At the entrance
The American Visionary Art Museum gave its entire third floor to Matt Sesow for a year — more than 150 paintings across three rooms, curated by the museum's founder, Rebecca Alban Hoffberger. It was the first time AVAM had shown his work on its own.
At the top of the stairs, where visitors turned into the gallery, the museum hung the exhibition title panel. Next to it, on the same blue wall, hung a painting that was not his.
Duality is a two-part portrait: Sesow twice over, painted as the two John Hughes characters Ellyn loved most in the eighties. Above, in a preppy blazer and red scarf, he is her Jake Ryan from Sixteen Candles. Below, in a field of red, he is her Duckie — mid-Otis-Redding, in the record store at Trax.
It was lent to the exhibition by the collector Ted Frankel, who also lent Sesow's Fallen Soldiers — the wall of one hundred small portraits that AVAM's press release named first among what visitors would see.
The wall label
The museum printed its labels in white on the gallery wall itself. Hers read:
Acrylic and oil on canvas
Courtesy of Ted Frankel
Before the paintings went up
Ellyn made two trips to Baltimore with Sesow that winter — December 18, 2015 and January 17, 2016 — to measure the third-floor gallery before a single work was hung. Hoffberger had visited the studio in Washington that December, and returned in February to collect paintings for framing.
The opening
The exhibition opened to members on the Sunday after Memorial Day weekend, with a talk by the artist. Sesow's mother, Deb Sesow, came from Nebraska.
The exhibition
AVAM announced the show in February 2016. Hoffberger, who founded the museum in 1989 and chose the theme of every exhibition for its first twenty-seven years, selected this one herself. Alongside the paintings the exhibition included Sesow's tribute to the first hundred American soldiers killed in the Iraq War, and a painted key to the recurring icons in his work.
Sesow spent much of the following year in the gallery. Roughly once a month he sat on the third floor through the middle of the day and answered whatever anyone asked. Ellyn joined him for several of those Saturdays.
The exhibition closed with a members' party on May 25, 2017. Twenty-three of the paintings entered the museum's permanent collection that day; by the following July the number had reached twenty-seven.
