The Addison Gallery of American Art is located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. It has one of the most important collections of American Art in the country. The museum’s founding collection included major works by such prominent American artists as John Singleton Copley, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Maurice Prendergast, John Singer Sargent, John Twachtman, and James McNeill Whistler. Aggressive purchasing and generous gifts have added works by such artists as Alexander Calder, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Hans Hofmann, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan, Frank Stella, Mark Bradford, and Kara Walker.
The collection has a total of more than 25,000 works in all media—painting, sculpture, photography, drawings, prints, and decorative arts—from the eighteenth century to the present.
The Addison’s collection of more than 13,000 photographs spans the history of American photography and includes in-depth holdings of key individual artists, such as Lewis Baltz, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Eadweard Muybridge. In recent years, the Gallery has acquired significant contemporary works by Carroll Dunham, Kerry James Marshall, Joel Shapiro, and Lorna Simpson.
After viewing the Oscar-nominated documentary film Finding Vivian Maier, Eastman was so inspired by both Vivian Maier’s story and photographs that he established a collection of her photographs as part of the W. Dean Eastman Family Collection at the Addison Gallery.
Vivian Maier was a full-time nanny for most of her life, taking pictures in her spare time. Her photographs were “discovered” at a storage unite auction after her death. Like many in the creative arts, her fame and recognition came posthumously, starting in 2010.
There are currently ten Maier photographs in the collection, with five to six additional Maier photographs to be added each year.
Two of the ten photographs “New York, NY” (mid-20th century, printed 2023) and “Chicago, 1956” (printed 2023) are featured in “Free Association: New Acquisitions in Context“, the new fall exhibit at the Addison.