KONGO across the WATERS will explore connections between the art and culture of the Kongo peoples of western Central Africa and African American art and culture in the United States.
The exhibition will address cultural and artistic themes within Kongo culture, beginning with the ancient Kongo kingdom that encompassed parts of Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, Republic of the Congo and Gabon. Themes will include the arts of leadership, religion, and daily life interpreted within historical, archaeological, linguistic, musicological, anthropological and art historical contexts.

Opening in October, 2013 Kongo across the Waters will celebrate Kongo influenced cultural traditions primarily in the southeastern United States, including Florida, and will commemorate 500 years since the first African conquistador, Juan Garrido, came to the Americas. The exhibition coincides with the Viva Florida celebration of 500 years of Florida’s cultural heritage.

KONGO across the WATERS is a collaborative project by the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art at the University of Florida and the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium.

Monet and American Impressionism will be the first major exhibition on American Impressionism to be organized by the Harn Museum of Art. Highlighting vivid depictions of modern life in America between 1888 and 1920, the exhibition will feature approximately 50 paintings and 20 prints representing 25 American artists who launched a new way of painting in response to the influence of French Impressionism. Select works by French master Claude Monet will introduce artistic concerns such as media, technique, subject matter and composition.

The Harn Museum’s growing collection of works by French and American Impressionists is the catalyst for the exhibition. Since the acquisition in 1999 of Claude Monet’s Giverny landscape, Champ d’avoine (1890), the permanent collection has grown strategically through the addition of works by Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam and Maurice Prendergast. The exhibition will present these major figures alongside works by other major American Impressionists such as Mary Cassatt, William Merritt Chase, Frederick Frieseke, Willard Metcalf and John Twachtman, as well as works by under-recognized artists such as John Leslie Breck, Gari Melchers, Richard Miller, Lilla Cabot Perry and Guy Wiggins. Artists representing a new generation of painters who merged Impressionism with newer realist concerns will include Prendergast, William Glackens, Ernest Lawson and Jonas Lie.

Monet and American Impressionism will be organized along five thematic groupings: “The Allure of Giverny,” “A Country Retreat,” “The Vibrance of Urbanism,” “The Comfort of Home,” and “A Graphic Legacy.” Each section will include several works by Monet alongside works by American Impressionists to generate dialogue about techniques, composition and subject matter. The exhibition is curated by Dulce Román, Curator of Modern Art, and will be accompanied by a publication with essays addressing the artistic, cultural and historical context of American Impressionism from interdisciplinary perspectives.