This spring we will kick off a year-long celebration of the Addison’s 75th birthday. Throughout the year a special series of events, programs, and exhibitions will honor the past, celebrate the present, and chart our course for the future.

In the infant stages of photography, the portraiture of Albert Sands Southworth and Josiah Johnson Hawes drew the elite of the time to their Boston studio. The finest practitioners of daguerreotype, their twenty- year partnership elevated the medium to the level of art and produced an unmatched body of work documenting mid-nineteenth century America. The Addison is pleased to present the only New England showing of Young America: The Daguerreotypes of Southworth & Hawes, the most comprehensive exhibition of the daguerreotypes of these famed Boston photographers, on display through April 9.

On Thursday, January 19, over three hundred people joined us for the dedication of the exhibition Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century to the memory of Charles J. Beard II. Charlie, PA ’62, served as both a trustee of Phillips Academy and member of the Addison’s Board of Governors. Portraits of a People fosters dialogue about how contemporary and historic images of people have the power to form, reinforce, or change one’s perceptions – and thus speaks to the commitment to education that was a hallmark of Charlie's work at Andover.

In the early twentieth century, the harbor town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, about an hour's drive from the Addison, drew not only vacationers but also artists who rented cottages, rooms, and lofts to work during the summer months. First visiting on the recommendation of fellow artist John Sloan in 1915, Stuart Davis became a returning member of Gloucester's artist colony until 1940. Describing it as “the place I had been looking for,” he made the docks, the fishermen, the schooners and even the rocks celebrated and recurring subjects.

John Marin (1870 – 1953) was an important American modernist painter and a central figure in the circle of artists around Alfred Stieglitz. Marin’s career spanned two centuries. An original and inventive artist, he is best known for translating the American landscape tradition of the nineteenth century into a modern vocabulary. His work also inspired Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and many of the emerging Abstract Expressionists of the 1940s. In the fall of 2005, Marin’s daughter-in-law, Norma Marin, donated one of his great works, a painting from 1947 called Movement: Seas After Hurricane, Red, Green and White, Figure in Blue, to the Addison. We recently spoke with Norma about her gift and her thoughts about the Addison collection.

Artist Beverly McIver is fascinated with the concept of identity and how one defines oneself. While her experiences are generated from the perspective of a black woman, the issues at the heart of her paintings focus on what it means to be human and the vulnerability of the human condition. “My identity is composed of the people who are in my life: my friends and my family. I define myself in part by the characteristics I admire within my friends and family and every project I work on deals with this idea in different ways,” said McIver.

View photo highlights of the Addison's recent events by clicking below.

Click below to see the lastest list of exhibitions and upcoming events coming to the Addison Gallery.