Abundance/Excess: A Contemporary Eye on Still Life

Abundance/Excess: A Contemporary Eye on Still Life

March 15, 2026 – June 7, 2026

Open Wednesday–Monday. Closed Tuesdays except for special events.

Curator: Kerry Bickford

Abundance/Excess: A Contemporary Eye on Still Life brings together ten contemporary artists who engage with the long tradition of still life while reframing it for the twenty-first century. Historically a genre associated with technical skill and symbolic meaning, still life has also served as a space for experimentation — a place where artists explore texture, composition, and coded messages about wealth, mortality, and desire.

The exhibition is organized into two thematic sections:

Abundance

This section examines how still life imagery has historically symbolized prosperity and status. The featured contemporary works interrogate systems of wealth, commerce, and exchange — asking how objects signal value and how consumer culture shapes perception. Fruit, fish, flowers, and meat become markers not only of bounty, but of economic power.

Excess

The second section focuses on the environmental and social consequences of overconsumption. Many works incorporate discarded or repurposed materials — bath towels, reclaimed toys, grocery flyers, and other found objects — reflecting on industrial production and waste. These reinterpretations of still life question what remains after abundance tips into excess.

The Brandywine Museum of Art presents John Sloan’s Street Theater, an exhibition exploring the graphic work of John Sloan (1871–1951), a central figure of the Ashcan School. Emerging in the early twentieth century, Sloan and his contemporaries rejected idealized subjects in favor of the realities of modern urban life, particularly in New York City.

Best known for his paintings and etchings of everyday city scenes, Sloan captured sidewalks, rooftops, tenements, shop windows, and neighborhood theaters with both humor and social awareness. While his oil paintings employed loose, modern brushwork, his prints reveal a more intricate approach, using etching to record fleeting gestures, crowd interactions, and private moments glimpsed through open windows.

This exhibition draws from a collection of more than 500 prints donated to the museum by the late Paul Preston Davis, presenting over 50 works that highlight Sloan’s mastery of the medium. The selection underscores his deep interest in human behavior — from children playing in the streets to the rhythms of working-class neighborhoods.

Sloan’s art offers insight into a transformative period in American life. During his lifetime, the city shifted from horse-drawn transportation to automobiles; women’s public roles expanded dramatically; and social norms were reshaped through movements such as suffrage and Prohibition. Through his prints, urban life becomes both stage and subject — a “street theater” unfolding in real time.

Together, the exhibition expands still life beyond decorative tradition, connecting it to urgent contemporary concerns about sustainability, consumption, and economic imbalance. The familiar language of fruit and flowers becomes a lens for examining extraction, production, and responsibility in modern society.