Please join us this Thanksgiving holiday weekend at the Maryland Historical Society. Admission to the museum will be free Friday, November 24 through Sunday, November 26. Bring your visiting families to see our latest exhibition, Structure and Perspective: David Brewster Explores Maryland’s Social Landscape. Hours: Friday and Saturday 10-5PM and Sunday 12-5PM.

On October 12, 2017, the Maryland Historical Society opened Structure and Perspective: David Brewster Explores Maryland’s Social Landscape. The installation brings together commissioned works by Maryland- born artist David Brewster with objects from the MdHS collection. This marrying of old with new, contemporary with “antique,” creates a dialogue that will inspire thought-provoking discussions of how the objects of the past remain relevant to today’s ever-changing social landscape. It also highlights Brewster’s often challenging perspective on the modern world, one that looks to the overlooked or unseen. Brewster’s commissioned works focus on challenging and complex themes like gender, race, urban decay, suburban sprawl, environmental conditions, and the political tensions in American today. Many objects within the Maryland Historical Society’s collection are relevant to the themes Brewster examines in the ever-changing social landscape of today’s Maryland.

New interactive media encourages visitors to engage with this exhibit beyond the contemporary art and initiate a dialogue between present-day perspectives and the structures of the past. Video interviews of members of the Maryland community sharing their voices and perspectives on these themes can be viewed on iPads throughout the exhibition.The interactive media components of Structure and Perspective, delivered through tablets and smartphone media, invite visitors to explore these themes further on their own throughout the museum.The question "What's Your Perspective?" runs throughout the installation and visitors will have a chance to record their perspectives in the exhibition.

Brewster was born in Glyndon, Maryland in 1960. His earliest childhood works reveal his interest in structure and perspective. A fascination with depicting houses in cross-section echoes his later interest in rendering architectural structures within urban and rural landscapes. His earliest landscape paintings foreshadow his many years of work “en plein air” or outside. Brewster attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1979-1980), and the Leo Marchute School of Painting and Drawing in Aix-en-Provence (1980-82). He received a BFA from the Maryland Institute and College of Art (1985) and a MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (1988). Today, he paints, lectures, and exhibits his work around the world.