A Place in America: Celebrating the Legacy of Ralph and Barbara Voorhees

Showing America’s landscape “from sea to shining sea” in prints and drawings made between 1880 and 1940, this exhibition offers a tantalizing panorama of urban and rural scenes, in addition to images of industry contrasting with wilderness views. The earliest works are by Mary Nimmo Moran and J. Alden Weir, who revived interest in landscape etching in late nineteenth-century America. Other highlights include Louis Comfort Tiffany, Arthur Wesley Dow, Blanche Lazzell, Stuart Davis, Walt Kuhn, John Marin, Abraham Walkowitz, Marguerite Zorach, and William Zorach. From Pedro de Lemos’s view of a California shipyard to Louis Lozowick’s lithograph of the Manhattan skyline seen from the Brooklyn Bridge, this selection of prints and drawings presents a captivating composite picture of places and experiences of America.  

The thirty-eight American prints and drawings on view, purchased with the Ralph and Barbara Voorhees American Art Fund, serve as a tribute to its late benefactors, who were generous friends to the Zimmerli and Rutgers University. In 1982, brothers Ralph and Alan Voorhees made a major contribution to the Rutgers University Art Gallery, which was then renamed the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum in honor of their mother. Between 1978 and 2005, Ralph and Barbara Voorhees regularly donated funds for art purchases, enabling the museum to acquire almost 500 American, European, and Russian art works, most of which were American prints and drawings dating between 1870 and 1950. With these important gifts, Mr. and Mrs. Voorhees (who died in 2013 and 2005, respectively) immeasurably enriched the museum’s  collection.  

Organized by Marilyn Symmes, Director of the Zimmerli’s Morse Research Center for Graphic Arts and Curator of Prints and Drawings, with Sara Green, International Fine Prints Dealers Association Foundation Intern, and Kirsten Marples, a Rutgers University Art History Graduate Student Intern (M.A. 2014).

Supported by New Brunswick Development Corporation and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital