Two New Exhibitions Opening At Andover's Addison Gallery On Thursday

ANDOVER, MA —The Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips Academy in Andover, will present two new exhibitions beginning on Thursday.

"Rosamond Purcell: Nature Stands Aside," will run until Dec. 31. It is the first retrospective of the 80-year-old Boston-based photographer/artist's work, which organizers said transcends the boundaries of both art and science.

The exhibition features over 150 of Purcell's photographs, assemblages, collages and installations spanning a career that began in the late 1960s and continues today.

Among the items in the exhibition are: Purcell's radically experimental Polaroid prints from the 1970s and 1980s, photographs of preserved animals in museum collections, fossils, eggs, nests and specimens from medical museums, and "Wall," a 20-foot-long installation composed of naturally patinated scrap metal and other objects rescued from obscurity.

"This retrospective is a long overdue examination of Purcell's work, which reveals the connections between the unsettling and the sublime, the beautiful and the bizarre, the natural and the manufactured," said Allison Kemmerer, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art.

Kemmerer continued: "The Addison has long presented and championed photography, and Purcell's experimental Polaroid work in the 1970s was instrumental in the recognition of color photography as fine art. But just as her work straddles the intersection of art and science, Purcell herself defies any simple categorization."

Meanwhile, "Harry Benson: Four Stories," which features the work of the award-winning photojournalist, will be at the Addison Gallery until Jan. 30, 2023.

The Scottish-born Benson came to America with the Beatles in 1964, and he has gone on to photograph moments in U.S. history like Civil Rights marches, the Watts Riots and the Robert F. Kennedy assassination. Benson also has covered the Gulf War and conflicts in Kosovo and Bosnia.

Benson is the only photographer to have photographed the last 13 presidents, dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he has photographed everyone from Queen Elizabeth II to Mohammed Ali.

Benson's work has been featured in publications like: LIFE, Time, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, French Vogue, The New Yorker and the Sunday Times Magazine.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Addison Gallery will be hosting a Q&A with Benson on Oct. 22. The event begins at 5 p.m. and will be followed by a reception.

Both events are free and open to the public, though registration for the Q&A is required.

More information about those events, the gallery's collections and its other exhibitions is available on the Addison Gallery website or by calling 978-749-4015.

The gallery is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Sunday.