Triumph of Craftsmanship: Arts and Crafts Frames by Greg Drinkwine

Nevada Museum of Art, Installation Gallery April 2—August 7, 2011
Exclusive sponsorship provided by Wells Fargo Foundation

In this first-ever frame exhibition, the Nevada Museum of Art will partner with northern Nevada craftsman Greg Drinkwine, a master frame-maker who  along with master carver John Drube have been creating hand carved gilded frames from thier studio's in Gardnerville, Nevada since 2005. As designers and makers of hand-carved, gilded frames, Drinkwine and his team are dedicated to making superior quality frames using centuries-old techniques and only the finest materials including 22 carat gold. Drinkwine is often called upon by arts industry specialists to design and carve period frames when a painting’s original frame is no longer extant. Among his clients are the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the Coeur D ' Alene Art Auction, both of which require museum-quality frames for the artworks in their collections.

Although the discipline of art history has been acknowledged for centuries, the study of picture frames remains an emerging field. According to frame historian Laurence B. Kanter, “historic frames have always been the poor cousins of important collections of paintings and drawings.” Only in the late nineteenth century, he goes on to explain, “did museums and private collectors develop an interest in historical authenticity that extended to frames as well as to the objects they contained, by which time, frames more than 100-200 years old had grown exceedingly rare.” The frame that encase the world’s most important paintings deserve to be studied, and this exhibition presents a collection of exemplary frames carved by one of the nation’s most talented craftsmen to chronicle the history of frame-making since the mid-nineteenth century.  

Drinkwine specializes in making frames from the late-nineteenth through early twentieth century—an era popularly known as the Arts and Crafts period. Creating a frame requires more than just the technical skills of a craftsman; only after hours of research and study of original notes, blueprints, and plans, can a replica frame be hand carved. For this exhibition, Drinkwine’s team will carve frames representative of those once made by well-known frame makers such as James McNeil Whistler, Stanford White, Herman Dudley Murphy, Arthur and Lucia Matthews, and the Taos School—among numerous others. The Nevada Museum of Art will retain five of Drinkwine’s frames for permanent collection artworks that are in need of historically-accurate frames.