EASTON, MD.- The Academy Art Museum has announced the opening of five new exhibitions in April 2015. Rosemary Cooley: World View opened on April 11 and is on display through July 19, 2015.

A life of travel and living in Asia, Africa, and South America has broadened Rosemary Cooley’s artistic vision, which she translates into the world of printmaking. A fascination with art and architectural history informs her work, and fragments of script, stamps, and the human line add soul and spirit to her woodcuts, lithographs, etchings and monoprints. Chance associations which occur in the human psyche may be revealed in the found images Cooley layers with inked plates which are passed through her etching press on fine rag paper. She is actively exhibiting in Washington, DC at the Washington Printmakers Gallery, and has shown her work at the Stimson Center, the Dadian Gallery, The Old Print Gallery, the Cosmos Club and NIH, and other places. Rosemary is past President and Board Member of Washington Printmakers Gallery, and her work is in the collections of Georgetown University, Delbarton School, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Martha Jefferson Hospital, Charlottesville, VA, the National Headquarters of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, the Library of Congress and in private collections in the United States, South Africa, Belgium, Sweden, Venezuela, France, England, Italy, New Zealand, Japan and China.

Recent Acquisitions: Frederick Hammersley II , an exhibition of the works of Frederick Hammerlsey opened on April 18 and will be on display through July 5, 2015. In 2013 the Museum received a donation of 45 works on paper by Frederick Hammerlsey, consisting of 10 computer drawings; 6 prints; 18 drawings; and 11 paintings. The oeuvre was a generously gift from the Frederick Hammersley Foundation, Albuquerque, NM. Frederick Hammersley was born in 1919, in Salt Lake City, UT and died in 2009 in Albuquerque, NM. He was raised in Idaho and moved to Los Angeles after serving in World War II to study at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. He soon developed a style of abstraction that incorporated geometric forms in his paintings that were called hard-edge painting, a style unique to Southern California. Hammersley was also a professor, teaching first at Jepson Art Institute in Los Angeles and later at Pomona College, Chouinard, and the University of New Mexico. Hammersley’s artwork can be found at The National Gallery of Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Fogg Museum, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among many others, and now also on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Carol Minarick brings her Easton studio to the Academy Art Museum in Carol Minarick: Beowulf and A Series That Is Not A Series. For Minarick the freedom of the studio environment makes possible the melding of ideas and substances in unexpected ways. Not believing in preplanning or sketching she allows materials—from stones to tar paper—to emerge in new configurations. She cites sumi-e, or the Eastern black-painted discipline she studied at the Corcoran School Art. “The first mark sets the stage then everything else is a response,” she says. Carol Minarick has had more than 20 solo exhibitions in the United States and Canada and is a Fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She lives in Easton with her husband Joe and joins other artists on installations and commissions. A major collaborative work is her Lost Synagogues of the Holocaust, now in the collection of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Carol Minarick: Beowulf and A Series-That-Is-Not-a-Series opened April 18 and be on diplay through July 19, 2015.

Artist Ray Turner lives in Pasadena, California, where he received his BFA from Art Center College of Design. Post graduation, he became a professor of painting at his alma mater. Turners' work has been exhibited in museums and galleries throughout the United States. Turner began painting portraits for the current body of work and traveling museum exhibition called Population in 2007. The idea was to paint portraits of the uncelebrated to the celebrated people from a cross section of the populace in communities across America. The subjects would then become part of the growing body of work that represented their communities and respective museums. The exhibition is currently touring the United States and abroad began at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. It has shown in eight museums and Turner’s work is in many permanent and private collections. Still growing in number the body of work has currently has over 500 portraits. Population is an installation based body of work, painted on 12 inch squares of sapphire glass, which are then displayed on a color field grid that becomes their back ground. Ray Turner: Population will be on display April 25 through July 5, 2015 with Curator Tours on May 8 at 12 noon and June 10 at 12 noon.

The exhibition, From Rubens to the Grand Tour, focuses on two paintings by Peter Paul Rubens 1577-1640), the famous painter from the southern Netherlands and his expert knowledge of the antiques, and of the Romans in particular. The time period covered also includes the 18th and into the 19th centuries. The focus of the exhibition is on his Agrippina and Germanicus, on loan from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and its “counterpart” Roman Imperial Couple, on loan from the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Rubens painted the two double-profile paintings upon his return to his native Antwerp in Flanders (present-day Belgium) after a long sojourn in Italy. Rubens had collected and brought back with him Roman coins, medals and carved cameos, which may have inspired the artist to paint the profile portraits. The concept of the exhibition is based on the Museum’s Curator Anke Van Wagenberg’s article “A Matter of Mistaken Identity - In Search of a New Title for Rubens's ‘Tiberius and Agrippina’,” in Artibus et Historiae (2005). The Museum will receive on loan several objects relating to numismatic collecting, including the 12 Roman coins dating to the first century A.D. from Augustus to Nero, from the American Numismatic Society in New York, while The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, contributes – among others - collector coin boxes, of the kind that Rubens may have brought back with him. The exhibition is curated by Anke Van Wagenberg. From Rubens to the Grand Tour opens on April 25 and will be on display through July 5, 2015 with Curator Tours on May 8 at 12 noon and June 10 at 12 noon.