Spring is here, and with it, endings and beginnings. We begin closing out the Museum’s 60th year with an exciting exhibition pointing forward to the days ahead: Future Perfect. This exhibition reflects the generosity of spirit that has made this Museum over six decades into a true cultural touchstone in our community, as well as a repository of some of the finest art on public display in the region, and, in the some cases, the country. More than that, the wealth of new artworks provided by our donors ensures the continual enrichment of Birmingham’s cultural life by this Museum on into the decades to come. We will offer a sneak peak of this exhibition May 5 at the Museum Ball and Dinner. This event raises crucial financial support for the Museum’s education and outreach programs.

We are so grateful to this year’s Chairs, Katharine Patton and Penny Page, and Men’s Committee Chairs, Will Legg and Jim Priester. As we celebrate our growing collection, we continue to bring in excellent, acclaimed traveling exhibitions, such as next month’s Warhol and Cars: American Icons, and this fall’s impending blockbuster, Norman Rockwell’s America. In the case of Warhol and Cars, the
first exhibition which examines the Pop Artist’s love of the automobile, you will find an amazingly diverse set of drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptural models and more by one of America’s most influential artists.

We’ll talk more about Rockwell in the future, but suffice it to say that the BMA feels a palpable air of excitement over bringing to Birmingham an exhibition hailed by American Spectator as the finest in London last year. As the first United States venue for this traveling exhibition, we look forward to showing close to 50 of Norman Rockwell’s paintings, spanning his entire career, as well as more than 300 of his iconic covers for the Saturday Evening Post, illustrations that defined America in the minds and memories of so many individuals.

And opening May 20 is an exhibition of elegant sculpture sure to enlighten us about a culture indigenous to the upper reaches of North America and beyond, Arctic Beauty: Inuit Sculpture from Canada. This fascinating exhibition presents 87 works shining a spotlight on the graceful talents of a people living in harmony with their frozen natural world, and the people, animals, and even spirits they interact with. Also in May we are thrilled to unleash Bart’s ArtVenture! with all the fun and excitement our new Hess family gallery holds for our younger visitors. Making art with Bart has a fresh and colorful, educational, and high tech new meaning in this space. Be sure to come and spend time with your children or grandchildren, stepping into our artworks, or taking inspiration from our collection to create new masterpieces in the most
kid-friendly area in the Museum!

Meanwhile, our exhibition, Look of Love: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, continues to earn raves and great press. By now, you’ve no doubt seen coverage of the exhibition in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Elle, Antiques and Fine Art, Salon.com, as well as beautifully featured in Birmingham press. The enthusiastic response is truly gratifying for the Museum and we extend our deep gratitude to David and Nan Skier, who made the exhibition possible. We are also so proud of how this exhibition has spawned fun, engaging, and educational new technology in the development of our own iPad app, created by our web team, and now available to the general public through Apple’s App Store.

As you read this, another great original exhibition years in the making will be coming to its last days, Dragons and Lotus Blossoms: Vietnamese Ceramics from the Birmingham Museum of Art. This exhibition, too, has earned its praise in national and international press—the Wall Street Journal and Orientations magazine, among others, drew attention to the first exhibition of its kind and scope in North America. Vietnamese ceramics have formed an important aspect of the Museum’s collecting for more than 30 years, and we are delighted to make this particular strength known nationally and internationally.

We enter this season proud too, of our Kennedy Center Partners in Education grant, which is sending Associate Education Curator Suzy Harris and a representative of the Jefferson County Schools to Washington D.C. to learn new ways to integrate arts education into teacher development programs. And we think it is so cool that our Education Department recently enjoyed a new partnership with Google, which had the BMA taking part in the Doodle 4 Google program. With all these groundbreaking new initiatives, so many tremendous exhibitions and programs in your Museum, we can’t help but look forward to the rest of 2012 and what the coming decades will bring to the Birmingham Museum of Art.

We hope you will be with us for all the good things to come.

Gail C. Andrews
The R. Hugh Daniel Director