Monday, May 19, 2008

The Stark Museum

We just arrived from San Antonio, Texas last week. How I wish we could have stayed longer, and get a chance to visit Stark Museum of Art in Orange, Texas. I don't have any idea how close or far that is from San Antonio, but we are used to travelling by long hours on the road. Well, there are still "next times" and it is confirmed, we will go back to Texas in July. The exact place is still unknown, but hopefully it should be closer to Orange, Texas :).
The Stark Museum of Art houses the most significant collections of American Western Art. The museum were envisioned by H.J. Lutcher Stark and his mother Miriam Lutcher Stark who was an enthusiastic collector of arts, furnitures and decorative items from all around the world. In that similar way, H.J. Lutcher Stark had the passion of collecting things with similar interest of art and nature that depicts the American West. The family roots since then developed and made the collecting passion flourished thus the museum was created to display the great various collections. Being a museum of art, inside the museum are great collections of different paintings,sculptures, and prints from the 19th and 20th centuries such as rare books and manuscripts, and many more. The museum is divided into different art collections such as the Western Art reflecting the artistic interpretation of the western region for more than 2 centuries; the American Indian Art which consists of collections of plain clothings, body ornaments and beadworks reflecting these objects as creations of the different tribes of Great Plains, Southwest, Eastern Woodlands and Northwest Coast; Decorative Arts that consists primarily of glass and porcelains and the Rare books and Manuscripts collections. They also have different exhibitions that is worth seeing from the current to past and future exhibitions and exhibitions on loan. Finally, in 1961, the Stark foundation was established as a non-profit corporation by H.J. Lutcher Stark and his wife Nelda C. Stark purposely for the benefits of charitable and educational purposes by which the foundation also carries the mandate in part, through the programs of the Stark Museum of Art, and other part of the foundation such as the W.H.Stark House, the Frances Ann Lutcher Theater for Performing Arts and Shangrila Botanical Gardens and Nature Center. If you happen to be visiting Orange Texas someday, visit the Stark Museum of Art website to know more about the details and there's nothing ever more fun than visiting the actual museum itself :).


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