Opening reception: Friday, October 30, 2026, 6–8 PM
Schoelkopf Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of exceptional works of American art in celebration of the gallery’s 25th anniversary.
Building on the first installment of the exhibition, on view earlier this year in January and February, 25 | 250: A Celebration of American Art, Part II marks the culmination of a year of notable programming spotlighting the significance and influence of American art.
The exhibition affirms and celebrates the gallery’s longtime, unparalleled expertise and market leadership in the field of American art. Founded in 2001 as Menconi + Schoelkopf, the gallery has positioned itself at the forefront of the field in terms of connoisseurship, client service, and scholarship since inception.
Reflecting on the gallery’s 25th anniversary, founder Andrew Schoelkopf commented: “I am filled with appreciation and gratitude for the global community of collectors, artists, curators, scholars, and art enthusiasts whose support and engagement with our program have helped make the gallery what it is today. I take tremendous pride in the work our team has done to cultivate an appreciation of American art with audiences of all kinds and expand what we see as American art from a present-day perspective. With this exhibition, we are thrilled to showcase a truly magnificent selection of pictures to celebrate the best of American art and look ahead to the next twenty-five years.”
The works featured in A Celebration of American Art are drawn primarily from notable private and institutional collections. Several works come from the legendary Weyhe Gallery, which operated on the Upper East Side in New York beginning in 1919 and had an enormous influence on American modern art. Additional works come to the exhibition from the Vilcek Foundation. The sale of these works will benefit the Vilcek Foundation, which raises awareness of immigrant contributions in the United States and fosters appreciation of the arts and sciences. Furthermore, the exhibition features a painting by Patrick Henry Bruce that comes from the collection of pioneering artist, gallerist, and collector Robert A. Ellison, Jr. who was the focus of the Schoelkopf Gallery exhibition New York City Circa 1960 earlier this year.
The second installment of A Celebration of American Art will feature works spanning 1862 to 1970 by Mary Abbott, Ernie Barnes, Thomas Hart Benton, Patrick Henry Bruce, William Merritt Chase, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Richard Estes, Arshile Gorky, Marsden Hartley, Childe Hassam, Winslow Homer, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, D, Joseph Stella, Charles White, and Andrew Wyeth.
Mary Abbott’s vibrant and energetic The Garden at Nîmes (c. 1957) draws inspiration from the artist’s travels to the south of France where she reveled in the region’s sun-drenched gardens. The work comes from a small series of large and ambitious paintings that each feature collaged elements and are dominated by yellow, which Abbott noted as her favorite color.
Abbot’s relationship with the natural world served as a lifelong source of inspiration for the artist. As scholar and art historian Laura Smith wrote in Schoelkopf Gallery’s 2025 catalogue Mary Abbott: To Draw Imagination, “Abbott saw her emotional response to the forms of nature as the drive behind her work and endeavored to let these forces invigorate her composition.”
Schoelkopf Gallery is honored to be the exclusive worldwide representative of the Estate of Mary Abbott.
A historically and compositionally significant pastel-on-paper work by William Merritt Chase is another highlight of the exhibition. Dating around 1883, May I Come In? depicts the artist’s wife, Alice, as she enters his famed 10th Street studio. The work was shown at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the landmark international exhibition held in Chicago that marked a turning point in the recognition of American art on the world stage.
May I Come In? is one of the most appealing and revealing examples of Chase’s celebrated studio interiors. At once a portrait, an interior, a still-life, and a meditation on domestic life, the pastel captures the artist’s ability to transform the familiar spaces and everyday experience into images of extraordinary elegance and atmosphere.
The work is also notably rendered in pastel, a medium Chase approached with a boldness that set him apart from many of his American contemporaries. While others regarded pastel primarily as a vehicle for sketches or preparatory studies, Chase employed it as a fully realized means of expression.
Additional highlights of the exhibition include Childe Hassam’s final flag painting and a 1970 self-portrait by Thomas Hart Benton.
Hassam’s Victory Won (Victory Day) from 1919 is the last work he created in his acclaimed and highly recognizable series of flag paintings. Most of the approximately 24 works in this series now reside in institutional collections such as the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the White House. Hassam, who was perhaps the most acclaimed American Impressionist artist, created Victory Won (Victory Day) shortly after the end of World Ward I. The painting depicts the victory celebrations on Fifth Avenue in New York in May 1919.
Benton’s self-portrait from 1970 was his second-to-last before his death in 1975. Rising to fame in the 1930s, Benton was one of the most important figures in American art and served as a leading narrator of the American experience. Benton’s work was distinctly American in its colorful and dynamic representations of people’s everyday lives and labor. His frank, yet dignified approach to depicting American people carried over into his self-portraiture.
Commenting on the artist’s late self-portraits, art historian, scholar, and Benton expert Erika Doss notes that they “show the artist at work in his home studio, brushes in hand, dressed comfortably and casually. Unafraid to paint the effect of aging, he openly revealed his wrinkled brow, gray hair, and gnarled hands. While still directly and intently scrutinizing himself and his audience, Benton appears less skeptical, less unforgiving than in the self-portraits he painted as a younger man.”
The exhibition further showcases a large-scale still life by Arshile Gorky from the 1920s and a portrait of a seated child by Diego Rivera from 1929.
Painted between 1928 and 1929, Gorky's still life embodies a sense of abundance in its generous and expressive application of paint depicting a bounty of cascading fruits at the center of the composition. Gorky came to the United States in 1920 after fleeing the Armenian genocide. By 1924, he settled in New York, where he enrolled and soon became an instructor at the National Academy of Design and the Grand Central School of Art. When this still life was painted circa 1928–29, Gorky had established a rigorous practice of self-education via museum and gallery visits, and art publications, through which he encountered developments advanced by the European avant-garde, including Paul Cézanne, Joan Miró, and Pablo Picasso.
Diego Rivera was a key figure in revitalizing and redefining Mexican culture in the wake of the Mexican Revolution and achieved extraordinary international fame during his lifetime. This exhibition features his 1929 painting Niña sentada con rebozo (Seated Child with Shawl), which is a quintessential example of the artist’s portraits of children. Rivera created at least 70 such works over the course of his career, with his subjects typically seated on the floor of his studio wearing traditional Mexican clothing. The children sometimes appear in pairs or with their mother or another older woman.
James Oles, a specialist in Mexican modern art, wrote in a 2024 essay commissioned by Schoelkopf Gallery: “These are less portraits than ‘types,’ working class children from Indigenous or mestizo backgrounds who represent the future beneficiaries of the Revolution. None of Rivera’s children smile, their solemnity perhaps underscoring the difficulty of the worker’s life to which they were born. Though some critics found these works saccharine or repetitive, they were in great demand at the time.”
This particular work, Niña sentada con rebozo (Seated Child with Shawl), was exhibited in the artist’s 1931 retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York and in his 1949 retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City.
In addition to these highlights, the exhibition will showcase works by Ernie Barnes, Patrick Henry Bruce, Stuart Davis, Arthur Dove, Richard Estes, Marsden Hartley, Winslow Homer, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, D, Joseph Stella, Charles White, and Andrew Wyeth.
