Pennsylvania State Museum featuring historic artwork to mark Semiquincentennial
Artist Nick Ruggieri painted scenes from all 67 counties
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Scott LaMar
Aired; May 1st, 2024.
American’s 250th birthday or Semiquincentennial will be in two years. Plans are already being made for celebrations around the country.
The State Museum in Harrisburg has gotten a head start with an exhibit called Pennsylvania in Watercolor by artist Nick Ruggieri. Ruggieri’s project involved visiting all 67 counties to paint a representative scene he chose for each one – often a historic site, natural feature, or signature industry.
There’s a program at the State Museum this Sunday at 2 p.m. to highlight the exhibit.
With us on The Spark Wednesday were Curt Miner, Director of Interpretation and Amy Hammond, Sr. Curator of Cultural History at the State Museum in Harrisburg, who talked about the paintings in the exhibit,”It’s really versatile. There’s a lot of different perspectives that you can approach this particular collection. I noticed that there were, certain themes that really stood out. Industry, which is one and it is certainly the coal mining, was an important one, but also mills and, some industries that we don’t necessarily go to anymore. And there’s also transportation. He addressed transportation. There’s architecture from the 18th century into the 20th century. There are historic sites that he captured. And, it’s really fascinating to see the different things that he was able to find within each county.”
One of the unique aspects of the paintings is that they were painted with watercolors as Hammond described,”He was really a master watercolor artist. And what I think was appealing about that media was that it’s portable. So he did travel to all the counties and he did preliminary sketches, and he brought his watercolors with him because they were easy to take along. And also watercolors is a great media for landscapes because it captures light. And he was able to to manipulate it and paint in a certain way that is sometimes different painting to painting, depending on what he was trying to portray.”
Miner said Ruggieri was well known in Harrisburg as the art director of the Harrisburg Patriot-News newspaper,”He comes to the Harrisburg area as a 12 year old immigrant from Italy. His father was a shoemaker. Nick is unusually talented at art and he goes to William Penn. Graduates from William Penn High School in Harrisburg, then goes to art school in New York, actually goes to Italy to study as well, and returns in the 1940s to get his first hitch in the newspaper business in Harrisburg. But he develops a very strong attachment to Harrisburg and Pennsylvania. And in 1971, four years, five years out from the Bicentennial, he proposes a project to his publisher, which is this idea of traveling across Pennsylvania and visiting all 67 counties to do one particularly iconic scene for each of those counties. And, this is his passion for four years. Take some four years to complete this, what he ends up with, I think over 80 paintings. So he did two or more for some counties, in particular. And the exhibit premieres at the then William Penn Memorial Museum in September of 1975. It’s the first that we’re aware of statewide art project completed by a single artist. And it gets rave reviews because Nick understood Pennsylvania as a series of places that were often highly localized.”
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