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Preview and Curator Tour of "Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor"

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Julie Smith
Stuart O. Smith, Jr.
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Cleveland
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Cleveland Museum of Art
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Thursday, September 17, 2026 - Julie and Stuart Smith attend the preview and curator tour of “Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor”
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Invitation to the Thursday, September 17, 2026, Media and Influencer Preview of “Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor”
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You’re invited to take an in-depth look at the legacy of American artist Andrew Wyeth at the Influencer and Media Preview for Spectacular Freedom. See the first major exhibition dedicated to the exploration of Wyeth’s watercolor paintings—described by one critic as having a “spectacular freedom”—examining his relationship to the medium throughout the early decades of his career.

This new exhibition presents nearly 75 works from Wyeth’s estate—most of which have never been publicly exhibited—until now. Spectacular Freedom explores Wyeth’s use of watercolor during the early decades of his career, including landscapes, interior scenes, and studies of people and places in rural Maine and Pennsylvania.

. . .

10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m.: View Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery.

12:00 p.m.: Enjoy a guided tour of the exhibition by Britany Salsbury, curator of prints and drawings, in the Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery followed by brief Q and A.

The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) will mark the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States with a series of exhibitions on view this year that explore the breadth, complexity, and ongoing evolution of American art.
. . .
“As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, we celebrate the many histories, voices, and artistic traditions that have shaped American life,” said William Griswold, the Sarah S. and Alexander M. Cutler Director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. “By lifting up the artists who define our culture, we aim to ensure that all of our visitors can see themselves in their museum and its collection, while discovering art and stories beyond their own experience.”

Featured Exhibitions

Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor
September 20, 2026–January 18, 2027
The Kelvin and Eleanor Smith Foundation Gallery

Explore Andrew Wyeth’s innovative watercolor practice through nearly 75 works from the artist’s estate—most never previously exhibited—alongside a selection of his tempera paintings. Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor offers a fresh perspective on a celebrated American artist’s early decades, highlighting his engagement with watercolor at a time when it was seen as a national medium, distinctively suited for depicting American experiences.

Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercoloris organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art in association with the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, with support from the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center of the Brandywine Museum of Art.

Presented by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art

Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor by Britany Salsbury
Yale Press
. . . Sep 3, 2026
Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor by Britany Salsbury

Contributions by William L. Coleman and Christina Michelon

Beginning in the 1930s, Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) built a monumental reputation for his watercolors—described by one critic at the time as having a “spectacular freedom.” In the medium, Wyeth depicted the people and places that surrounded him in rural Pennsylvania and Maine in expressive and evocative compositions. Though he later became known for his tempera paintings, he never ceased to work in watercolor, using the medium for both preliminary and finished works throughout his storied career.

Exploring Wyeth’s use of watercolors, this richly illustrated volume features rarely seen works from the artist’s estate and considers the role of the medium within Wyeth’s larger oeuvre. It illuminates new aspects of the artist’s formative period by situating Wyeth’s early experiments in the context of an explosion of interest in watercolor and the promotion of the medium as distinctively American, and it includes scholarly essays that reveal how Wyeth—an artist who embraced precise realism at a time when many of his peers favored abstraction—used watercolor to engage with the question of what it means to be both modern and American.

Distributed for the Cleveland Museum of Art

Exhibition Schedule:

The Cleveland Museum of Art (September 20, 2026–January 18, 2027)

De Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (February 13–July 18, 2027)

 

On Thursday, September 17, 2026, we were fortunate to attend The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor preview. We are sharing here photos from the preview to encourage others to visit the museum to see this and other exhibitions at the museum. Those of us that live in Northeast Ohio are very fortunate to have this world class museum here in Cleveland. General admission is always free, and members receive free tickets to the museum's special exhibitions.

We noted on the museum's website that there is a special offer for this exhibition: "See Spectacular Freedom and Ten Kings of Hell together as a combo package and save up to $9 off the combined ticket price." The Ten Kings of Hell exhibition is open from Sunday, October 11, 2026, through Sunday, January 3, 2027. Stuart is planning to visit this new exhibition next week.

 

Learn more about Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor in the following article from the Cleveland Museum of Art members magazine:

 

Also, visit the Wyeth Foundation for American Art website at: WyethFoundationForAmericanArt.org

Here is a video of our photos from the preview. Note that the last photo shows the banners in front of the museum announcing both the Ten Kings of Hell and Spectacular Freedom exhibitions.

I recommend viewing videos in full screen mode.
Please feel free to pause the video to look more closely at the artwork and to read any interesting facts in the slides!!

 

Britany Salsbury
Curator of Prints and Drawings
Britany Salsbury joined the Cleveland Museum of Art in March 2018. During her time at the CMA, she has organized exhibitions on topics including the watercolors of Charles Burchfield, contemporary women printmakers, and Latin American works on paper.

. . . Salsbury cofounded the Association of Print Scholars and serves on the boards of the Print Council of America and the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art. She works with students though the CMA and Case Western Reserve University’s joint doctoral program in art history and has previously taught on topics including modern art and the history of printmaking at the City University of New York, Christie’s Education, and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Salsbury received a BA in art history and English at Case Western Reserve University and an MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She completed an MPhil and a PhD at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where her dissertation on print portfolios in fin de siècle Paris was supported by funding from the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Contact the curator printsdrawings@clevelandart.org.

After exploring the new exhibition on our own, we joined everyone attending the preview for a curator tour of this new exhibition. You will note in our photos that we were given museum tour headsets, and the curator wore a microphone that broadcast her words to attendees. This is the first time we have seen the Cleveland Museum of Art use this tour headset technology. It is the same type of technology that our tour guide used on our Great Britain 2026 trip (learn more in our 2026 adventure blog post).

We first heard a welcome message and background information about the exhibition from Cleveland Museum of Art Chief Marketing Officer Todd Mesek. Thank you to the museum’s curator of prints and drawings, Britany Salsbury, for the guided tour of the exhibition:

I recommend viewing videos in full screen mode.
Please feel free to pause the video to look more closely at the artwork and to read any interesting facts in the slides!!

 

We enjoyed the pictures in this exhibition. The muted colors evoked fall, winter, and early spring. Julie liked the bolder, brighter colors in the earlier works. It was interesting to learn that Wyeth experimented with different techniques, effects, and textures, including dry-brush watercolor.

Related Blog Posts

We always like to include in our blog posts a list of related posts that may be of interest to our readers, but since there are so many, we will just list the following categories:

Thank you for reading our blog post! We were very grateful to be able to attend the preview and curator tour of Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor, and look forward to visiting the museum again very soon! We hope this blog post encourages you to attend future events at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

You can learn about our travel journeys and the venues we explore in Cleveland and Akron at: sosAssociates.com/Blog

 

 

Disclosure: We received an invitation to attend the Thursday, September 17, 2026, Media & Influencer Preview of Spectacular Freedom: Andrew Wyeth and the Modern American Watercolor, which included refreshments, admission to the exhibition, and a tour led by CMA Curator of Prints and Drawings Britany Salsbury. Since we are members of the Cleveland Museum of Art, we were already entitled to free tickets to Spectacular Freedom,.

The invitation to attend came as a result of our support of the Cleveland Museum of Art with our many sosAssociates.com blog posts about the museum. We enjoyed the event, and wrote this blog post to share our experience at Spectacular Freedom at the Cleveland Museum of Art. We plan to use our membership benefit to return to see the exhibition again with other family members.