FOR JANUARY 28 –

JOHN PENCE GALLERIES PRESENTS VALENTINES – 1 CUT –

WD/jl set 1-19 #616103

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF. — On Thursday, February 3, the John Pence Gallery will open the new year with an exhibition, “Valentines.” Thirty-two of America’s top realist painters have been invited to participate. A reception for the artists will be open to the public the evening of February 3, from 6 to 8. The exhibition will be on view until February 27.

While some of the works feature hearts and flowers, many of the artists have viewed this assignment with relish and created off-beat and surprisingly ingenious works of art, not to be missed. In reality, Valentine’s Day can be loving or lonely, celebratory or cause for reassessment, colorful or drab — and the invited artists have covered most of these bases in their own individual way.

The “Valentines” exhibition includes cornerstone artists such as Juliette Aristides, Mikel Glass, Sarah Lamb, Dean Larson, Steven J. Levin, Jacob A. Pfeiffer, Randall Sexton, Anthony Waichulis, Patricia Watwood, Will Wilson, Steve Armstrong, William Bartlett, Noah Buchanan, John Patrick Campbell, Tony Curanaj, William Davis, Carl Dobsky, Adam Forfang, Carin Gerard, Ralph Stone Jacobs, Kate Lehman, Anthony Mastromatteo, Edward Minoff, Clark Mitchell, Nita Moore, Christopher Pierce, Nicholas M. Raynolds, Travis Schlaht, Hugh Shurley, Dan Thompson, Adam Vinson and Peter Van Dyck.

The gallery is at 750 Post Street. For information, www.johnpence.com.

1-28 FIRST THURSDAY – WADSWORTH ATHENEUM

FOR JANUARY 28 –

FIRST THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 3, AT THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM – W/CUT –

WD/jl set 1-19 #616103

HARTFORD, CONN. — A blues-filled First Thursday, February 3, at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art will feature a tropical Blue Hawaiian cocktail and “Blues and Things” by XY Eli and his band.

A frequent subject of the blues is “being done wrong,” and artist Robert Lazzarini offers a variation on this theme. He makes sculptures that resemble familiar utilitarian objects but are distorted into something unexpected. For example, his piece “phone,” 2000, shown in the current exhibition “Contemporary Art: Floor to Ceiling, Wall to Wall,” is a full-scale recreation of a rotary-dial telephone, but it has been stretched at an extreme oblique angle. Lazzarini will talk about his work and the current art scene at 6 pm.

The biopic Ray, 2004 vividly recounts how Ray Charles (1930–2004) surmounted obstacles of racism and blindness to become a great musician, even an American institution. Directed by Taylor Hackford, the narrative of the film is generously interspersed with Charles’s music, from gospel to rhythm and blues to country and western to orchestral pop. Screening time is 7:30 pm.

The Museum Café is serving dinner from 5 to 8 pm.

First Thursday admission is $5, free for Wadsworth Athe-neum members. Movie tickets are $8, $6 for Atheneum members, seniors and students with ID, $3 for Atheneum Film Buffs.

The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is at 600 Main Street. For information, www.wadsworthatheneum.org or 860-278-2670.

FOR 1-28

YALE ART GALLERY ACQUIRES ROBERT ADAM’S PHOTOS

tg/lsb set 1/19 #615797

NEW HAVEN, CONN. — Jock Reynolds, the Henry J. Heinz II director of the Yale University Art Gallery, has announced the gallery’s acquisition of “The Master Sets,” a total of 1,465 gelatin silver prints by the influential American landscape photographer Robert Adams.

These 15 vintage sets and several related prints join the acclaimed Adams set “What We Bought: The New World, Scenes from the Denver Metropolitan Area,” acquired by the gallery in 2000.

“The significance of this extraordinary addition to our already strong collection of post-1950 American photography cannot be overstated,” said Reynolds. “Together with Lewis Baltz’s ‘Park City’ project and Emmet Gowin’s recent aerial photographs of the West, both of which the gallery recently purchased, this acquisition forms a worthy complement to the extensive holdings of Nineteenth Century Western American landscape photography residing at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.”

In 1962, as an assistant professor of English at Colorado College, he was shocked and dismayed by the rapid transformation of the landscape in the Denver region — an area that, less than a decade before, Jack Kerouac had described as “like the Promised Land” — Adams began photographing what had become banal suburbia, replete with hastily conceived tract housing, strip malls and gas stations.

“In a few years,” Adams wrote, “the area’s ruin would be a testament to a bargain we had tried to strike. The pictures record what we purchased, what we paid and what we could not buy. They document a separation from ourselves, and in turn from the natural world that we professed to love.”

The Yale University Art Gallery is at the corner of Chapel and High Street. For information 203-432-0600 or www.artgallery.yale.edu.