Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter
May – August 2024
Esther Estelle Pressoir (1902-86) was born in Woonsocket, RI and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in painting and drawing. Coming of age in the 1920s, Pressoir embraced the modern art scene in America and abroad. She spent summers with the Provincetown art colony and moved through the studios, galleries, and nightclubs of jazz-age New York. She punctuated her formal education with an unprecedented 18,000 km bicycle trip across Europe in 1927, where she developed her personal style.
On view are a selection of Pressoir’s paintings, sketches, letters, and ephemera on loan from private collections, including those of Ingeborg Gallery and Suzanne Scanlan. Additional Pressoir works are currently exhibited at the RISD Museum.
Watch Scanlan’s EX LIBRIS program about Pressoir’s life and work here.
Presidents and Their Books: What They Read and What They Wrote
February 1 – April 7, 2024
Traveling from NYC’s Grolier Club, Presidents and Their Books: What They Read and What They Wrote explores America’s presidents as bibliophiles, readers, and writers and features books owned or written by each of the 45 men who have served as President. Co-curated by renowned collector Susan Jaffe Tane and her teenage grandchildren Natalie Flaxman and Spencer Flaxman, the materials are drawn from Ms. Tane’s personal collection.
Highlights include:
- George Washington’s signed copy of Memoir of a Map of Hindoostan (1794)
- Thomas Jefferson’s annotated copy of Homer’s Iliad (1570), a Renaissance-era printing in Greek
- Theodore Roosevelt’s personal copy of his book Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter (1905)
- Harry S. Truman’s Truman Speaks (1960), gifted and inscribed to Eleanor Roosevelt
- John F. Kennedy’s copy of Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the United States (1961), inscribed by Jacqueline Kennedy after her husband’s death
Join us for staff-led exhibition tours at 1pm:
February 14 & 28
March 5 & 19
April 2 & 5
(registration not required)
To discover more about this exhibition, explore its incredible volumes, and take a virtual tour, visit the Grolier’s website. For more information, contact collections@provath.org or 401.421.6970 x26.
