GRAND RAPIDS, MICHIGAN.-The Grand Rapids Art Museum presents Marks of Distinction: Two Hundred Years of Painting at Watercolors from the Hood Museum of Art, on view through September 11, 2005

Overview: This exhibition features eighty American master drawings and watercolors from the collection of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. Spanning nearly two hundred years of American art, the works represent the achievements of well-known artists, such as Benjamin West, Winslow Homer, Mary Cassatt, James McNeill Whistler, George Wesley Bellows, Joan Mitchell, and Jacob Lawrence. Taken as a whole, they reveal the rich variety of approaches, media and subjects that have attracted American artists over the decades.

The exhibition is an exchange partnership between the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Hood Museum of Art. Drawn from Nature: The Plant Lithographs of Ellsworth Kelly will be presented in the galleries of the Hood Museum at Dartmouth during the same time period of American watercolors here.

This exhibition was organized by the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and supported in part by a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation. Local support for this exhibition comes from Wege Foundation. Catalogue: A catalogue, co-published with Hudson Hills Press, will accompany the exhibition and include full entries on the works presented in the exhibition.