A New World: England's First View of America 6 MARCH — 1 JUNE, 2008 John White, Elizabethan gentleman and artist, was the person most responsible for shaping England's first view of America and its inhabitants. In 1585 White sailed with the earliest expedition to Virginia (on the coast of present-day North Carolina) and produced a series of extraordinary watercolors that documented his travels. These drawings of the complex and sophisticated culture of the region's Algonquian Indians and local flora and fauna constitute the only surviving original visual record of England's first settlement venture in North America. The exhibition will feature nearly one hundred works, including all of White's drawings of the Algonquian Indians, his maps and charts, watercolors of the Inuit and of North American and West Indian plants and animals, depictions of ancient Britons, and associated works by his contemporaries. It will also include additional maps, manuscripts, and rare books related to early European voyages of exploration to America, primarily from the Center's collections. English interest in establishing a settlement in North America emerged toward the end of the sixteenth century. In 1584 Sir W Raleigh received a patent from Queen Elizabeth I to finance and settle a colony in Virginia. Raleigh hoped to find minerals and other commodities, to establish a safe harbor from which to harass Spanish ships, and to create a permanent foothold for England in America. He sent an expedition in 1585 that included White and the renowned scientist Thomas Harriot. Together, they produced drawings, maps, and written records of what they found to satisfy curiosity about the New World, to encourage further investors, and to attract colonists for an English plantation. White depicted the native people and their way of life in a series of spectacular watercolors of the Indians and their villages. He also produced stunning drawings of local animals and plants, portraying for the first time many species native to the New World. The exhibition provides a rare opportunity to catch a glimpse of the land and people of North America at the moment when Europeans encountered the continent's native inhabitants for the first time. A New World has been organized by the British Museum, which houses the complete collection of White's work, and curated by Kim Sloan, Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery and Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1880 at the British Museum. The organizing curator at the Center is Elisabeth Fairman, Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts. An illustrated catalogue, published by the University of North Carolina Press, reproduces in full the British Museum's collection of White's watercolors and explores White's various roles as colonist, surveyor, and artist. The catalogue is available for purchase in the Center's Museum Shop. Generous support for the exhibition has been provided by the American Friends of the British Museum. Art in Focus Student Guide Exhibition Figuring Women: The Female in Modern British Art 28 MARCH — 8 JUNE, 2008 Art in Focus is an annual academic initiative that introduces the Center's student guides to every aspect of curatorial practice, from the selection of the art works, to research, label-writing, and installation. With guidance Linda Friedlaender, Curator of Education, and Cassandra Albinson, Associate Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, student guides select an object or theme from the Center's collections that they would like to explore. In this second year of the program, the curatorial challenge for the student guides was to design an exhibition showcasing highlights from the Center's collection of late-nineteenth through twenty-first-century paintings and sculpture. The students chose as their theme the image of women in British art, and traced a progression of ideas about their status in British culture as they were portrayed by artists the Victorian period to the present day. The exhibition highlights the Center's recent acquisition, the late R. B. Kitajs School of London Diasporists (1988-2004), which features an image of Kitaj's wife, the artist Sandra Fisher. Other artists, ranging in date the 1850's to today, include Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Gwen John, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and Lucian Freud. The exhibition concludes with an equestrian statue of Queen Victoria and Julie Roberts's provocative painting Gynaecology Treatment Couch (Blues) (1994). The students address several overlapping questions in their labels and in the installation: the position of the patron (who is invariably understood to be male), femaleness as performance, the commodification of the female body, and the tradition of drawing or painting the female model as part of a British artist's training. The exhibition Figuring Women: The Female in Modern British Art is the first time that many of these paintings and sculptures have been displayed on the fourth floor of the British Art Center, where they will be seen under natural light and with the benefit of Louis Kahn's soaring ceilings. The design of the exhibition creates striking juxtapositions between works of art, rather than relying on a more traditional chronological display. The student curators of the exhibition are Jenny E. Braun DC'08, Jessica Dilworth BK'10, Panda Ebling DC'08, Charles Gariepy TD'09, Andrew Lee BR'09, Sharon Madanes DC'08, and Adrienne Wong MC'10.