ANDOVER, MASS.- The Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., opened its fall exhibition season this month with a trio of new shows. Lorna Simpson, a retrospective examining the artist’s 30- year career, headlines the fall season and opened on September 20. This comprehensive exhibition, curated by noted scholar Joan Simon, presents Simpson’s oeuvre from her earliest photo-text pieces of the mid-1980s to her most recent works in a variety of mediums. A three-channel video installation entitled Chess (2013), created especially for this show, makes its American debut at the Addison. The Addison’s presentation of the exhibition is the first stop in the United States following critical success at the Jeu de Paume, Paris, the Haus der Kunst, Munich, and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England. Lorna Simpson, and the Addison’s other fall exhibitions, will be on view through January 4, 2015.

“It is a privilege to present the work of Lorna Simpson, who so compellingly and poetically explores the complicated intersections of race, gender, class, and identity, often through simultaneously evocative and elusive pairings of text and image. These works are both thought-provoking and also sumptuously beautiful,” Judith F. Dolkart, The Mary Stripp and R. Crosby Kemper Director of the Addison, notes.

Also at the Addison this season, Dwight Tryon and American Tonalism opened September 13. This exhibition brings together seven landscape paintings from the 1880s by the American artist Dwight Tryon (1849–1925) and sets them within the context of Tonalist works from the Addison’s collection by such artists as Alvin Langdon Coburn, George Inness, and John Twachtman. A style of the period 1880–1915, Tonalism followed the factual naturalism of the Hudson River School. Developed at the same time that American artists were influenced by French Barbizon and Impressionist painting, Tonalist works are characterized by subtle gradations of tone within a limited color scale, projecting personal expressions of mood through veiled depictions of light and atmosphere. Tryon’s paintings, created near his home in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, display his intimate connection to the coastal region of southeastern Massachusetts and distinguish themselves as highly evocative of the artist’s personal relationship with nature and his response to a particular time and place. Dwight Tryon and American Tonalism, curated by independent scholar Keith Kauppila, contributes to the growing scholarly interest in American Tonalism and gives Tryon’s work the closer look that it deserves.

Exhibition curator Keith Kauppila will give a Gallery Talk for Dwight Tryon and American Tonalism on Sunday, September 28 at 2:00 p.m. The event is presented in collaboration with the Essex National Heritage Area’s Trails & Sails program (www.trailsandsails.org), which offers explorations of Essex County's cultural, historic, and natural sites over two weekends in September. This talk is free and open to the public.

The exhibition Exterior Spaces, Interior Places, on view now, rounds out the Addison’s fall exhibitions. This permanent collection installation features objects both well-known and rarely seen grouped into two overarching themes, the exterior and the interior. The interpretation of these themes is quite literal in the first two galleries, where wonderful nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscapes and equally engaging interior environments complement each other. In the other two galleries, the meaning of interior and exterior becomes more conceptual in nature, as contemporary works that delineate a known reality are contrasted with images from the imagination of the artist. As always, the purpose of these juxtapositions is to create intriguing dialogue between the rich visual resources of the Addison and to elicit new and unexpected ways of seeing and experiencing art.