We are delighted to announce that A Cultivating Journey, the third and final book of the Museum’s collection-based research documenting major touring exhibitions is now published.

Copies of A Cultivating Journey: The Herman H. Levy Legacy and its companion volumes – The Unvarnished Truth and Living Building Thinking – are available in person at the McMaster Museum of Art (cash payments only) or online via ABC Art Books.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A CULTIVATING JOURNEY: THE HERMAN H. LEVY LEGACY

Tabitha Barber, Tobi Bruce, Lloyd DeWitt, Ihor Holubizky, Alex Kidson, Alison McQueen, Kim Ness, Caterina Pierre
With an introduction by Carol Podedworny

McMaster Museum of Art
250 pp col. ill. 10.75 x 8 in softcover
9781926632186
$45.00 Can. $49.00 U.S.
March 2018

A Cultivating Journey examines the collection of significant European historical and modern art donated to the McMaster Museum of Art by Herman Levy in 1984, and includes works by Courbet, Derain, Monet, Pissarro and Van Gogh. Today the production of such a project raises the critical question: how does the museum collect in the twenty-first century?

This would have been a much easier consideration when the Levy donation entered the museum’s collection. Up until that time, art history and the museum were Western inventions that served a particular period (circa 1860-1980) without contestation. The situation has since changed, forcing a reconsideration of the making, collecting, and presenting of art in a diverse, global, multi-centred world through a decidedly ideological institution.

This thoroughly illustrated publication serves as both exhibition catalogue and analysis of the task at hand. In essays and extended didactic statements on individual works, experts in their fields document the conundrum while speaking to/in the present museological moment. Discussions include the act of collecting; the transfer of personal to public; the enduring yet changing cultural significance of works of art – formally and socio-politically; the changing nature of collections; and the role of the museum in naming, classifying, interpreting, and maintaining works of cultural heritage. In English and French.