a virtual exhibition, “Pennsylvania Scenery: Early Landscape Prints from the Tavern Collection.” The “Tavern Collection” features prints acquired by John C. O’Connor and Ralph M. Yeager that were originally decorations at The Tavern in downtown State College.

“Tavern Collection” is influenced by early 19th-century literary journals and publications that commemorated American landscapes. They were gifted to the Palmer Museum roughly 35 years ago. The virtual exhibition can be viewed here.

Now through Sunday, May 9, a display titled “The Wit and Whimsy of Lucille Corcos” will be shown. It will exhibit Lucille Corcos’s watercolor paintings that were pivotal to her career from the 1930s to the 1950s. This will be the museum’s first exhibition devoted to Corcos in 22 years.

From Sunday, March 28, to Sunday, July 11, the museum will showcase art from the Palmer Museum’s permanent collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s collection. The art on display will be Warren Rohrer and Alma Thomas’s works about the natural world, as well as works by Norman Lewis, Leonard Nelson, Mark Tobey, Henry Pearson, and Alan Gussow.

From Sunday, May 23 to Sunday, Aug. 22, visitors can view the exhibition, “Summer Light: American Impressionist Paintings from the Thomas Clark Collection.” As an effort to welcome summer, the museum is showcasing 25 works that explore “the durability and dissemination of Impressionism in the United States between about 1910 and 1940.”

The featured artists include Maurice Braun, Hayley Lever, George Loftus Noyes, Carl Peters, Jane Peterson, Mabel May Woodward, and many others. This collection is on a loan from Thomas Clark, who intends to give the art to the Palmer Museum.

From Wednesday, Aug. 4, to Sunday, Dec. 12, the museum will feature an exhibit titled, “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation.”

The exhibition from the Schnitzer collection and organized by the Palmer highlights work by contemporary Asian and Asian American artists who draw on various “motifs, techniques, and cultural motivations to construct diverse ‘Asias’ in a modern global context..

From Wednesday, Aug. 11, to Sunday, Dec. 5, “Ukiyo-e: Images of the Floating World, Japanese Woodblock Prints from the Permanent Collection” will be on display. The focal point of his exhibition is the art of ukiyo-e, which means “pictures of the floating world.”

This exhibition features work from Japan during the Edo period (1615–1867) reflecting contemporary fashions and attitudes and will include 16 Japanese woodblock prints that were given to the Palmer Museum by William E. Harkins, a 1942 Penn State alumnus.

The final exhibition will take place from Tuesday, Sept. 7 to Sunday, Dec. 12. It is titled, “Place to Place: Recent Gifts of American Drawings and Watercolors, 1900-1950.”

It will present 30 drawings and watercolors of geographical locations depicted by traveling artists including Colin Campbell Cooper, Marsden Hartley, Charles Webster Hawthorne, Robert Henri, Irene Rice Pereira, and Alice Schille. These works will be on view at the museum for the first time.