HARTFORD, CONN.- “Sound & Sense: Poetic Musings in American Art”—a new exhibition exploring American paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts that were inspired by poetic verse—opens Nov. 14, 2015, and runs through Apr. 17, 2016, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Conn. The exhibition presents a diverse landscape of masterpieces from the museum’s permanent collection that incorporate poetic inscriptions in their composition or have direct relationships to America’s rich academic and vernacular poetic traditions.

The exhibition is organized in four thematic sections that demonstrate how poetry and art became vehicles of popular culture and entertainment, as well as beacons of American memory, oral tradition and folklore: “Heroes, Martyrs, and Epic Adventures;” “Romantic Americans: Love, Life, and Loss;” “Enlightened Americans;” and “Repeat After Me…Poetic Orations and Recitations.” Featured artworks include paintings by Albert Bierstadt, Rockwell Kent, and Georgia O’Keeffe; sculpture by Daniel Chester French and Isamu Noguchi; as well as ceramics, furniture, and tableware. Throughout the exhibition, objects are paired with verses by celebrated poets such as Herman Melville, Lydia Sigourney, Walt Whitman, and Robert Frost. The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated booklet written by Alyce Perry Englund, former Richard Koopman Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, and current Assistant Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

An illustrated booklet by Alyce Perry Englund was generously supported by the Decorative Arts Council of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Duff Ashmead and Eric Ort, David and Mary Dangremond, the Howard and Bush Foundation Publication Fund, and the Adolf and Virginia Dehn Foundation.