HUNTINGTON, WV.-The Huntington Museum of Art will open the exhibit American Spirit: The A.G. Edwards/Wachovia Securities Collection on
April 12 and will run through July 13. In 1991, A.G. Edwards created a traveling exhibition program which encourages branch offices to partner with local art institutions to bring a selection of the corporate collection, based in St. Louis, Missouri, to their communities. The Huntington Museum of Art is excited to host a branch-sponsored exhibition that presents 55 works selected from a large collection of more than 4,000 works by noted American and European artists.

The exhibition addresses our "American Spirit" with an amazing array of prints, posters, and photographs from the mid-19th century to the end of the 20th century. Each work speaks to what it is that makes us uniquely American. The overriding themes of the exhibition deal with the issues of western expansion in the 19th century, small town life, urban life, recreational pastimes, industry (steel, oil, rail, steamboats), the immigrant experience, our national icons, women's rights, and war time propaganda.

Artists we may think of as completely disparate (for example: Andy Warhol and George Catlin) fit together perfectly in this exhibition. Artists range the gamut from painters depicting the early west such as George Catlin, and George Caleb Bingham; illustrators who produced war propaganda posters such as Howard Chandler Christy and Edward Penfield; photojournalists such as W. Eugene Smith and Eudora Welty; Pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein; to avant garde artists such as Vito Acconci and Robert Rauschenberg. And, many of these images have become icons of American art, such as Alfred Stieglitz's photograph entitled The Steerage, and James Montgomery Flagg's Uncle Sam posters.

The artists included in this exhibition capture our collective memories , and address the major concerns of Americans both today and throughout our country's history - the same values as denoted in the Declaration of Independence - life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.