November 14, 2017 – Reading, Pa. – The Reading Public Museum is anticipating an exciting new year filled with interactive family-centered exhibits, Ice Age mammals, art and culture, and more.
WINTER 2018 SCHEDULE:
Doc McStuffins: The Exhibit
On view: January 27 – May 20, 2018
Experience the first-ever children's museum exhibit based on Disney Junior's award-winning series, Doc McStuffins.
The highly interactive experience transports children and families from Doc’s backyard clinic to the McStuffins Toy Hospital. There, families are invited to help Doc perform check-ups and diagnose toy patients, while learning about healthy habits, compassion and nurturing care.
Disney Junior's Peabody Award-winning Doc McStuffins is an imaginative animated series about a six-year-old girl who communicates with and heals stuffed animals and broken toys out of her backyard playhouse clinic and in the magical McStuffins Toy Hospital. Created and executive-produced by Humanitas Prize and Emmy Award-winning Chris Nee, the series has been lauded globally for its modeling of good health practices and imparting to young viewers the importance of taking care of oneself and others.
This exhibition is produced by The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and presented by the Riley Hospital for Children. The exhibit is sponsored locally by Wells Fargo and the Berks County Community Foundation.
Keith Haring: Symbolic Gestures
On view: January 27 – April 15, 2018
The year 2018 marks the 40th anniversary of Keith Haring’s first solo exhibition held at the Pittsburgh Arts and Craft Center in 1978. The Reading Public Museum, where the artist first exhibited his work in 1976, will mount an exhibition of paintings, prints, and sculpture from all phases of the career of this internationally-known “hometown” artist. Raised in Kutztown, Berks County, Keith Haring went on to become one of the most influential artists of his generation, making his mark as both a street graffiti artist and later, as a fine artist. Haring enlisted a language of visual symbols—televisions, radiant babies, barking dogs, hearts, pyramids, etc. — that embodied the essence of his age and became universally recognizable. Early works from the dawn of his career will be included as well as well-known prints from the artist’s Pop Shop (1987, 1988), Chocolate Buddha (1989), and Icons (1990).
After the Dinosaurs: Ice Age Mammals
On view: February 3 – May 6, 2018
Enter the Age of the Mammals, a survey of the Cenozoic era. Explore cornerstones of the Ice Age, from gregarious carnivores to massive herbivores. Watch members of an Australopithecus (one of the longest-lived and best-known early human species) family engage in routine activities in a cave in Africa: a mother cradling her baby, a father keeping a lookout for threats, and a juvenile banging a bone against a rock while another chomps on food. Spend a day in the life of a Smilodon (saber-toothed cat): frolic in the snow with a Smilodon pack, and listen to a Smilodon bellow as it attacks a Megatherium (sloth).
Then enter the land of herbivores. Stand beneath a Platybelodon slicing vegetation with its jaw like a scythe. Travel the tundra with a massive woolly mammoth, and then wallow in the mud with the largest land mammal to have ever lived, a Baluchitherium. Witness the gigantic, flightless Diatryma wandering near a watering hole, while a Coelodonta (woolly rhinoceros) roams the snowy landscape in search of grasses to eat. Walk with the truck-sized Doedicurus, an ancestor of the modern-day armadillo, and a dog-sized Hyracotherium, the first horse predecessor, as they munch on vegetation.
The exhibition is produced by Kokoro Exhibits and is sponsored locally by The Friends of the Reading Public Museum and Bruce and Reneé Dietrich Endowment Funds.
Mariano Fortuny: Etching the Exotic
Opening February 10 – May 27, 2018
This unique exhibition features a group of more than 30 etchings by Spanish painter and etcher, Mariano Fortuny (Spanish, 1838 – 1874) and his contemporaries. One of the leading artists of his day, working in both Paris and Rome, the artist achieved international renown in the second half of the 19th century. The artist often explored the theme of Orientalism and the romantic exotic, drawn from trips to North Africa, including time in Tangier during 1859-60 during the Spanish-Moroccan War. Fortuny was an innovator in painting, watercolor, and etching, and this exhibition will include several works in those mediums. His distinctive and brilliant use of etching as an independent genre, with a unique freedom of line and expression, made him one of the most important and influential graphic artists of his time. All of the works are drawn from the collection of works on paper at the Reading Public Museum.
